Zoho CRM empowered Excelsia College to be more efficient, by increasing collaboration, removing manual processes, and giving increased visibility and tracking.
Background
Background
Excelsia College (or just Excelsia) is a tertiary college offering undergraduate and graduate courses in counselling, performing arts (drama and music), and teacher education with a view to become Australia’s first Protestant Christian University.
Excelsia College is formerly called Wesley Institute. Wesley Institute for Ministry & the Arts was set up by Wesley Mission, Sydney in 1989 as a Christian Institute to train students for both ministry and the creative arts. It operated from a campus at Drummoyne, New South Wales, previously the site of the Drummoyne Boys’ High School. In 2016, it relocated to Macquarie Park, New South Wales.
Generally, the college has 32 years of experience in Christian higher education in Australia, and IWU has 95 years of experience in Christ-centred education in the US and global markets. Together the partners are well positioned to take Christian higher education to the next level in Australia for undergraduate and postgraduate students.
Excelsia has long been using Zoho CRM system for their Leads (potential student) management from a sales perspective, as well as Paradigm for their operational needs. Paradigm is an Online Student Management System used by many colleges in Australia.
Challenges
Challenges
Excelsia College was having issues with their current implementation of CRM and Paradigm, which are detailed below.
No Integration with online web form – All new enquiries would have to be entered manually into their CRM
Limited reporting – Reports in CRM were not giving Excelsia the ability to create the dashboards they needed, due to data in CRM not being structured correctly. Staff would have to export data from CRM into excel and manipulate it from there, leading to wasted time.
No integration with social media – The marketing team wasn’t able to see any history of Leads on social media. There was also no way to quickly add leads from social media such as facebook, twitter.
No Integration with Google Adwords – The marketing team wasn’t able to track if any leads had come in from Google adwords.
Inability to track lead source correctly – Due to the structure of the CRM not being correct, lead source was not being used correctly to identify where each lead had come from. This meant reports couldn’t be created to show where leads had been coming from.
No integration with Paradigm – Due to there not being any integration, Excelsia staff had to manually input student details into Paradigm. This was creating lots of tedious work for staff, and leading to losses of productivity.
Staff was unfamiliar with Zoho CRM – Due to the staff not being trained on Zoho CRM, they weren’t utilizing it correctly, and weren’t aware of all the features available. This made them reluctant to use it.
No Email integration – There was no email integration with the CRM. If staff wanted emails to be logged in the CRM, they had to send them from the CRM.
Bobby Abraham – Marketing manager at Excelsia – decided it was time to engage with a certified Zoho Partner to resolve all their issues.
Solution
Solution
Zoho CRM, Zoho Social, Zoho Reports, API integration, Web to Lead
Oscillosoft integrated Excelsia’s webform with CRM, so that all enquiries from their webform would come in correctly into the CRM.
Excelsia’’s CRM was restructured into the proper CRM structure of Leads, Accounts, Contacts and Potentials. The CRM was customised for an appropriate way required by the college, with industry specific fields created.
Google adwords was integrated with Zoho CRM, to allow tracking of Leads from specific adwords
Zoho Social was set up by Oscillosoft – This allowed scheduling of posts to social media, automatic creation of Leads from social media, and allowing responses to Leads directly from CRM.
Paradigm was integrated with Zoho CRM, this allowed the pushing of students directly into Paradigm automatically, after the student was confirmed for a semester.
In Zoho Reports, a dashboard was set up and customized to Excelsia’s liking. This rich dashboard showed Excelsia management everything they needed to see, saving them from having to export data from Zoho CRM.
Staff was trained onsite by Oscillosoft on Zoho CRM, Zoho Reports, and the API Integration.
Emails were integrated using IMAP.
Results
Results
Excelsia College management and staff were very satisfied with their CRM after the work done by Oscillosoft. Zoho CRM empowered them to be more efficient, by increasing collaboration, removing manual processes, and giving increased visibility and tracking. Specifically:
Paradigm integration saved staff from having to go back and manually update student information in paradigm every week. Now, with the click of a button, the student would be in Paradigm, and their information would automatically be kept up to date.
Management were very pleased with Zoho Reports’ rich dashboards with showed them Leads by quarter, Leads by source over years, etc.
The marketing team was satisfied with the new CRM, as they could properly track leads and contacts from their source
Zoho CRM email integration allowed Excelsia to quickly check the latest status of a lead or student, as all emails were brought into one place and made visible to all staff.
Staff found Zoho CRM’s new 2016 interface to be intuitive and easy to use, once they had received training on it.
Since Zoho CRM is a true cloud CRM, staff could view leads, contacts, accounts; make changes; add notes; log phone calls; and add or view tasks anywhere on any device with internet access.
Zoho CRM activities, tasks and events allowed Excelsia staff to live off the CRM, rather than relying on other third party tools or calendars.