Explore Inquiries and Opportunities
Learning Objectives
After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:
- Discuss the role of inquiries and opportunities in the recruitment process.
- Explain how Inquiry Management facilitates effective communication with prospective students.
- Explain how to manage and track opportunities in Education Cloud.
Boost Engagement
Choosing a college is a high-stakes decision that often comes with uncertainty. Students seek timely and trustworthy information about your institution, academic programs, campus life, and support services. Every unanswered question or delay risks pushing them toward a different school.
Recruiters and admissions officers are tasked with engaging students early and maintaining meaningful communication throughout the process. At the same time, admissions officers monitor overall recruitment health and ensure progress toward enrollment targets.
But many institutions still work with legacy tools that hinder student engagement at scale. Recruiters struggle to keep up with incoming inquiries and tailor responses to each student’s interests. Admissions staff often lack visibility into the pipeline, limiting their ability to forecast enrollment or adjust outreach strategies in real time.
Education Cloud helps institutions close these gaps with an online portal, flows, and automation that keep students engaged during their first inquiry onward. It also provides tools to monitor your admissions pipeline, forecast enrollments, and optimize your recruitment strategies using opportunities, campaigns, and data-driven insights. These capabilities help your team build stronger relationships and enroll students who are the best fit for your institution.
Recruitment Inquiry Management
As learners explore your institution’s website and programs, questions arise. Recruitment Inquiry Management helps interested learners connect with your institution and provides recruitment teams with helpful data to personalize engagement.
Education Cloud provides three out-of-the-box, customizable screen flow templates to help you quickly set up common inquiry forms. You can also embed them into your applicant portal or third-party site.
- The Sign Up for Information form
- The Connect with Us form
- The Submit an Inquiry form
These flows automatically create records that help in driving ongoing engagement and efficient management of requests. This table shows the records that each form creates from a student's submission.
Flow |
Records Created |
|---|---|
Sign Up For Information |
Academic Interest |
Connect with Us |
Academic Interest, Contact Request |
Submit an Inquiry |
Academic Interest, Case, Educational Info Request |
Notice that all three flows create an academic interest record for each program that the learner indicated interest in on the form. Use this connection between academic interests and learning programs to automatically create opportunities or enroll interested students in a Marketing Cloud journey, which you explore further in a moment.
Connected subflows also create a person account to store additional information about each student. To learn more about the use of person accounts in Recruitment and Admissions, check out the Model Suspects and Prospects article in Salesforce Help.
Now, take a closer look at how these forms work to support prospective students.
Sign Up for Information
The Sign Up for Information form automatically enrolls learners in email communications that include details about the programs they select in the form.
For example, Sophia has a keen interest in the environment and sustainability programs at Astro University. So she visits the university’s applicant portal and fills out the Sign Up for Communications form.
In the form, Sophia selects the two programs that caught her eye: an undergraduate certificate in Environmental Sustainability and a bachelor’s program in Environmental Studies.
Soon after, Sophia receives emails with information and resources related to these programs. She’s excited, but she’s still having a difficult time choosing between the two programs. She requests a call from the Astro U staff to discuss her options.
Connect with Us
Using the Connect With Us form, students request a conversation with a staff member by phone, email, or another preferred channel. Along with an academic interest record, this flow also creates a contact request, which recruiters use to schedule and manage the follow-up correspondence.
Back on the portal, Sophia fills out the Connect with Us form, again including her two programs of interest.
Sophia selects Phone as her preferred contact method.
In the Recruitment and Admissions app, Rachel, the Astro U recruiter, receives the request and schedules a time to walk through both programs with her. Sophia finds the call helpful and is now closing in on a decision!
Submit an Inquiry
Students use the Submit an Inquiry form to ask questions about programs, applications, financial aid, or other topics. Each submission creates a case that’s assigned to the appropriate staff member, along with an educational info request that captures the inquiry details.
As Sophia becomes more serious about Astro U, she starts looking into financial aid options. The portal’s knowledge articles help, but she’s still unsure whether she qualifies, so she uses the Submit an Inquiry form to learn more.
Because she selected Financial Aid as the inquiry category, the case and info request automatically route to a Financial Services staff member. The staff member responds promptly and attaches additional resources for review.
Inquiry Management facilitates strong connections with potential students such as Sophia and helps them along their journey toward enrollment. Now, it’s time to discover how Opportunity Management takes this engagement even further.
Opportunity Management
Opportunity Management helps your institution forecast and track enrollment—from initial inquiry to final admission. With better visibility into student engagement, you can focus your outreach, support strategic planning, and meet your enrollment goals.
Whenever a student expresses interest in the program, you can configure the automatic creation of opportunities by selecting a checkbox on the learning program record. At Astro U, Rachel has enabled this setting for the Environmental Studies program, so when Sophia requests information about the program, the system immediately generates an opportunity for her.
To simplify tracking, you can also group all of a student’s selected programs into one opportunity record. Sophia’s exploring two related programs, so the system groups them into a single record, giving Rachel a complete view of her interests in one place.
You can also trigger automated communications by using the Subscription field on a student’s academic interest record. Rachel enables a subscription for Sophia, enrolling her in a campaign that highlights upcoming info sessions and financial aid deadlines.
After opportunities are in place, you can assign them to staff, segment them by criteria such as interest tags, and include them in targeted campaigns. You can also set up alerts to make sure that interested students never miss an update or deadline.
A flow automatically creates an opportunity based on Sophia’s interest in the environment, and she’s then added to a tailored outreach list for sustainability-related events. Rachel also receives an alert to follow up before the early application deadline.
You can link opportunities to price book entries to estimate expected tuition revenue across programs and terms. Sophia’s opportunity contributes to the projected revenue for Astro U’s environmental programs this term, helping the admissions director assess pipeline health.
The Recruitment Insights dashboard gives your team a summary of the current pipeline, and helps them to analyze recruitment status, prioritize prospects, and plan engagement activities based on KPIs derived from opportunity data.
Recruiters can check the dashboard regularly to monitor engagement levels and spot students who need extra attention.
From the dashboard, recruiters can review and respond to submitted info requests using the Manage RFIs feature. Rachel notices that Sophia submitted a financial aid inquiry and opens the case to confirm it’s been answered.
With the Scoring Framework, you can predict how likely each student is to enroll based on their engagement and activity. Sophia’s active participation boosts her score, indicating that she’s a strong candidate to prioritize.
These are just a handful of the Marketing Cloud capabilities that work alongside Education Cloud. To learn more, visit the Marketing Cloud Engagement for Education Help article.
In this unit, you learned how Recruitment and Admissions paves the road towards enrollment by simplifying and enhancing the connection between prospective students and your institution. In the next unit, learn how Agentforce strengthens this connection while also reducing the burden on staff.