Success Story

Industry
Higher Ed
USC Marshall Trades Manual Processes for Secure Web Forms
10,000+
Annual applicants
15
Graduate programs
40+
Active forms

Overview
As a well-renowned institution of higher education, the University of Southern California’s Marshall School of Business (USC Marshall) has been enriching the lives of students and serving the community for over 100 years.
With this mission in mind, the university needed to make sure that its current and prospective students, staff members, and campus visitors were able to access information about the university and its graduate programs in a streamlined, user-friendly way. The faculty at USC Marshall decided that they were ready to leave outdated, complicated data collection in the past, and move to secure web forms with a data collection platform.
Streamlining processes to save staff time
Challenge
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. Prior to FormAssembly, if a prospective student inquired 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.
“We needed an automated solution to be able to provide information as swiftly as possible.”

Improved applicant experience
Solution
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 manually responding to emails. This process has been critical in saving staff time of up to two hours per form. The customized web forms help keep their website organized while matching their brand.
With FERPA, GDPR, and GLBA compliance, FormAssemby’s secure web forms help keep student, staff, and alumni data safe. The data collection 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 who come for classroom presentations as well as the visitors who come onto campus to judge competitions. Tracking these visitors while using the Salesforce connector helps them to build a database of campus visitors. It 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!