Higher Ed

USC Marshall Trades Manual Processes for Reliable FormAssembly Web Forms

Matt Wilson

Head of CRM Applications USC Marshall School of Business

Case Study Snapshot

As a well-renowned institution of higher education, the University of Southern California’s Marshall School of Business (USC Marshall) has been embarking on its education journey with students for over 100 years. At USC Marshall, their mission of enriching students and serving the community is a simple but serious one. With this mission in mind, the university needed to make sure that their prospective students, current students, staff members, and campus visitors were able to access information about the university and its graduate programs in a streamlined, user-friendly way. In 2018, the faculty at USC Marshall decided that they were ready to leave outdated, complicated data collection in the past.

We were able to have a conversation with Matt Wilson, USC Marshall School of Business’ Head of CRM Applications, who shed light on the institution’s journey to collecting data with FormAssembly. Read on to learn how the connectors, software pliability, and reliability has revolutionized the information sharing process for their graduate program.

About USC Marshall

With over 100 years of history, USC Marshall is the oldest business school in Southern California.
USC Marshall has over 15 graduate programs and offers customizable executive education programs for continuing education in the workplace.
The university has more than 90,000 alumni that are making a difference in 100+ countries worldwide.

The numbers

15

graduate programs

40+

active forms

10,000+

applicants yearly

The Need

Streamlined Processes to Save Staff Time

“They needed an automated solution to be able to provide information as swiftly as possible.”

While current students and their education is of the utmost importance at USC Marshall, the prospects and recruitment are also incredibly pertinent to the legacy they continue to build. In 2018, if a prospective student traveled to the USC Marshall home page to inquire about programs or applications, they would be prompted to send an email to a generic information domain and wait for an admissions employee to respond. This process was not only time consuming for prospective students, but it was also inefficient for staff. USC Marshall faculty knew that there had to be a labor-saving, simple, and aesthetically pleasing way to share and gather information on the university website. As a program perpetually striving for growth and development, they needed an automated solution to be able to provide information as swiftly as possible to those looking for it.

The university also needed to reallocate staff time that was previously lost on sifting through and responding to emails. With several goals to achieve simplicity on the website and to ‘spice up’ their basic and outdated forms, USC Marshall turned to FormAssembly so they could relieve burdened staff members and give them more time to focus on the university’s overall mission.

The Solution

Reliability and Improved Applicant Experience

The reliability of FormAssembly’s automated connectors helps eliminate human error and provides protection.

Since implementing FormAssembly in 2018, USC Marshall has seen a plethora of benefits, including but certainly not limited to: hundreds of possibilities through FormAssembly connectors with logic and formulas, an entirely editable and customizable form system, reliability, and overall, hours of time saved for staff.

One of the biggest time savers was implementing forms that automate applicants’ graduate program inquiries. University staff is now confident to send potential students and campus guests to their website to fill out a form asking for information, knowing that they can trust FormAssembly to relay the form data and ensure that the requestee receives the desired information.

Additionally, with FormAssembly providing a better user experience, they have seen an increase in the quality of candidates and volume of applications.

Use Cases

Student Inquiry Forms

Problems Solved with the switch to FormAssembly

By creating forms that allow prospective students to easily specify what information they’re inquiring about, USC Marshall is now able to automate responses. The automation of responses alleviates staff from the burden of answering an abundance of emails & alike questions, and from sharing the information manually. This process has been critical in saving staff time of up to two hours per form. It has also been a huge help to clean up their webpages. The web forms help keep their website organized, while matching their overall aesthetic.

Matt shared that one of the greatest benefits is the reliability that FormAssembly has provided, giving staff a sense of relief when it comes to gathering sensitive information. The reliability of FormAssembly’s automated connectors helps eliminate human error and provides protection.

With FERPA, GDPR, and GLBA compliance, FormAssemby’s secure data collection platform helps keep student, staff, and alumni data safe. The web form platform also provides TLS 1.2 encryption in transit and at rest, respondent authentication (SSO), administrative controls, and advanced security and privacy controls.

What’s Next?

As USC Marshall moves forward in their form building journey, Matt shared that the university has recently started to use FormAssembly to track campus visitors that come for classroom presentations as well as the visitors that come onto campus to judge competitions. Tracking these visitors while using the Salesforce connector helps them to build a database of campus visitors and allows staff to share information with visitors for future events, which is an exciting avenue they’ll continue to explore.

The university is also eagerly looking into a new application process for prospective students applying to specific programs to help their system funnel information into the right application pool. We look forward to sharing more on that use case in the future!