Salesforce Education Cloud Review
Use Cases and Deployment Scope
Education Cloud addresses kind of those common business processes you see in higher ed. It does K through 12 as well, but obviously we use it for higher ed. So we use it for things like recruiting, so collecting web forms and running marketing campaigns for prospective students, running campaigns and collecting data for them to complete their application. Once they matriculate, we try to target them with various promotional campaigns. There's also an advising tool in Education Cloud, which is if you just think about Service Cloud and apply that to education advising students on anything from do I have enough credit to graduate, I want to change my major, how do I do that? Is this transfer credit equivalent? So a lot of case processing for current students. And then there's a significant alumni feature as well. So having a portal for the alumni, the university to engage and track various metrics about them.
Pros
- I would say, everything I just said, you can kind of see Marketing Cloud or Service Cloud or Experience Cloud there. I would say the service cloud aspect, that student advising is one of the strongest use cases for Education Cloud.
Cons
- I think that the recruitment features of the product are still in their infancy. I think the advising solution is very mature. The experience cloud solution is very mature, their recruitment solution getting there, but if I had to pick one, that's what I'd say there's some room for improvement or just maturity overall and how they're handling some of that.
Return on Investment
- I would say when you talk about recruiting students, there's a massive implication for ROI, right? If we're collecting the right data, if we're able to action that data into marketing campaigns to get students to complete their application and try to come to the university. And then there's, if you will, a customer retention component with advising, right? Where you want the students at the university to be well taken care of, you want their needs be met and tracked appropriately. So I think that has massive ROI implications.
