Customer Solution Case Study
/ / Education Consultants Speed up Services with Dynamic Real Time Information and Reports
Increases Business by 30 Percent, Spends No Time on Report Generation
Overview
Country or region: India
Industry: Education
Customer Profile
EGE Global Education, a global network of higher education consultants, enable students to pursue international education that best meets their individual career aspirations.
Business Situation
The organization tried its best to manage leads, co-relate students’ information to the courses offered by universities using a local solution and Excel spreadsheets. However, it was too time consuming to help the business scale quickly.
Solution
With the help of Trident Global Business Services, EGE deployed Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online to attain new levels of user productivity and collaboration amongst teams. The new business solution optimized the efficiency levels.
Benefits
n Unlimited reports in no time at all
n Customer satisfaction positively impacts revenue
n Improves decision making
n Increases productivity / “We chose Dynamics CRM Online to address our need for MIS and data analysis for better decision making. We also wanted to provide a high level of support to our customers, who are demanding, and want continuous update about their application status.”
Rajiv Gupta, Chief Executive Officer, EGE Global Education
A global, trusted education consultant, EGE Global offers an objective, expert assessment of a student’s unique educational needs. Challenged by the diverse needs of students, and ever-changing admission criteria at universities and courses offered, decision makers at EGE decided to deploy Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online. Trident Global Business Services, a unit of Microsoft® Certified Partner, Trident Information Systems deployed the solution. The organization's effectiveness and productivity has increased by streamlining operations and increasing efficiency through a single application. The management now makes faster, smarter decisions, using real time dashboards delivering up-to-date data about its business. The new solution helps to meet specific business needs with optimal performance and a low total cost of ownership.
Situation
EGE Global Education is a worldwide network of higher education consultants and counselors. It maintains dialogue with accredited colleges and universities in United States, United Kingdom, Canada, Europe, and Asia Pacific, to understand their expectations and continually changing admissions criteria for international students. Headquartered in New York, EGE has offices in destination countries including United Kingdom, Canada and Singapore. EGE provides comprehensive mentoring programs to its students that include counseling, detailed student profile analysis, mapping of profiles to the best courses and documentation for admission and financial aid application. It also offers post admission, pre-departure and arrival support to its students.
EGE began operations in India in September 2010 with a corporate office in New Delhi. With more than 40 employees, it is expanding its operations in India, has opened branches at Mumbai and Hyderabad and has aggressive plans to expand to enter other cities.
"Word of mouth on our quality services is generating significantly more leads. This in turn is positively impacting our revenues.”Ashish Jaiswar, Assistant Manager Counseling and Management control Department, EGE Global
EGE initially had deployed a counseling specific application to address the elementary requirements of its counselors in various business processes and assist in operations. Databases such as students, universities, and courses were maintained in Microsoft Office Excel spreadsheets. Coordinating all the information to match each student’s profile according to his interest in courses, budget, and university requirements was a time-intensive process. “The system was tedious to use, requiring team members to copy and paste data between systems. The system served us well when student numbers were limited but was not sustainable as we were scaling up,” states Vaibhav Arya, Head – Marketing, EGE Global Education.
EGE demands high quality standards and drives its team to offer highest quality services to its students, with comprehensive, up-to date, and nouveau information. Aware of manual consolidations, it was determined to obviate any mistake or slip. Hence, every lead was manually checked and evaluated on a regular basis; profiles were matched and communicated to students. If a management review was to take place to understand how customers were being catered to, it took many hours of report preparation. Besides, the existing systems had limitations in enabling counselors to track when they were supposed to revert to a customer for what.
Moreover, the existing solution offered a limited number of reports. For any other report, the software team had to develop custom formats, which meant additional costs and time. “With new asks from the management we had no option but to go for a comprehensive solution so that we could meet the requirements of management,” says Kunal Ambasht, Management Control Office, EGE Global Education.
Solution
In December 2010, EGE thought of migrating to CRM solution. “We wanted to minimize the instability and reduce costs and time spent in coordinating and mapping prospective student details,” says Vaibhav Arya. “That meant that the new system had to be easy to use and customizable to our functional requirements.”
EGE scouted for a suitable CRM solution that would address its needs. It compared several systems and zeroed in on a shortlist of three. In order to assist in its decision-making, it took advice from its team based at New York headquarters that had amongst them, a person familiar with IT and CRM solution.
“We chose Dynamics CRM Online to address our need for MIS and data analysis for better decision making. We also wanted to provide a high level of support to our customers, who are demanding, and want continuous update about their application status, explains Rajiv Gupta, Chief Executive Officer, EGE Global Education. The vote was for Microsoft Dynamics CRM based on:
n Microsoft compatibility
n Simplicity of set-up and service
n Cost
n Cloud versus on premise platform
EGE approached, Trident Global Business Services, a unit of Microsoft Certified Partner Trident Information Systems for its vast experience in implementing CRM solutions. Implementation began in January 2011 and the solution went live within two months. EGE started with just 25 user licenses; however, the success and benefits have led the company to plan expansion quickly. It is likely to increase it to 50 users by September 2011 and possibly to 100 in near future.
Trident Global Business Services deployed Lead Management, Counseling Notes and Customer Service follow up modules. The solution integrates the three unique functions and accommodates features specific to EGE. Processes are mapped as per EGE workflows. Lead forms and opportunity forms capture profile analysis information of student. Activity flows are configured using filters to shortlist universities and courses. With real time information, students are assisted immediately.
Counselors no longer need to enter multiple passwords and jump from system to system to perform tasks. The solution sets hierarchies to match business processes for different countries. Role-based forms and security roles protect database authorization.
“The implementation has not been without its share of challenges. There was a resistance from the employees to move to the new solution, even though it was a far superior solution. Hence, internal buy-in and training held the key to overcome this,” says Rahul Datt, Chief Operating Officer, EGE Global Education. “The second was transitioning all the records, data and MIS to a new system in a seamless manner. The third was changing the ‘design basis’ as during implementation, we ourselves understood our needs.”
According to Vaibhav Arya, “We have overcome these challenges thanks to the support from the Trident team.” EGE hopes to extend Microsoft Dynamics CRM using the concept of XRM (Anything(x) Relationship Management) platform to accelerate line of business application development through point-and-click configurations or customizations.
"Any query from a student about any course or university can be answered within no time."Ashish Jaiswar, Assistant Manager Counseling and Management control Department, EGE Global
Benefits
Microsoft Dynamics CRM provides an easy and systematic way to manage prospects and ensures follow through. It maps data from lead to opportunity, converts to a contact right up to invoicing.
Unlimited Reports in no Time at All
The reporting capabilities inherent in Microsoft Dynamics CRM have enabled EGE to design several custom reports for use. “One of the significant benefits of a system like Dynamics CRM is that if on a given day, we would like to analyze data from a completely different dimension from what our routine reports reveal, we can do so ourselves, without having to ask the counselors or IT team or management control team to spend time in creating new reports. Not only this, when we want to see reports from a multi dimension perspective, for example, Counselor-wise - Lead Source-wise Analysis of Conversions and then compare it with certain benchmarks, Dynamics CRM comes in handy,” says Rajiv Gupta.
Customer Satisfaction Positively Impacts Revenue
Counselors instantly find the information with number of features such as preview panes, personal views, record pinning and most recently used lists. “Any query from a student about any course or university can be answered within no time,” tells Ashish Jaiswar, Assistant Manager Counseling and Management control Department, EGE Global. “Word of mouth on our quality services is generating significantly more leads. This in turn is positively impacting our revenues.”
Improves Decision Making
The new business solution allows dashboard to give 360-degree overview of the organization, business and sales opportunities. It enhances accuracy in revenue projections, allows revenue-tracking goals by dates, financial periods or other predefined criteria. Review and analysis of entire business scenario with real-time data hones management abilities to make faster, smarter decisions in favor of business expansion and more revenue. “We can identify trends and make suitable predictions based on them,” states Kunal Ambasht.
Increases Productivity
Microsoft Dynamics CRM ensures that the data is available for effective planning. Rahul Datt, expresses, “We can, for example, analyze monthly sales; students registered for a specific course; intake session, country of choice etc.” We can forecast trends and advice Counseling and Research team accordingly.”
Dynamics CRM has improved coordination and collaboration between sales and service team by tracking all the information in one central system. Counselors and their reporting managers have complete visibility into activities at the lead and contact levels. Leads are assigned, email messages are associated with relevant leads or opportunities and tasks are automatically sent based on predefined rules. The automated workflow saves time which directly effects productivity and efficiency. Likewise, it instantly tracks target sales versus attainment and thus drives the marketing and counseling teams harder to accomplish targets or more.
Future Plans
EGE plans a more agile development process in the future. It plans to transform its web site from a static information repository to a lead generation, lead capture and lead profiling tool. CRM will be integrated with the web site. It is also planning a call center, which will integrate Microsoft Dynamics CRM with interactive voice response (IVR) system. A mobile access gateway is also planned in near future. “Real time integration between our portal, accounting and call centre is a necessity to grow our business,” concludes Rahul Datt.
Microsoft Dynamics
Microsoft Dynamics is a line of integrated, adaptable business management solutions that enables you and your people to make business decisions with greater confidence. Microsoft Dynamics works like familiar Microsoft software such as Microsoft Office, which means less of a learning curve for your people, so they can get up and running quickly and focus on what’s most important. And because it is from Microsoft, it easily works with the systemsthat your company already has implemented. By automating and streamlining financial, customer relationship, and supply chain processes, Microsoft Dynamics brings together people, processes, and technologies, increasing the productivity and effectiveness of your business, and helping you drive business success.
For more information about Microsoft Dynamics, go to:
www.microsoft.com/dynamics
About Trident Global Business Services
Trident Global Business Services (Trident GBS), a unit of Trident Information Systems, is a leading provider of business advisory and co-sourcing services in retail, supply chain and finance domain and implementation services in ERP, CRM and Business Intelligence across diverse industry segments. It is managed by a core team of partners and operational leadership who believe in the measurement of their performance by enabling clients to achieve an increasing lifetime value through solutions and service offerings.