Customer Stories

Educational Housing Services

Educational Housing Services (EHS) is an independent, not-for-profit housing association charged with the complex and detailed task of housing students and interns in six different buildings in Manhattan and Brooklyn.

A B2B and B2C business, EHS works annually with schools and individually with students.Over 30+ years in business, EHS has established itself as an agile and committed solution to New York City’s student and intern housing shortage.

Housing students and interns in NYC from across the world is no simple feat in itself, and EHS further takes into consideration cultural background, age, gender, and community building combinations when matching people with places.

It’s an enormous undertaking, and one that requires reliable access to lots of different types of data for several different end-users.

We sat down and talked with Elice Baxter, Program Manager, about the EHS experience with Edge Cloudworks. Here’s what she had to say.

Elice Baxter, Program Manager at EHS

Starting line:
We had Salesforce prior to engaging with Edge Cloudworks to help us with integration solutions for our multiple departments, and to organize our community. Our students choose between two options – a single or a double occupancy. If we’re working on a double, we try to make the best matches between residents.

The Need:
We sought to fine-tune and further customize the platform with Edge Cloudworks. Specifically, by increasing efficiency for our Student Life team, which maintains the information referable to the check-in and checkouts of each room. Before Edge Cloudworks, team members had to manually enter all the information for each room twice. This inefficiency took time and increased the likelihood of errors.

Results:
Edge Cloudworks created a beautiful, efficient, seamless integration system for us. We’ve seen gains in three main areas: increased sales, improved morale, and a decrease in errors.

Increased sales
Sales have increased because the new system has lowered the time to record a sale by five minutes. Our team gets hundreds and hundreds of leads per day, those five minutes add up. We also have better lead generation and flow, and more of those leads are engaged and targeted thanks to the work we did with Edge Cloudworks.

Improved morale
Our sales team works on commission, and they’re tickled about the reduced burden on them. They’re no longer concerned about the possibility of some types of errors thanks to the new system, and as a team they’re more able to focus on what matters. Morale has increased substantially.

Reduced errors
We’ve seen a huge decrease in errors. Ed simplified our report structure, so that we only need two reports now. We can now catch mistakes before they happen. It’s been beautiful.

Overall experience:
Ed is a Salesforce architect. I now think of time at EHS as “Before Ed and After Ed.” He helped us figure out what we needed for our business, and he offered solutions that simplified things. As a small example, he added a checkbox in a certain area as a safeguard; we hadn’t thought of that, and it has proven to be repeatedly valuable. He was available, prompt, knowledgeable, and, most helpfully, forward-thinking. Ed foresaw things that seemed, at first, very far-fetched to me; then I saw how viable his perspective was. Edge Cloudworks was so communicative and helpful that we’re set up for monthly services. Given their proficiency, I’ll go to them without question for future and upcoming projects.