You’re losing your leads and you don’t even realize it! That’s not what we’re saying. A recent MIT study suggests that “The odds of calling to contact a lead decrease by over 10 times in the first hour. The odds of qualifying a lead in 5 minutes versus 30 minutes drop 21 times. And from 5 minutes to 10 minutes the dial to qualify odds to decrease 4 times.”
The education industry is at an exponential growth trajectory in the present times, yet the ed-tech firms face multiple challenges in scaling their business. Some of the key business pain points can be listed as
- Lack of lead tracking
- Lack of effective communication
- Poor customer experience due to improper customer query management
- Arduous paperwork which creates accounting errors
- Lack of coordination between product and project teams
Correct tools can strengthen a business’s relationship with its end-users and clients, while also improving the overall customer experience. In this blog, we list 5 tools to manage your edtech business better and efficiently.
Customer Relationship Management
Lead conversion is an essential aspect of business success. Lead management is dependent on different moving parts across departments including accounts, sales, and marketing teams. If your business is dealing with too many leads at a time, there are high chances that critical conversions may be lost.
A CRM or a Customer Relationship Management software is a tool that can rightly handle and aggregate leads from across different channels like websites, calls, and emails. Integration of CRM in the business can help you to track and take action for each lead. A strong tech solution with CRM can help you with-
- Auto distribution of leads across sales team members with no manual intervention
- Availability tracking so that leads do not get distributed to co-workers who aren’t available
- Collecting lead data from multiple sources in one place to eliminate duplication
- Efficiency in management of callbacks and keeping records
Some examples of good CRM include Pipedrive, Hubspot, and Salesforce.
Communication Software – For seamless connection with customers
For product optimization, the business team must acquire and retain its customers. For this reason you need communication software so that your edtech company can connect with its customers seamlessly.
Therefore you must choose software that helps you solve customer queries or approach them directly over the sales call. Communication software can help you with-
- Remote ability so that you can make calls from your laptop or mobile with a simple click from anywhere
- Ease of use by making call entries, notes of customers, and tagging leads
- Call analytics and monitoring for the team to keep track of, or listen to live calls in real-time without interference
- SMS Automation for sending out bulk SMSs to communicate with all clients and contacts efficiently
- Auto dialing feature which allows automatic and direct connection to the suitable recipient based on previous interactions
Helpdesk & Shared inbox – For addressing customer queries better
Reducing the rate of customer defection by 5% can shoot up your profitability by 25-125%. That is why handling customer queries is an essential part of customer service in the edtech market. The most compelling reason why catering to your customers is essential is because a 2% rise in customer retention causes the same effect as lowering the cost by 1%.
Customer service is about learning and responding to customer queries in real-time, and increasing customer satisfaction. When customers send in queries, a tool like shared inbox can come in handy. It is popular among small, mid-sized, and big businesses alike. A shared inbox and helpdesk can help with-
- Promoting transparency among teammates to understand the best-dealt or failed query response
- Better e-mail management to filter out the priority mails, and comment or communicate efficiently with the queries raised
- Seamless integration by including several features of automation to increase productivity and reduce response time
- Solving query load through helpdesk by creating articles or answers around common queries and concerns
Some of the platforms that can help you with customer query addressing include Helpwise, Freshdesk, and Zendesk.
Accounting software – For efficient cash management
Accounting software for an edtech business can help the business owner assess whether the strategies are working towards profit generation or not. Good software in place will assist in making a correlation between cash flow and sales forecast. This is essential for business owners to strike a balance between raising revenues, releasing payrolls, and keeping track of expenses. Paperwork and spreadsheets in such a complex business model will make things clumsy. Having an accounting software will help you with-
- Invoicing with formal designing and tracking whether or not your client has viewed the bill
- Expense and bill management to improvise investments with analytical features
- Document management keeps a tab on customer sales and cash flow, while also monitoring customer journeys across schemes and promotions
- An informative dashboard allows you to track your business performance using charts and graphs; and also gives sales statistics to depict the performance of your company
Freshbooks, Quickbooks, and Xero are some good examples of accounting software.
Product Management Software – For overall management
At any edtech firm, there is a constant demand for developments to cater to the evolving market. With so many tasks and multiple developments going on simultaneously, there is also a need for overall product management. It is the role of a product manager to design a roadmap that the team navigates. Product management software can help a firm with-
- Task management to set weekly or daily targets, create a board for multiple tasks, set goals, due dates, and priority lists
- Team management to make the development process a waterfall model, and strategize the teams to make the process agile, and faster time-to-market
- Dynamic dashboards to bring in project flexibility and work visualization, monitoring the live progress, and real-time data
Some of the good product management software include Asana, Basecamp, and Microsoft Teams.
In the active education industry, your business can make the customers and clients discover the benefits of digital learning with the rightly stacked tools. The tools mentioned above will help you in increasing business growth and team productivity. Let us know if you’re ready to get one or all of the tech stacks for improving your edtech business management.
