Salesforce for Higher Ed: highly customizable, but that means you need a team to develop it right.
January 18, 2019
Salesforce for Higher Ed: highly customizable, but that means you need a team to develop it right.
Score 6 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Salesforce for Higher Ed
Who uses it and for what:
- Enrollment: for tracking leads, recording all conversation information/notes, and ensuring their applications are complete.
- Student advisors: once students are enrolled, they use the Contact and Opportunities objects to track student success in their programs, also recording all conversation information/notes.
- Account management: our account managers track holistic student success data to track account health.
- Management/leadership: we are a company driven by our student's success. We use Salesforce for Higher Ed to know how we're performing as a company. Our students' success is directly our success.
- Track groups of students via an individual object: via lead or contact, but not by tracking students via both.
- Compare the performance of your team members via reports and dashboards.
- Limit permissions of people or groups of people.
- It’s hard to run reports or create working “views” for Enrollment/Student Advisor teams that include both Leads and Contacts in the same report.
- Some fields do not map from Lead to Contact object. When a student transitions from application to acceptance, some dropdown and fill-in fields completely disappear from the student’s page in Salesforce. Every version of Salesforce I’ve used has this problem.
- Salesforce overall is clunky and confusing for the average user. We require thorough Salesforce training for new hires on all teams because it’s not user-friendly or obvious what to click on to achieve a specific task.
- Positive: Our entire company is more aligned because while still complying with FERPA, the right people have access to student records while also having the correct permissions.
- Positive: we can integrate with our partners who also use Salesforce, while still complying with FERPA.
- Negative: we've needed to hire a Salesforce Development team with multiple people to accurately customize the tool to work for us.
Salesforce Classic and Salesforce Lightning: I have not developed or directly managed any version of Salesforce, but I train on it, use it my role, and need to troubleshoot while using it.