Recently, Salesforce announced its new Education Cloud solution for Higher Ed and K-12 organizations looking to create a 360 degree view of the students, parents, staff, and partners they work with. Education Cloud brings the education industry as part of Salesforce’s industry verticals, meaning Salesforce will be able to provide best practices and solutions from other industry teams to education organizations!
Let’s take a deep dive into one of the features that we see as a benefit for this industry – Salesforce Scheduler. For those familiar with Student Success Hub’s Appointment Scheduler feature – you’ll understand the benefit provided by constituents being able to schedule appointments with staff. Salesforce Scheduler provides this capability based on staff availability and topic.
For Higher Education institutions – Salesforce Scheduler could be used not only for faculty or academic advising appointments, but also as part of the admissions or onboarding process. Admissions counselors, Financial Aid representatives, and/or housing/student life coordinators could use Salesforce Schedule to assist students with their application and deposit process. Housing, student life, and athletics staff members could use Salesforce scheduler to assist students with the onboarding progress. We see this as a solution to improve melt rates and as a huge benefit for creating a better student experience during this critical onboarding time.
K-12 institutions can benefit from this new functionality as well! Salesforce Scheduler can be used to assign guidance counselors, set up career counseling, and for CTE/Work Based Learning programing as well as pathway planning. Parents of K-12 students can also be included in Salesforce Scheduler by utilizing a parent portal to schedule time to meet with staff that specialize in student’s social/emotional health, academic support, and student transfer/transition onboarding.
The help site of Salesforce.com includes great resources for Salesforce Scheduler. Here are some functional components of the feature:
- Create records that represent the education institution’s appointment attendees and add details about their areas of expertise, location, and availability.
- Define building and office locations and operating hours.
- Create appointment topics such as financial aid, pathway planning, and career counseling.
- Define appointment templates to link appointment topics with particular locations, and define key appointment parameters like appointment duration, prep and wrap-up buffers, and availability timings. Appointment templates also tell us what areas of expertise are needed for an appointment topic.
- Schedule constituent appointments with defined topics, attendees, duration, and location.
- Find the right resources for appointments based on skill matching.
Overall, Salesforce Scheduler is a sophisticated scheduler that incorporates availability, skill set matches, and more. This new feature can be used to help education organizations match key staff and resources to better serve the students, parents, and constituents they work with.
If you’d like to learn more or have questions about this feature, let us know! Connect with us via the form at the bottom of this page or send us an email to booking@elevation.soltuions and we’ll be in touch.
