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Customer Q & A

Customer Q & A: Taylor University

Customer Q&A Swish Maintenance

Customer Q & A: Taylor University

The ongoing Customer Q & A blog series highlights a wide range of Jitterbit customers to find out what business needs drove their integration requirements and why they made Jitterbit their integration solution of choice.

In this week’s hot seat is Susanne Ours, Divisional Programmer, Taylor University.

How did you find out about Jitterbit and what were some of the reasons you chose it as your integration solution?

Taylor University is a coeducational, interdenominational Christian liberal arts college located in Upland, Indiana. I work for the Enrollment Management division. Taylor University uses Banner as its institutional ERP system. In the past, all of our information completely resided in Banner but over time our needs changed. As an admissions office, we have to be flexible in marketing to students. We have to be able to make changes to our processes quickly and often.

We decided to use Salesforce as our recruiting CRM and moved our entire inquiry pool out of Banner. Admissions counselors now have the ability to easily see prospective student information and also to track their communications with students. Faculty and Athletic Recruiters also are interacting with students and logging those interactions in Salesforce. Our visit program is run completely out of Salesforce. Our marketing plan is also done through Salesforce and Marketo.

In doing this, it became apparent that we needed an integration tool to help manage the numerous processes that needed to take place each day. I am not an IT person and am self-taught. So I just needed something simple to use with a robust scheduler.

Jitterbit made sense to me and I liked how the work was done in components. We have the ability to schedule and chain processes together. The lookup feature in Jitterbit is excellent and has streamlined our processes tremendously. It has opened up a lot of possibilities that we didn’t have access to before.

How do you currently use Jitterbit?

We are using Jitterbit for a number of things.

  1. Jitterbit runs our integration processes between Banner and Salesforce. Our application process is still done in Banner. This information has to go in and out of Banner each morning and afternoon in order for our admissions counselors to have the most up-to-date picture of their students. We also use this to load financial aid information from PowerFaids into Salesforce.
  2. We have found creative ways to load information collected on our online forms in Marketo into objects in Salesforce that Marketo can’t update or create records in on its own.
  3. We are loading information into Salesforce from files that were extracted from our online application. Our admissions counselors no longer have to log into Fire Engine Red to see the information. They can see it all within Salesforce.

From a business perspective, how has Jitterbit helped you?

Jitterbit has transformed that way our admissions counselors and office staff interact with the data from all of our different systems. They now have a 360 degree view of our students without having to look in multiple places for that information.

Our marketing plan has been completely changed with the use of Salesforce and Marketo. Jitterbit is an integral part of that plan. Along with this, we’ve been able to move many processes that used to be done manually to automated processes. This has freed up our staff and allowed them to do other things that require the more personal touch.

Jitterbit has also allowed us the freedom to move nimbly and quickly. As we develop marketing plans or adjust how we do things, we are able to respond to those changes easily. We have complete control over how the data is extracted, manipulated and loaded.

The people in our office think of Jitterbit as the “magic” behind the scenes. They have no idea how it works. They just know that Jitterbit is doing wonderful things all throughout the day that magically makes things appear on their screens and in their task lists. We really appreciate Jitterbit and I don’t think we could do our jobs without it.

Thanks Susanne!

Do you have a customer success story you would like to share?  Drop us a line at customersuccess [at] jitterbit.com or @jitterbit on Twitter.

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