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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.

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
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.
Well suited:
  1. Groups that need to integrate their CRM with other partners: many education institutions use Salesforce!
  2. Groups with huge student populations now, or expected in the future.
  3. Groups that have resources for custom Salesforce development, like an in-house Salesforce Developer role.
Less appropriate:
  1. If you expect your company/school will have a limited number of students.
  2. If you set up Salesforce to use ONLY Leads or only Contacts, not both. What happens if you have a student re-enroll? How do you handle losing data when converting a Lead to a Contact? If you don't have good answers for these in advance, you'll want to use only Leads or only Contacts to track each student.