Ellucian Portal vs. Salesforce Experience Cloud

It is great and collecting information and keeping it all in one place. But once you go outside of their scope it requires a lot of outside programming that quickly adds up. It's hard to find a good, reliable developer for this software so once you do find one you hang on to them. There is a very steep learning curve, but I would suspect that for any new CRM that you bring on

Incentivized

For well-suited, this product is great for your external clientele groups that you would not necessarily want to have a high user fee rate for. So basically general public or a group that will be authorized to come in and just do a few things here and there, but you don't necessarily want them access to all of your systems and your data points for groups that it would not be a great use for. I'd say probably your high level internal staff, they're going to be using a lot of the backend functionality automations, evaluating data, managing data, and doing custom inputs. That's just not what's intended for.

Incentivized

• Collecting information and putting it into a concise place
• Creating forms for use on our website to collect user information
• Differentiating between different user types and knowing where they are in the funnel

Incentivized

• Complete integration with the Salesforce ecosystem. Data displayed in your Community portal reflects records from a Sales Cloud organization
• Highly customizable. A Community Cloud portal can be totally customized both visually and with different funcionalities with little to no coding skills required

Incentivized

• We don't necessarily think that what the sales team promised us has been delivered. There are some features we thought we'd have that require hours of outside programming
• The forms that we create for the website would be nice to have more control over the look and feel
• Creating nice looking emails in ellucian is very cumbersome. It's definitely a far cry from a drag and drop like mail chimp or delivra

Incentivized

• The documentation for implementing Experience Cloud can be a bit confusing as their rebranding hasn't made it's way into all articles, resulting in different terminology being used to refer to the same thing
• Some things are not as intuitive regarding their customizability, so there's a bit of a learning curve (i.e. Lightning apps can't be used to customize layouts in Experience Cloud)

Incentivized

Usability is pretty streamlined, especially if you're familiar with other Salesforce products, but even if not, take it from me, as I just entered the technological space about two years ago, that this product is pretty simple to learn. You don't have to jump in with your head underwater. Small wins and learnings along the way are what foster long-term understandings and enable your evolution alongside the product. I definitely recommend Salesforce Trailhead along with it

Incentivized

It's delivered on our original requirements and we've found ways to grow its usage. We continue to build on our original success and we can report our data out to leadership to show a true return on investment which is great for growing support and expanding uses for the system.

Incentivized

We have weekly calls with our Salesforce reps. They bring new ideas to the table and help with taxonomy builds. They have also answered many questions and connected us to the right people for us to grow our knowledge and utilization of the platform. They are a good partner overall in comparison.

Incentivized

It is about right on par with the marketing stuff that Salesforce had. If you want to use it for email marketing it's only good for very simply designed email campaigns. But the scheduling of these campaigns is pretty painless and does a very good job. It has combined many other software packages that we were using into one place which is nice, but if you need to go outside the box of how they have things set up it will cost you a lot to do some custom development.

Incentivized

Salesforce Experience Cloud was selected due to its tight integration with our existing Salesforce CRM platform. Customization of the portal was much, much simpler compared to Sharepoint - especially with role-based security parameters that are ultimately inherited based on attributes within the Salesforce CRM platform. Salesforce Experience Cloud was a natural fit for this customer-facing purpose.

Incentivized

• It has turned out to be much more expensive to get what we want than we thought
• There is a lot of customizing for our institution so the dollar cost will not be seen anytime soon
• It has helped bring everything into one place, but that has taken many hours of training for a lot of our staff just to get up to speed.

Incentivized

• Improved online admission application completion rates from mid-60%s to mid-80%s.
• Positive user experience from start-to-finish to leverage one data system for all prospective student data
• Fewer data integrations transforming and loading sensitive student data by leveraging Salesforce Community Cloud to access already existing data

Incentivized