Success Story
Industry
Higher Ed
How UC Merced Facilitates Dynamic Check-In Processes
2015
First adopted FormAssembly
12
Departments with active forms
Overview
By making changes to their form process, staff at UC Merced have been able to expand access to important student data without hundreds of extra Salesforce licenses for staff. This has contributed to an advanced appointment request form that provides an enhanced student booking experience.
Limited time and space to address student demand
Challenge
At UC Merced, the Student First Center has limited physical space to serve students who make appointment requests. The office is staffed by only three team members, and physical space for handling lines and conversations is limited. These limitations created a bottleneck in terms of time and resources when students needed to speak with someone to handle requests related to the Registrar, Financial Aid, and Admissions.
Additionally, the Business Systems team took notice of how much other departments were relying on technical and analytics support to handle basic day-to-day operations.
After identifying this particular pain point, the team got to work on a solution that provided flexibility, user-friendliness, and speed for departments across campus that needed accurate data in real time.
“We’re using FormAssembly forms to get students into these appointments. Now, these appointments can be scheduled a month out at a time. Students are picking and choosing when they want, and staff know that they can increase the amount of appointments that they offer during high-traffic times.”
Salesforce configurations and personalized user experiences
Solution
To help departments and office teams have more control over their own internal processes, Steve and the team developed a Salesforce Department Configuration object for any department using FormAssembly forms. With this system, campus employees can change, update, and modify specific information on their own forms at any time without additional support. By using this new user-friendly process, departments can:
- Open and close access to individual forms at certain times of the year
- Make daily changes to event locations
- Provide daily or weekly advising support hours based on availability
- Promote and advertise upcoming events or deadlines
This allows each department to effectively reach hundreds if not thousands, of students daily by managing their own unique appointment request forms. This process also reduces stress for busy technology teams who may not be able to manage the minutiae of day-to-day operations.
