Heald College Drives Student Enrollment with Marketing and Inquiry Generation Success

Challenge

• Heald College, a career college, wanted greater visibility into its inquiry-generation process to more effectively market to potential students and boost admissions
• With 11 separate locations, a lack of visibility into the admissions process prevented the college from improving the process
• Because the amount of time it takes between the moment someone clicks on a Web interest form and the moment Heald contacts that person correlates directly with enrollment success, visibility to real-time information was paramount
• The college required a CRM solution that could easily integrate with its PeopleSoft FT system to link marketing, inquiries, and enrollments

Solution

• Heald chose Salesforce CRM for its ease of use and ability to fully integrate with Heald's back-end system; the college deployed Salesforce CRM Enterprise Edition to 101 users with integration to Microsoft Outlook and PeopleSoft FT
• The college integrates all up-front inquiry generation via vendors, direct mail, and the Web site into Salesforce CRM; determined by workflow rules, auto-response emails are then automatically delivered
• Dashboards help drive customer success and allow the senior vice president of Marketing and Admissions to know exactly how many inquiries were generated during a given time and where they came from
• Real-time reporting expands dashboard information for customizable forecasting
• With bidirectional integration into PeopleSoft FT on the back end, for student enrollment Heald users simply click a link in Salesforce CRM; S-controls validate the information, which is then matriculated in PeopleSoft; real-time and nightly synchronizations ensure information is updated in both systems
• Salesforce.com Premier Support from Salesforce.com Consulting provides 24/7 superior customer care

Results

• With 100 percent visibility into the marketing and enrollment process, the college is beginning to understand the sweet spot for the number of touch points needed, which helps Heald better understand what it takes to attract and enroll new students
• The college can now centrally and quickly confirm the effectiveness of its marketing dollars at eleven campuses
• By accelerating the response time of inquiries, Heald has improved customer outreach and enrollment rates