CRM integration for a leading University using Salesforce
We recently tendered for a contract with a university to provide all their prospectus fulfilment and direct marketing campaigns. The university was looking for innovative ways that they could integrate with the chosen supplier to improve data processing on both sides.
The problem
Traditionally, they had received prospectus requests through their website, which came through by email to the previous incumbent, who would then process the request and provide a monthly report, illustrating the number of orders that had been processed each month. This would be sent, along with a copy of the data that had information appended to it.
The solution
The university uses Salesforce as their CRM system, as do we. Our proposed solution was to set up a web-to-lead integration with their website. This meant that when a student requested a prospectus through their website, the request was sent directly to the university’s Salesforce instance, where the lead could be qualified by a member of their team.
We then carried out a direct integration between the university’s Salesforce instance and ours. We created a custom object that mirrored the university’s own data set and the two instances can sync in real time.
The benefits
- Firstly, it means that all data are kept within the Salesforce environment and there is a clear audit trail of any changes that are made. We only have access to the parts of the data set that they want us to have – and vice versa
- There is no duplication of data appending. Traditionally, the supplier would append their information to an excel spreadsheet, send it to the university, which would then have to append it into their own CRM system. Our solution means that once we have appended any additional information, it automatically syncs to the university’s system
- The university does not need to carry out any data selections for campaigns. They simply send us the criteria and we create a report that pulls the relevant data. This report is shared within the Salesforce environment and the university checks to ensure everything is correct
- Campaign sign-off is carried out directly from within Salesforce, so there is no need to email/file share any documents
