In 2014, Salesforce released Education Cloud, a product extending generic Salesforce CRM functionality with industry-specific capabilities tailored to the education market. In 2023, Salesforce revamped the product and released a new Education Cloud to help institutions engage prospects, applicants, enrolled students, and alumni more efficiently.
Currently, the vendor continues to extend the functionality of its new Education Cloud to increase the value of Salesforce for educational institutions, with the next major update scheduled for October 2024. This article covers six new features of Salesforce Education Cloud that will become available by the end of 2024.
1. Data Cloud For Education
One of the key roles of any educational CRM is to consolidate student data gathered across different sources, and Salesforce Education Cloud is no exception. Data Cloud for Education expands the data consolidation capabilities of Salesforce’s education CRM, helping institutions enhance student data integrity, accuracy, and visibility while improving data analytics.
Data Cloud can consolidate data from various sources, such as an LMS and email, or data storage automatically transform into a unified format familiar to Salesforce users with the help of the Salesforce metadata framework.
After the data becomes available across Salesforce apps, users can use it to make data-driven decisions. As an option, they can use Model Builder to create an AI model to analyze gathered student data more quickly and efficiently. The AI model can identify patterns in this data and generate forecasts, helping predict student enrollment rates and identify those at high risk of academic failure by uncovering other trends related to a student’s success and engagement.
2. Einstein Copilot Recruitment and Admissions Actions
Additionally, Salesforce upgrades Einstein Copilot, conversational AI integrated with Salesforce Education Cloud, and extends it with new capabilities. The new feature, Einstein Copilot Recruitment and Admissions Actions will help institutions streamline the admissions process, simplifying tasks for recruitment and admissions offices by automating communication with prospective students.
Conversational AI can answer inquiries instead of recruitment and admissions specialists, thus reducing their administrative burden and helping them focus on more high-value tasks.
Suppose a prospective student is interested in one of the university’s academic programs and sends an email to get more information. Einstein Copilot can analyze this email, find relevant information in the university databases, and generate a personalized reply message with a detailed program description.
3. Intelligent Question Generator For Student Intake
Creating and updating student enrollment forms – which institutions use to gather data on students’ personal and academic backgrounds – is one of the common responsibilities of recruitment and admissions officers.
Defining the right questions to include in these forms is critical since a relevant and comprehensive questionnaire helps institutions better understand the preferences of their prospective students, which is required to provide quality learning.
The Intelligent Question Generator embedded in Salesforce Education Cloud will help generate relevant questions for enrollment forms. An admissions office employee first has to set up rules for question generation. After processing these requirements and analyzing necessary data, such as descriptions of learning programs, the solution will provide a set of questions to include in college applications, school admission, or any other intake form.
4. Intelligent Degree Planning
The ability to plan their academic journeys precisely is essential for students. The new Salesforce feature, Intelligent Degree Planning, enables institutions to grant students this opportunity, thus enhancing their satisfaction.
University counselors and other specialists can use it to create personalized educational plans and graduation roadmaps for their students based on parameters such as student specialization or current degrees, as well as the requests and educational goals the students submitted themselves.
5. Einstein Skills Generator
Another new functionality of Education Cloud, Einstein Skills Generator, can help institutions discover skills that are in demand in the job market. Instructional designers can use this knowledge to develop skill-based programs that can be more attractive to students, as they provide competencies required to excel in a specific job or industry.
Also, Skills Generator enables institutions to discover skills that can be added to that program’s description by analyzing information about the program and studying public job market data. Now, a counselor’s office or a student looking for specific skills can find relevant programs more easily, as they would be appropriately tagged.
6. Einstein Mentorship Summaries
Soon, Salesforce Education Cloud will also be able to streamline mentorship, another critical education aspect. Its new feature, Einstein Mentorship Summaries, allows institutions to match students who require mentorship with relevant specialists from teaching staff.
Based on students’ requirements and goals and information about available teachers, the AI solution can create a summary listing all suitable mentors and provide it to a program coordinator.
Final Thoughts
Salesforce Education Cloud is a powerful CRM product tailored to the specifics and work processes inherent to the educational industry. It provides an industry-specific data model and includes functionality for student lifecycle management, from engagement, recruitment, and enrollment to career preparation and alumni management capabilities.
Since its emergence in 2014, Salesforce has been continuously modernizing the product and equipping Education Cloud with new capabilities. By the end of this year, multiple new functionalities will be released, including Data Cloud for Education, Intelligent Degree Planning, Skills Generator, and other features.
To leverage Education Cloud and its functionality to the fullest extent, an institution should consult certified Salesforce experts. They can provide guidance on how to adopt Education Cloud properly, execute the implementation itself, and tailor the solution to an institution’s unique processes, thus helping it maximize the overall adoption ROI.