University of Waterloo Engineering Uses Salesforce to Engage Faculty and Improve Student Recruitment

The University of Waterloo Engineering needed to expand their implementation of Salesforce Sales Cloud to better organize student leads from events and media. Although leads were being captured, the school wanted to better understand the quality of the leads coming in and how the leads were progressing through the application process.

Additionally, the school needed to enhance faculty engagement with leads. The solution would have to qualify leads consistently, simplify preliminary qualification screening, capture student information and provide guidance before connecting leads directly with faculty in their programs of interest.

And finally, all data would need to seamlessly synchronize between the university’s application management system and Salesforce.

Wave6 started by building a Salesforce platform with web-to-lead functionality. This streamlines the application process and allows applicants to be programmatically matched to leads from the application system.

Waev6 next built a solution to match applicants with faculty. A student applicant completes a web-based form, which records the student as a lead in Salesforce. The student’s information is then sent via email to the requested faculty. The faculty simply clicks a button in the email to respond to the student request; the response is recorded in Salesforce and sent to the student via automated email (the faculty can opt to send a customized email as well).

All data is tracked in Salesforce, so both student applications and faculty responses can be reported on and analyzed for further program optimization.

The previously manual, time-consuming process of mapping leads to applicants to faculty requests is now entirely automated.

“Thanks to the solution Wave6 built, our student application data can now be managed, reported and analyzed,” stated Meg Bauman, Graduate Marketing and Recruitment Officer at University of Waterloo Engineering. “Our professors are pleased with how easy the solution is to use, and our team is thrilled with how much more productive and efficient we can be.”