Reimagined Salesforce Education Cloud Helps Institutions Build Lifelong Student Relationships with Unified Data, Automation, and Intelligence
Today, at the 2023 Education Summit in Dallas, Salesforce introduced Education Cloud innovations to help institutions deliver personalised experiences faster, drive better outcomes, and build lifelong relationships with students.
Why it’s relevant: Amid rising tuition costs and stagnating enrollment numbers, research shows that higher ed institutions must prioritize a personalized, flexible student experience that starts the moment a student first expresses interest in an institution:
- Of the surveyed students, those who had a great onboarding experience were 35x more likely to have a great university experience.
- Sixty-nine percent of students who had a great educational experience said their institution provides a personalized experience tailored to their needs.
- Students with a great university experience were also 31x more likely to be proud alumni, and 51% more likely to recommend their institution to family and friends.
Innovation in action: Education Cloud uses the full power of the Customer 360 and will seek to leverage the latest platform innovations, such as Salesforce Data Cloud and Einstein AI, to support the needs of institutions worldwide.
The reimagined Education Cloud helps institutions:
- Get Started Faster: A new, learner-centric data foundation built for the evolving needs of higher ed helps institutions achieve faster time to value with the Customer 360 by providing education-specific insights — like grades, courses, and learner profiles — out of the box.
- Maximize Faculty & Staff Impact: A new capability model drives efficiency by breaking down silos to allow for critical services, such as appointment scheduling, application forms, case management, and more, to be used institution-wide.
- Wow Prospective Students & Families: Salesforce’s reimagined recruitment and admissions experience provides a modern, personalised offering for prospective students and their families, plus recruiters and admissions staff.
- With features like Smart Prospecting, institutions can automatically group prospective students based on their interests, assign them to recruiters, and personalise engagement from the very first interaction, while students can easily apply to multiple programs, track their application status, and engage with admissions teams.
- Drive Better Student Outcomes: With features like Care Plans, institutions can leverage unified data to help staff truly understand what students need during critical moments in their journey and deliver better onboarding with step-by-step guidance. And soon, Salesforce’s innovations for student success will track key milestones in real time with automated alerts that notify advisors if a student is falling behind. They will also be able to support non-academic needs that are critical to student success such as managing programs for international students and food security.
- Access Real-Time Insights: With new CRM Analytics capabilities, institutions can work smarter with dashboards and analytics templates pre-built for education that capture real-time insights and visualize progress toward key metrics.
The Salesforce perspective: “Higher education is at an inflection point and leaders are rethinking traditional education models. We have reimagined Education Cloud to help institutions navigate these tectonic shifts and be future-ready while providing holistic, personalized support for students from the moment they start looking at a university, to graduation, and beyond.” – Bala Subramanian, VP & GM of Education
“We have reimagined Education Cloud to help institutions navigate these tectonic shifts and be future-ready while providing holistic, personalized support for students from the moment they start looking at a university, to graduation, and beyond.”
Bala Subramanian, VP & GM of Education
Reaction to the news:
- “University should be a home away from home for prospects, we want them to feel like part of the family before they even arrive. Families are for life. We’re invested in their success from students to alumni, and Salesforce will help us stay close for longer.” – Sarah Cox, Head of Data, Systems, and Applicant Engagement, University of East Anglia
- “The way to build scale is to build a heroic system. That system involves the right people at the right place at the right time, unified through a common 360-degree view of the student experience, and bound by automation that allows you to have things that can be programmed and happen behind the scenes.” – David Burge, VP of Enrollment Management, George Mason University
Fast facts:
- The reimagined Education Cloud powers the next generation of student experiences and is generally available now.
- At this year’s Education Summit, Salesforce also highlighted philanthropic support of three organisations helping first-generation students in their journey through and post-college: Beyond 12, Bottom Line, and uAspire.
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