If you are an university using salesforce crm, here is a good list of features which you should leverage for free which should help you to create actionable insights for your executives, prevent problems and make good decisions.
Productivity enhancements(Save time and Make life easier)
1. Macros in service cloud
If you are using service cloud for your one stop service center or managing your cases on student inquiries, macros feature would help you to automate repeated tasks which your service center folks do on student inquiry. So let us say if there is a support ticket raised on a specific issue, if the agent sends a default email, sends a chatter post to the advisor or faculty on further action or sends a knowledge base article , all of these can be automated with one click of a button using macro feature.
2. Questions from chatter create case
If your faculty or advisor have questions which get logged on your chatter post, now the question to chatter feature can create cases automatically .
3. More automation with Process builder
With the new process builder , all your workflows which you had created can be grouped for multiple if and else conditions and can be easily visualized. This reduces your maintenance time and can now easily identify workflows and group them to a logical process like inquiry, application or post registration process.
4. Salesforce to outlook sync
If you use microsoft exchange, salesforce for outlook now has more integrations with exchange. This should help your IT support team to remove all the plugins from the desktop and seamlessly integrate all the contacts on the server which would reduce maintenance time. Task synchronization is a great feature to sync your tasks with outlook.
5. Community builder
With the latest updates on communities, communities can easily be setup, branded and the wizard to set it up takes most of the manual tasks on setting up communities the first time which is a great time saver.
Actionable insight
1. Subscribe to reports for executives
With the new subscribing features, executives can now schedule their own reports with custom filters on existing reports . Deans can now subscribe to registrations if the count exceeds a threshold value which would trigger an alert email for them. Actionable insights real time!!
2. Run reports with latest data.
We always know how much time some dashboards take to refresh and it does take a lot of time. Now with the reload option, executives can get the most recent data from their latest refresh instead of refreshing every time which takes long time.
New capability( Great value)
1. Social community starter pack
If you are using service cloud, you are eligible for installing the social community starter pack which is a small addon having the features from Radian6. This would allow to monitor your prospective student posts from twitter, facebook and let your support staff respond to inquiries real time. This also has a great service to monitor blogs and other social community channels, look for keywords and provide you a snapshot of the inquires real time. So universities should make use of this offer real time.
2. thanks and badges for motivation.
You can enable adoption with the use of thanks and badges which you can provide to your users on questions answered, data cleaning activities and training imparted. This would allow to recognize users real time on their activities and would help to increase adoption.
Preventing problems
1. Prevent duplicates
We know how the duplicates on student data is painful and it always ends up on a lot of deduplication effort and wasted emails on campaigns. With spring 15, deduplication comes out of the box and you should now able to prevent duplicate students from entering in the system on your web to lead forms and also data imports. The good thing about deduplication is that it can now look at leads and contacts. Now for universities using dupe blocker and demand tools the question is what should we do with it? I would say demand tools is still a perfect tool to clean up in bulk and salesforce dupe blocker is great about prevention. Sooner or later dupe blocker features might be consumed by default behavior of salesforce.
2. Edit inactive user records
We always repented if some users leave the organization and how much it is hard to edit their inactive records which they own which involved a lot of data manipulation time. Now if you are a salesforce admin, you can easily edit records owned by your inactive users.
These features should help universities to maximize salesforce and leverage it to increase student success and application count. Please feel free to post your comments below or email me at buyan@eigenx.com for further questions.