Success Story

Industry

Higher Ed

Cornell University Tackles Complex Application Processes with Advanced Web Forms

227+

Responses collected in 5 months

3,191

Graduate and Undergraduate Students

3

Salesforce Admins

Overview

At Cornell University, a talented team of Salesforce administrators oversees the day-to-day CRM operations for the SC Johnson College of Business. To better manage application processes for the school’s academic areas, and to relieve the burden from the Salesforce Developer team, the Salesforce Administrator team employs FormAssembly’s platform to streamline data integration projects ranging from simple to very complex.

No real-time data for higher education business processes

Challenge

Denise Ruben, Salesforce Administrator, explained how FormAssembly is used to manage the application process for two separate programs for Executive Education. Within each individual program, there are two forms: a single application form and a group enrollment form. Previous pain points revolved around the need for data integration and to update multiple objects and mitigate the workload of establishing these forms on the backend.

“One form is saving someone from having to go into about 8 different objects. You can imagine the process someone would have to go through to do this manually. This is hours of work and the chance of mistakes is extremely high.”

Denise Ruben

Salesforce Administrator, Cornell University Johnson College of Business

A fix for backlogged projects

Solution

The Salesforce team at Cornell used FormAssembly to create, manage, and streamline their online forms. This creates an opportunity to relieve extra work and tasks from the Salesforce Developer team.

“What we were really able to do with this is to take stuff off the plates of Salesforce Developers who are extremely backlogged,” Ruben shared.

The complex Group Planner form is the main use case that the Salesforce team at Cornell has worked to establish. This form is designed so that one individual (usually a manager or supervisor) can register several team members or colleagues for an Executive Education program at Cornell. This form incorporates the Prefill and Post-Submit Connectors to verify repeat data such as contact and billing information for each person.

“This [form] is saving someone from having to go into about 8 different objects. You can just imagine the process someone would have to go through to do this manually. This is hours of work and the chance of mistakes is extremely high,” Ruben said.

What’s next for Cornell?

As an institution of higher education, Cornell SC Johnson College of Business has a governance process by which they approve and prioritize new process changes. FormAssembly remains a viable option for new data processes and workflows. Additionally, as the need for outside corporate training programs arises, the college can meet those application needs head-on with intuitive FormAssembly forms.

Feature highlights

The team at Cornell has benefited from a few key FormAssembly features, in particular.

Prefill connector

The Prefill Connector allows the team to minimize the amount of repeat data they request from respondents. Staff use this next-level data integration to be able to save time and energy and eliminate the need for respondents to type in contact information in multiple places.

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Validation rules

FormAssembly’s validation rules can help ensure that all the rules in a form are followed correctly. This extra layer of protection ensures that submitted data is clean, free of errors, and will flow into Salesforce correctly.

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Repeatable fields

The team at Cornell also makes use of repeatable fields and sections on different forms. According to Ruben, this “does a good job of creating data in Salesforce and creating the right records.” FormAssembly’s repeatable fields can be used to merge data in Salesforce or to create separate, individual records.

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