Salesforce.com is widely regarded as the premier Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tool available in the market place today.  The platform has seemingly endless applications for sales and relationship-driven business; and because it is a hosted solution it requires very little maintenance.  EDU Interactive has worked with the Salesforce.com platform for several years delivering leads into the system in real time via the Application Programming Interface (API).  What has proven most interesting about Salesforce.com is that each of our clients on the platform uses the software in slightly different ways to facilitate enrollment.  This has a lot to do with the fact that Salesforce is highly customizable.  Our clients are leveraging the customization suite to build the system that suits their enrollment needs.

The enrollment process at each college is slightly different.  These differences primarily revolve around definitions of events in the enrollment process such as ‘matriculation’ and which events in the enrollment process are important to track, such as ‘student completed FAFSA’.  Different enrollment departments track different events in the enrollment cycle, and define similar events in different ways.  For this reason, the ability to customize a CRM can be very important to how effective that system is in tracking the efficiency of an enrollment department.  EDU Interactive has found that out of the box CRM solutions can prove problematic because they do not lend themselves to simple modification.  Salesforce, on the other hand, can be customized by non technical people via very simple processes.  Adding custom fields, building reports and tracking new variables is as easy as point and click.  Though we do not advocate one system over another, Salesforce.com has proven to us that it molds easily to suit the differing needs of various enrollment departments.