Education CRM software is a great solution for keeping your tasks and your business on track. By streamlining processes and automating workflows, these programs help you work more efficiently and provide better service to students and parents. Keep reading to learn why implementing an education CRM is a must during the back-to-school rush.

1. Efficiently Schedule Follow-Ups for Students

Whether you run a private school, offer tutoring services, or sell textbooks, the end of summer will bring a wave of new students requesting information. However, they can get lost in the shuffle when returning students are also making requests.

To keep new students organized and provide superior customer service, look for education CRM software with web-to-lead form capabilities. When a prospective student fills out the form on your website, their contact information is automatically logged in your CRM database and an email notification is sent to your sales team. This ensures that someone can follow up with the student efficiently to give them the information they need.

2. Quickly Schedule Tasks and Meetings From Emails

There’s no doubt that plenty of emails from students, parents and teaching staff will be pouring into your inbox. Some of these messages will inevitably necessitate meetings to discuss educational goals or deal with paperwork. Unfortunately, it’s far too easy to lose or accidentally delete an email before you have the opportunity to transfer the information to your calendar.

Many email applications, such as Outlook and Gmail, offer CRM add-ons that allow you to efficiently turn emails into appointments. In just a few clicks, you can save the email’s details in a scheduled meeting that will appear on your CRM calendar. And if the person you’re meeting isn’t a known contact in your CRM, you can also save their information directly from your email inbox.

3. Automate Redundant Processes

There are many administrative processes in the education industry that are redundant and take up valuable time. Updating student contact information, creating invoices, and sending emails are all tasks that slow down your productivity.

Thankfully, a robust customer relationship management program helps to reduce your manual workload by automating repetitive tasks. For instance, integration with your accounting software eliminates the need to enter invoice data multiple times, while saved email templates make student follow-ups a breeze. By having your CRM do the grunt work, you can focus on more productive tasks.

4. Invest in Student/Parent Portal Technology

Manually inputting each student’s contact information and payment details is tiring. Data entry errors can also lead to serious accounting mistakes, so it’s best to minimize this risk whenever possible.

Instead, let the students and parents handle these tasks. Seek out education CRM software with customer portal technology that allows students to access their personal accounts online. These portals should feature contact information as well as details about enrollment, tuition costs, and resources. Students and parents will appreciate the self-sufficiency of updating information, reviewing transaction history, and making payments online. Meanwhile, the portals will grant you extra time in the day by relieving your team from manual data entry duties.

5. Mobile Technology for Education Businesses

If you’re in the education industry, your work may involve going to schools to meet with contacts or provide resources. As you speak with students and faculty throughout the day, you need to keep their contact details up-to-date.

CRM software with mobile technology provides incredible solutions for traveling employees. With a CRM app, you can easily access student account information or faculty meeting notes on your smartphone and tablet. And for team members who are rarely in the office, being able to schedule meetings or prepare quotes while on the go is a game-changer.

6. Customization to Suit Your Needs

When adopting new software, it’s important to ensure that it can track the information that’s important to you. Using customizable CRM software offers greater flexibility for automating key processes and organizing essential data. Different schools and companies have unique needs for tracking student, parent, and teacher information, so adding custom fields can make the program a better fit for your business.

Customization can also help to streamline inefficient workflows. Say your company relies on having students and parents come into the office to sign paperwork — but sometimes they forget to show up, slowing down the sales process. A better solution is to incorporate online document signing into your CRM program. By making digital documents accessible through an online portal (see above!), students and parents can read the information at their own pace. Then, they can easily and virtually sign the document by clicking a button or typing their name. Once you receive an email notification about the signature, you can immediately move forward with next steps.

Prepare for the New School Year With Education CRM Software

With any luck, there are more and more students enrolling in your programs or purchasing your products every year. Increased business is great, but the increased workload can make you feel like you’re not getting anything accomplished. Education CRM software can help you get back on track by simplifying your workflow and automating manual processes. With these tools in your arsenal, you’ll be well-equipped to provide A+ customer service and work more productively come September.

The post 6 Ways CRM Software Helps Education Companies Handle the Back-to-School Rush appeared first on Method.

You see, initially Breaking the Barrier adopted sales and marketing software InfusionSoft, but it fell short for them as a business using QuickBooks. Like many small businesses, James felt the pain of trying to manage business applications that didn’t communicate, which inevitably meant inefficient manual work.

Sloppy Customer Service

“It didn’t integrate well with Quickbooks. It was time consuming to manually export data and upload it to InfusionSoft.”

To provide world-class service and continually grow their sales, James’ front-line team needed a way to identify the type of contact they were speaking to when answering the phone. They also needed a better process than looking up an email address in QuickBooks to see if the caller had an existing account.

Difficulty Managing a Long Sales Cycle

Adopting a new textbook for a school is a long sales cycle, often taking months or even years. With such long sales cycles James’ team needed a CRM that would help keep leads in the funnel with timely follow-ups.  

“It is critical we’re able to accurately track all our customer interactions and easily create activities and opportunities to follow-up. A teacher may ask for a sample in September in hopes their school eventually chooses to buy Breaking the Barrier for their students the following year!”

A long sales cycle also makes it critical for Breaking the Barrier to stay in contact with leads and customers throughout the year — they needed a tool that would help segment contacts and create email campaigns.

“InfusionSoft’s email campaign interface wasn’t giving us the capabilities of Mailchimp.”

The Solution: Method CRM

Discovering that Method has the #1 rated QuickBooks integration and an integration with Mailchimp, Breaking the Barriers adopted the CRM for their education company and never looked back.

James’ team now operates in a CRM that syncs with QuickBooks in real-time, which means that after an initial import of their company’s history, any new customer or transaction created in Method gets mirrored in QuickBooks and vice-versa.

“Enter Method CRM — a life-saver. With some great help from Method’s support team, we seamlessly uploaded literally decades of data.”

World-Class Customer Service

Now, with Method CRM in their arsenal, everyone on the Breaking the Barrier team has up-to-date customer data allowing them to serve customers quickly without going into QuickBooks. What’s more, the Breaking the Barrier team doesn’t even need to log into the CRM to access customer and transaction data with Method’s Gmail Gadget — a free tool that brings all Method CRM data right into your inbox.   

“Method’s Gmail Gadget has allowed our admins to rapidly see the order history of a customer and quickly assist with their needs without ever leaving Gmail. Before, we’d copy and paste an email address into QuickBooks to see if there was a customer history. Significant time burn!”

Long Sales Cycles Made Easy

Managing a long sales cycle is no longer a point of stress for the Breaking the Barrier team. Method CRM allows the team to maintain a healthy sales funnel through Opportunities and Activities. And, through the seamless integration with Mailchimp, the Breaking the Barrier team keeps in touch with current and potential customers through the year.  

“Method has allowed us to put reminders on our schedules months down the road to check-in with key decision makers. Further, the integration with Mailchimp has allowed us to segment our customer list and export certain groups over to Mailchimp for timely email campaigns.”

Business Benefits

“Method is a great CRM tool out of the box but that is just the beginning of what you can do with your Method. With the no-code platform that allows users to customize the system to meet their business needs, there is no limitation to what you can do. The Method team are the best vendors I have worked with in my career. If you need a CRM system with limitless possibility that fully integrates with QuickBooks, Method is the perfect software.”

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