How to Automate EdTech business with Service Desk?
Alfa School Success Story in Premium Education tell you how ((OTRS)) Community Edition (OTRS for short) based Help Desk automated Alfa School’s service for students and teachers.
Alfa School is an online language school with a very special approach to education. The school has been on the market since 2011, when the number of online schools in Russia was close to zero. Alfa School has been working with premium segment audience from the beginning. Their demanding clients know the value of time and expect the best service. In the first year the school saw such an increase in student numbers that they struggled to keep the level of service at a premium level manually.
Challenge: Keep High Standards of Premium Service
You can manage to keep track of 30 clients, but not a hundred. Alfa School founders realized that they can’t continue to grow their business without an automated ticketing system. The school needed what we know today as a classic CRM system.
CRM systems were getting popular in 2012, but the variety of products that we have today wasn’t yet available. Alfa School was choosing between AmoCRM and Megaplan until they got advice from Radiant System to implement OTRS. The company gladly followed that advice, because none of off-the-shelf products meet all their needs. Furthermore, it would be much more expensive to develop and to customise it in terms of money, time and labor-intensive with these companies.
Help Desk among other things had all basic CRM features. Besides, due to its open source code, this system would be easily developed as the business grew.
“Radiant System’s specialists warned us at once that OTRS is a Help Desk and it works a bit differently. It’s not a classical CRM system, but a system of a “Q&A” format. We liked the ease of this solution and the fact that all of the important features, such as history of requests and chats, were already in the basic configuration. So we even re-engineered our processes to fit Radiant Service Desk”.
Narina Bagdasaryan, CEO of Alfa School
How to remember everything a student has ever said?
On average a student stays with Alfa School for 11 months. Some students stay for a few years. The premium service from Alfa School means that clients don’t have to repeat themselves and that managers faultlessly keep any arrangements, even if some were made months ago. How can a manager who has hundreds of messages a day remember what this one client asked for three months ago?
“There are few feedback forms for clients: on the website, on Facebook, different email accounts, etc. The project’s challenge was to collect all students’ and teachers’ requests into one system and create a common сommunication space for all of Alfa School’s team”.
Alexey Yusov, CEO of Radiant System
Alfa School expected the new system to be very convenient for managers. It’s easier to find what the student asked for three months ago in their personal record than look for it in different messages in a few email accounts.
Solution: Radiant Service Desk is a Forever Choice
Alfa School ran OTRS based Service Desk for clients communication in a matter of days.
“Radiant System’s solution gives us what we need most. I mean stability, speed and clarity of work. There was never a case where we’ve had a new idea for the ticket system, that Radiant System met with ‘sorry, we can’t do that’. Radiant System can handle any tasks that appear as our business grows”.
Narina Bagdasaryan, CEO of Alfa School
Help Desk and billing platform integration
So, Alfa School systemised clients’ communication with the Help Desk and kept the service at a premium level while having a large number of students. Great!
But how can we automate financial processes like counting teachers’ salary or tracking students’ payments? OTRS isn’t actually a billing system.
That’s why Alfa School implemented the billing separately. The billing system has a class schedule, features for students’ payments and for counting salaries for teachers. Help Desk saves full history of chats with students in chronological order.
But there was one “but”. Constant switching between two softwares was quite annoying. Again, when there are only 30 clients, it’s ok to find and copy information from different systems manually. But what if there are few hundreds? Working with all this data manually wastes the most valuable resource, the employees’ time.
Radiant System’s experts found a solution and wrote an API to integrate Help Desk with the billing platform. It was an unusual task, because Radiant didn’t have any ready-to-use modules for this need. Radiant System did the API integration from start to finish together with the billing platform provider. This integration API is an independent add-on now. That’s how, thanks to collaboration with Alfa School, API integration modules appeared in Radiant System’s marketplace.
“Radiant Service Desk works by API both as a server and as a provider. When there’s an action in Help Desk, the system sends the information to the billing platform. But if there’s an action on the billing platform, it sends the information by API to Help Desk. So, each system has the latest information”.
Alexey Yusov, CEO of Radiant System
The integration not only cut down time for managers’ routine work, but also helped Alfa School to process urgent requests much faster. For example, a teacher messages a manager about a cancellation for a trial lesson, and a manager can easily handle it and reschedule. Thanks to the integration, any manager can find this student’s ticket number, get all his contact info, and correct the schedule a few times faster than before.
How Help Desk helps to trace lead quality
The company grows when it sees ways for growth. It’s not enough to track only the amount and channels of traffic for effective promotion. It’s necessary to analyse lead quality on all stages. Let’s look at a little example:
1. Alfa School used one UTM mark in an PR article they posted to an online platform and another in an influencer advertisement.
2. So, 100 users came to the site from the article and 200 users from the influencer post.
3. 100 people signed up for a trial lesson, 30 people from the article and 70 from the influencer ad.
After that Alfa School can’t trace the user journey by using UTM marks. But only the next steps can show the quality of traffic.
Thanks to client info in Help Desk, now Alfa School can see how a student came to them. And, thanks to the integration with the billing platform, they can see that 70 out of 100 people made the first payment, 20 of them came from the PR article, and 50 from the influencer post.
What conclusion can analysts draw? The influencer’s post attracts a lot of good leads and Alfa School needs to do more of them, but the article wasn’t very beneficial for the company.
As a Result: No Clients Lost
Alfa School has an incredible conversion rate. On average, 70 out 100 leads turn into clients.
“The conversion is so good because we have clearly described work stages. Everyone knows their scope of work. We don’t do business forcing ourselves onto clients or trying to sell them something they don’t need. Only influencers who study languages with us and can share their real experience tell others about the school. We just do our best, and when someone sees our expertise, everything they have to do is to make a call. After that they dive into our world”.
Narina Bagdasaryan, CEO of Alfa School
The clients service rating is 9,3 out of 10
Thanks to Help Desk Alfa School stopped losing potential clients. There isn’t an option to forget something or call a student at 3:05 instead of 3:08 with such a solution. Online school clients are busy people who value their time. It’s enough to call exactly when they have a coffee break to impress them with the best service.
1 manager — 1 working day — 300 people
Sounds crazy, but on average Alfa School managers really process requests from 250–300 people during an 8 hour working day without any pressure on them. Today thanks to Help Desk by Radiant System this amount of work is a standard. 8 hours is enough to solve all routing problems, delete spam, work with clients and go on a coffee break.
We shared another client success story and the next is coming up! Follow us on Medium to keep updated on our latest posts.
