Use Data to Identify Constituent Challenges

Learning Objectives:

After completing this unit you will be able to:

• Use data to identify issues that may impact your constituents.
• Describe which tools help you overcome obstacles in your data strategy work.

Use Data to Surface Issues

With a data strategy in place, your institution will be able to interpret the story your data is telling faster and with more clarity. This empowers you to use data to surface issues that may be impacting your constituents’ experiences. Without a data strategy, a business process may break down completely before it’s obvious that there’s a problem. Data strategy helps you spot issues while they’re still minor and manageable so you can quickly take action to make the changes needed to best support your constituents.

Since implementing a data strategy, (fictional) Cloudy College has much better visibility into the constituent experience surrounding support cases. When Nina, Cloudy College’s Salesforce Admin, sees that wait times on cases for the financial aid office are trending at five or more days, she notifies the department so they can take action, like adding to their self-service resources and distributing cases equally among the department’s advisor team, to bring the wait time down.

Data strategy has also exposed seasonal trends at Cloudy College. This information is helping the staff anticipate conditions that stress their standard business processes so they can plan ahead to reduce friction for constituents and staff. For example, based on data from last semester, the student experience team realizes they need advisors to offer more open office hours during the two weeks leading up to the course add/drop deadline. Similarly, the advancement office is using data from last year’s annual giving day to better anticipate the campaigns and campaign assets they need to create in advance of the event. 

Utilize Reports and Dashboards

Reports
Reports help you evaluate how successful you’ve been in reaching your goals. Start by asking stakeholders, “What information do you need in order to know if a goal is being met or a business process is operating effectively?”. As you collect the responses to these questions, begin to visualize what that report would look like, and how to structure your data to get the information you need.

The Cloudy College advancement team has shifted from a mindset of “if there’s a report for that, run it” to a more intentional reporting strategy that focuses on their goals and metrics. Two of the most valuable reports to come out of this new approach are a report on campaigns to track how well past efforts have worked and what can be improved, and a report on fundraising goals that is helping the team set more realistic goals for future campaigns.

Dashboards
Dashboards provide a visual overview of multiple reports. They can be customized for different audiences to show different stakeholders only the specific information they need to see.

Take a look at the chart below for examples of dashboards used by people in different roles at Cloudy College. Leadership tends to be best served by dashboards that feature high-level reports. More granular reports can be useful on dashboards for staff who interact directly with constituents.

Put Survey Tools to Work

In their pre-work for data strategy planning, Cloudy College used surveys as a data collection method to better understand their constituents’ experiences. The institution used this information to create personas, set goals, and establish metrics. It’s important for Cloudy College and all schools implementing a data strategy to make sure surveys aren’t a one-and-done task. Use surveys and other real-time constituent feedback functionality to stay informed about shifting constituent needs so you can adjust your institution’s goals and success metrics accordingly. Consider these three survey options.

Native Salesforce Surveys
Salesforce Surveys is native to the platform. You can use it to collect up to 300 survey responses for free. It has an easy point-and-click design and it lets users integrate survey responses into our customer relationship management (CRM) automation tool, Flow Builder.

Integrated survey tools
External survey tools like Qualtrics and GetFeedback integrate with Salesforce. Response data from these tools can also be integrated with Salesforce automations, but make sure to do your research as there may be additional charges for these non-native tools.

User feedback functionality
Collect quick, specific feedback with functionality like the thumbs up, thumbs down rating on articles in your knowledge base. This is a great way to keep track of which articles in your knowledge base are helpful and which ones might need to be updated. This kind of feedback also gives you a sense of what’s top of mind for your constituents. A high number of likes may indicate a really popular article or topic that’s being searched for often.

Build a Process for Addressing Issues

Tools like reports, dashboards, and surveys help you identify when you have an issue. To get to a solution, you need an established process for addressing issues as they arise.

Establish escalation rules
Decide what should trigger an escalation, and stick to those criteria. Take a look at a few of Cloudy College’s escalation rules. 

• If a support case hasn’t been touched in the last two days, it triggers an escalation.
• If a support case hasn’t been closed by day three, it triggers an escalation.

Refine and grow your knowledge base
A comprehensive knowledge base is the definition of a win-win. Internally, it eliminates repetitive and unnecessary cases for frequently asked questions. Externally, it empowers constituents to solve issues with a self-service option that is available to them 24 hours a day. Here are a few key ways you can leverage a knowledge base to address constituent needs before they become major issues:

• Answer commonly asked questions.
• Use topics to organize articles and make them easier to search for or follow.
• Track the most popular topics to understand what’s top of mind for your constituents and use that insight to guide decisions about additional support.

Leverage case management strategies
A goal of case management is to focus on issues that genuinely merit a case. One method, referred to as “case deflection,” is to create alternate paths for issues that can be addressed through other means. The knowledge base highlighted above is an example of a deflection option. Other methods include hosting open office hours, and creating an Experience Cloud community where students can ask questions and access resources.

When your constituents do need to open a case, make sure you meet them wherever they are. Do this by letting constituents start a case from a variety of places, like your school’s website or social channels, as well as emails. Implementing web-to-case, email-to-case, and social-to-case functionality ensures that your constituents feel supported and that calls for help always get acknowledged in a timely manner.

Once you start using best practices for case management, standardize the case process across campus. For example:

• Set up case assignment rules to automatically assign cases to the appropriate person and document any requirements for case management.
• Provide consistent training. For example, if your institution’s policy is that all cases should be closed in 72 hours, and notes must be entered upon closure, make sure that everyone in a constituent support role is fully aware of that expectation, and has been provided the resources to meet that deadline.

Create a Documentation Regimen

Stay on top of your institution’s data needs and issue resolution processes by creating a documentation plan. As part of this plan, make sure to address these three documentation needs:

• Keep track of customizations you make to your campus’s tools and solutions.
• Commit to tracking updates you make to your data structure.
• Continue to document the goals and metrics you set while building your data strategy.

Here are some ideas for how to structure your documentation regimen.

Maintain a data dictionary
At Cloudy College, Nina started a data dictionary to track all of the new objects and fields that are created. In addition to the new object or field, she documents why the customization is necessary. She also notes every request she receives for new automations and processes. To help her get started with Cloudy’s data dictionary she used a solution she found on the Salesforce AppExchange that provides data dictionary tools and templates. Nina reviews and evaluates Cloudy’s data dictionary periodically. Nina has found that a quarterly review cadence works best for Cloudy, but your institution may decide a review once a semester or once an academic year is a better fit.

Track updates to your data structure over time
Nina uses the Health Check tool and the Salesforce Optimizer app to keep track of how the institution’s data is doing. The Health Check tool looks for configuration inconsistencies or errors in EDA Settings and related configuration in Setup. Salesforce Optimizer pinpoints data and configuration in your org that may be causing inefficiencies. These may be fields that are never used, unassigned page layouts, or users who don’t log in, to name a few. And Optimizer doesn’t just highlight potential dead weight — it also tells you exactly how to fix it, how difficult the fix will be, and how long it will take. This is just another (very cool) way to stay informed about your institution’s data so you can keep it tidy. 

Keep up with maintenance and share the load
Using tools like Salesforce Optimizer and a data dictionary help Nina stay on top of data maintenance needs. When she follows the established regimen she can more easily clean up and archive anything that is no longer needed. Education institutions often have really high volumes of data. Keeping up with maintenance allows your data strategy to function properly. 

The maintenance tasks aren’t just for the administrator. The cross-campus data strategy committee meets regularly to review department and campus-wide goals and metrics. And they document changes to goals and metrics continuously.

Summing It All Up

If you’re thinking, “This is so much to do!” remember that even a small change can make a big difference — like the Cloudy College example of moving the button to schedule an appointment with an advisor.  Take heart from the work Cloudy College has done to plan and implement a constituent-centric data strategy and move solidly into the Describe stage of the Data Maturity Model. Because Cloudy invested time in the critical planning and maintenance phases of their data strategy work, they have a strong, successful strategy that will continue to evolve with the institution, no matter what the future holds. Ultimately, having a constituent-centric data strategy improved constituents’ experiences and streamlined the efforts of Cloudy faculty and staff — and it can do the same for your institution.

Resources

• Trailhead: Quick Start: Reports & Dashboards
• Trailhead: Create a Process for Managing Support Cases
• Trailhead: Experience Cloud Basics
• Salesforce Help: Collect Feedback Using Sentiment Surveys
• Salesforce Help: EDA Data Dictionary
• Salesforce Help: EDA Settings Health Check
• Trailhead: Salesforce Optimizer