How Skyeng School Created Its Own CRM

Developing our own customer relationship management system was not our original goal. We devoted all our efforts to developing our own educational platform , but when the first clients — school students — began to appear, maintaining our own CRM became an urgent need. We started with ready-made and publicly available tools such as Google Docs, gradually adding our own developments, until we found that we have a full-fledged customized tool that solves exactly our tasks. How we managed to develop our own CRM - read in our story.

Student cards and segregation of duties

At first, all information about students was contained in one Google tablet. It had a lot of columns, one of which was called "The history of communication with the client." It is clear that at a certain moment the information stopped getting into it, and it became very inconvenient to use the entire table.

At the same time, we had a paper CRM (yes, don’t laugh). Only one person was engaged in customer service at that time, and he set up his CRM system simply: put three baskets and put paper cards in them. When the student received the application, he inserted the card and put it in basket A. After completing the introductory lesson, the card was moved to basket B, and after paying for the training, the card moved to basket C. The result was a clear conversion funnel. With a paper card, it’s easy to go out into the corridor and call the student from there - at that time the whole Skyeng team fit in the same room in the hostel, and in order not to interfere with each other, the employees went out for conversations. Here's a CRM "on the knee." This system did not last long - about three weeks, as the customer base grew, and manual work became completely inconvenient (if a student calls with a question,

Therefore, we created the simplest CRM into which we transferred information from cards. The system was simple, but now it was easy to search by cards ... The search fields were standard - the student’s name, mail, phone, which was discussed at the introductory lesson, who is the teacher of this student. Employees manually entered into the CRM fields all the information they received by personal mail. Subsequently, the mail server was integrated into this system so that the data entry into the cards was automated.

The schedule at that time was manually compiled by Google. Here you could see when the lesson begins for each student and monitor the work of teachers. The system was initially focused on working with remote employees and was also administered remotely - no local installations were envisaged.

Such a system worked while we were small - a couple of dozen teachers, 5-6 managers who performed a full cycle of customer service. When the number of managers exceeded 15, it became obvious that people who do a good job supporting existing customers do not always know how to choose the right package of services and sell. We divided the responsibilities by creating two groups of managers - one working with incoming applications from potential customers, the other solves the problems of existing students.



The cards themselves were constantly growing, growing in musculature. Now they contain the maximum amount of useful information for the student, which allows us to provide individual service at a high level.

Priorities

Initially, managers independently decided which task required their attention. A lot of time was spent on this choice. As soon as we implemented the priority system, having removed responsibility for the choice from the manager, the work efficiency doubled!

Priorities are now distributed as follows (from high to low):

Salesmen

1 - answers to active questions. This does not take much time, but the faster this is done, the higher the chance that a person will become our student. Now we immediately tie the potential customer to one manager - thus, at the stage of sale, he communicates with the same person.
2 - fulfillment of promises. If you agreed to call at 15:00, then you need to make this call on time.
3 - work with users who have just completed the introductory lesson. We give them some time (half an hour or an hour) to collect their thoughts, after which we need to contact them and agree on the beginning of permanent classes.
4 - Organization of the schedule for customers who have made money and are ready to start working. We have to pick a teacher and schedule in a day. Due to our rapid growth, this task is not always simple; there are difficulties with the schedule.
5 - phoning of potential customers with whom this manager once communicated, but they “fell off”.

Support

1 - answers to active questions.
2 - fulfillment of obligations (promised to call - we’ll call).
3 - solving non-urgent problems of users who do not fall into the first paragraph. For example, the teacher does not like; there was a problem in the lesson; payment does not go through. The last point, by the way, is very important, because a student after several unsuccessful attempts to buy a package of lessons can simply fall off.
4 - ringing of users who have ended paid lessons and have no extension;
5 - ringing of students who should have had a break in training, but they have not yet returned. We remind ourselves and try to return.

Schedule and Statuses

The schedule system (now separated from the actual CRM, the connection between them is via the API) is a very important thing that we have not found on the market in the form of a ready-made solution that fully meets our needs. With the current number of Skyeng students, and now almost 5,000 students study at the school at one time, it’s physically impossible to make a schedule manually. Our system shows the teacher’s employment: when he has classes scheduled, these are regular lessons or one-time, paid or trial, who is the student, what program he is studying for. The system allows you to make sure that the time is planned and planned correctly, to calculate the analytics - what lessons took place, which did not take place and why, how much the student has on the balance sheet. Part of the information (for example, the number of lessons remaining on the balance sheet) is displayed in the student’s personal account,



With the help of schedules, we can plan regular classes in a semi-automatic mode. The manager fills the possibilities and needs of the student (his level, convenient class time, gender and mother tongue of the teacher, teacher’s psychotype recommended by the methodologist, etc.), receiving a list of available suitable teachers. Of course, it is far from always possible to achieve perfect matches, therefore, manual adjustment is required with the selection of the closest options that are already approved with the client.



The schedule system is tied to the status system - for example, when a student starts to skip classes, a status (“alert”) arises, that something went wrong, that is seen by a call center employee. We have the opportunity to see the entire school workflow with all the problems that arise. Status alerts can be generated by student actions or by the system itself. Among the former there is, for example, the status “payment does not pass” - it arises if the client unsuccessfully tried to buy a package of lessons four or more times (payment aggregators have failures, we need to respond to them promptly). The system also responds to systematic cancellations and skips of lessons by both students and teachers. The second includes statuses associated with the work of employees - replies to letters, negative assessments of lessons, missed incoming calls.

Both our CRM, and the schedule system that separated from it, have their own gateways in the student and teacher dashboards. Of course, the functionality there is stripped down - only what the user needs is left - but the changes that they make immediately fall into the "large" system. Now we are working on expanding the functionality of the personal account available to students.



Over the years of Skyeng School, our own CRM, which was not originally planned at all, has grown into an adult system that allows us to quickly and efficiently work with users. We continue to improve it, striving for even greater automation, which will allow managers to spend more time on individual service for students, rather than on a technical routine. Among the current active tasks is the appointment of classes with several teachers. This is what 10% of users ask us and what we ourselves need: if the student is not attached to one specific teacher, we will not lose him if the teacher went on vacation or quit.



We hope in the foreseeable future to give the student the opportunity to independently add their own lessons directly from their personal account. What our specialist is doing now, in principle, can be done by the student himself, setting the potential teacher’s data and schedule necessary for him and receiving a list of available teachers as an output.

Now we have no reason to abandon our own CRM in favor of some kind of commercial solution. Our employees are used to it, and over the years we have been able to make and customize all the chips and nuances we need; their implementation in a third-party system is possible, but it will require no less effort and time than we spent building them in our own CRM. On the one hand, we do not urge to follow in our footsteps - if you have the knowledge and the opportunity to buy a ready-made CRM, it is certainly worth doing. However, from experience we can say that spending extra time and money on solving urgent problems arising from the influx of paying customers is much nicer than sitting with a perfectly selected and tuned, but pristine CRM.

And we are looking for talent !