With the increasing competition among the higher educational institutions and their focus on marketing to newer prospects, somewhere students that already are a part of these institutions feel left out. There are the majority of colleges/universities that are seeing a huge retention gap as their students feel dis-aligned and delineated. There are major reasons why students are dropping out of these colleges. They mention that their college doesn’t care about them or provides poor service and treatment. This is where the need of an advising solution comes in to make your students feel a part of the university/college they belong to. Salesforce Advisor Link fills out the service gap to make a student feel secure and connected. With the use of advisor link, a student will know who to reach out to and more specifically that they can receive all the help and guidance they need.

Built on the Salesforce platform, Salesforce advisor link is an advising solution, and it caters to educational institutions. It is built on education data architecture as well as the salesforce service cloud. The biggest advantage of having salesforce advising solution for your university is that it can be customized based on business needs. It helps to culminate the information from different system and provides a 360-degree view to your advisor team.

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Salesforce advisor link mainly focusses on three areas:

1. Advising students to focus on what matters: With out-of-the-box functionality of salesforce to keep the data unified as well as using the analytical capability of Einstein AI, advisors can engage and guide students to be more strategic with their time. They can advise them on opting in for additional activities or take additional courses to reach out to their final goal.

2. Scaling the advising impact: Many advisors have hundreds of students to advise every semester. It will take more time and effort from their side to reach everyone individually. This is where Salesforce Advisor console can help them to make segregation of these students based on certain characteristics. Advisors can use different channels and do mass communication to reach out to multiple students at a single time. This will also help the advisor to have great interactions on scale and keep their students on track.

3. Building trusted relationships: As we know every higher educational institution would want their students to make meaningful connections within the campus, and somewhere it starts with connecting an advisor to the associated students. Having a trusted student-advisor relationship should be one of the key parameters for every institution.
Salesforce also helps you to go beyond the academic data and get a holistic view with the students. An advisor will know what clubs the students are a part of or what hobbies they have, what activities they participate across the institutes to get a better understanding on their overall goal.

Now let’s take a look at some of the awesome features that the advisor link provides:

Image Source = Google | Image By – TRAILHEAD

1. Unified Advising Records: Advisors have to go through hundreds of students’ cases which is a cumbersome process as they have to go through searching around for all these records in different system. To resolve this salesforce advisor link provides a unified advising record for each student and is active throughout the entire student lifecycle. It contains all the student advising interaction, notes, tasks, etc. This provides advisor to find all the data in a single place.
From an administration perspective, security and visibility is of prime importance. Salesforce with its security model helps the administrators to mark who can see the information and who can’t.

2. Success Teams: It is associated with each advising record and who is assigned to help students throughout their journey.
We know there is a gap from both ends – students face issues to understand whom to contact as their advisor, and advisor face issues in knowing the student goals. With the help of success teams, you can chart out the entire team associated with a student.

3. Early Alerts: It can be created manually or automatically to alert one or a group of advisors to give an early alert for a student in need. This will help advisors to reach out to the students who are in dire need, whether they are struggling with their internal grades or attendance issues.
Automatic alert can be made with integrating your student information system which then based on the threshold value of passing grades can alert the associated advisor.

4. Appointment Scheduling: Students can easily go though to book an appointment with their advisor. Now there is no hindrance for a student to go ahead and get the help of advisors. Advisors can also keep a counter check by doing this appointment if they want to reach out to these students.

5. Advising Notes and Email Conversation: Salesforce Advisor Link helps you to tag notes to any records. This functionality helps you to keep a log of all the advising notes and email conversations an advisor had with his/her student. The unified advising record also provides this functionality but what separates this is its ability to keep confidential certain notes such as health notes that a student doesn’t want to be known at an organization-wide level. Advisors can also keep records of back-and-forth communication with students on mail, removing the need of an external system to keep records.

6. Mass actions: Salesforce Advisor Link helps you to scale your impact, by selecting one or more students with similar characteristics and alert them all at once. You can choose email, text, or assign task. Whether you want to reach all the incoming freshman to have a conversation with you in the first few weeks or want all of transfer students to attend information session, mass action helps you with this segregation.

Reach out to us in making Salesforce Advisor Link a part of your educational institution’s student management system.