How India's overseas education experts tripled their productivity with Zoho CRM

Key results:

• Increase in productivity:3X
• Time saved:>90%

The company

Azent Overseas Education specializes in helping students unlock the power of global education and study abroad opportunities. Their services cater to students aspiring to study in destinations like the US, UK, Australia, Canada, and more.

They recognize the immense potential in Indian students and believe that these students—when provided with the right opportunities and education—can excel in their careers. While some may find these opportunities within India, many face limitations due to the scarcity of options. This is where Azent steps in and assists students in building careers abroad and affording them access to the opportunities available in these global destinations.

The company's comprehensive approach guides students through the entire process from start to finish.

The challenge

Kechit Goyal, Chief Growth Officer at Azent, leverages technology to enhance the user experience for internal and external stakeholders.

Before Kechit joined the company, Azent was already using Zoho CRM, but merely to store data. The company used spreadsheets to manage data, and some of that data was occasionally imported into Zoho CRM. Ultimately, this arrangement couldn't offer an accurate view of the business. Kechit recognized that Azent was yet to unlock the power of Zoho CRM, and took it upon himself and his team and learn more about the product, its robust capabilities, and how they could customized it to optimize Azent's business operations.

The solution

With teams across India, Azent started shifting their processes from spreadsheets and a shared, centralized space: Zoho CRM.

Capturing leads effectively

Forms that leads filled out and submitted from social media platforms or Azent's website are captured in Azent's back-end infrastructure, which functions via Python. With its API integration with Zoho CRM, Python validates form entries, checks for duplicates, and pushes submissions to Zoho CRM.

In some cases, new student leads come from referrals, such as when students visit Azent's counseling office or attend online counseling sessions and bring friends along. In these instances, Azent's internal team can quickly create a new lead or student profile directly in Zoho CRM to ensure that no opportunity is missed. They also capture leads automatically through other channels. For instance, when Azent hosts a seminar or webinar in partnership with a university, they use Zoom registration forms to gather attendee data. At the end of the event, they easily upload this information into Zoho CRM, which keeps everything organized and accessible for future engagements.

Driving efficiency with automation

Before adopting Zoho CRM, Azent's Student Success Advisors (SSAs) would call students/leads to understand their profiles, connect them with the right counselors, and update notes in their Zoho CRM profiles. This process is now automated in Zoho CRM. By integrating Ozonetel with Zoho CRM, the system automatically bulk calls the top 150 students/leads with just a click of a button, adding to the SSAs' calling queues.

SSAs only need to update records if a student answers a call. If a call goes unanswered, that fact is also captured in the CRM system automatically, and the information is passed back to Ozonetel for follow-up automation. Ozonetel sends an automated message to inform them that the company attempted to reach out but couldn't connect. The message includes the name of the person who tried to reach them and their contact details, the goal being to encourage the lead to return the call at their convenience and ensure that the line of communication remains open.

Empowering quick user adoption with Canvas

Counselors form the backbone of the company—comprising 90% of the staff—so it was crucial that the system catered to their needs and was easy for them to adopt. With Zoho CRM's no-code editor, Canvas, the user interface was fully customized to empower counselors by streamlining their workflows with intuitive tabs and easy-to-navigate lists. Azent's counselors manage large volumes of student academic data, which was previously scattered across WhatsApp chats and emails. Thanks to Zoho CRM, every critical document is now securely stored in one place, which enables counselors to focus more on guiding students than on hunting for information. This transformation has made their work far more efficient and impactful, and made them the company's champions.

End-to-end process management

When a student successfully connects with a counselor, they're converted from a lead to a contact, and their counselor has real-time access to their entire profiles in Zoho CRM without having to rely on SSAs, given that all the documents and details related to the student are already captured in Zoho CRM.

The next step after qualifying differs for every student, as each profile is unique and has specific requirements according to the course or university in question—for instance, scores on competitive exams. Counselors discuss and facilitate these requirements with students, and once students have met all of their requirements, they become applicants, and are then tracked in a custom Zoho CRM module. The Azent team has created nearly 30 custom modules to support and track their unique business requirements in Zoho CRM.

Once a student's application is submitted and they receive an offer from a university, they need to pay a deposit. Afterwards, Azent assists them with the visa process and ensures smooth communication throughout. They track and manage every step of this process in Zoho CRM.

Enhancing conversion potential with scoring rules

The Azent team has developed a custom algorithm to facilitate bulk calling that selects the best leads based on factors such as activity, profile completion, and the number of documents submitted. These elements contribute to a lead score. During bulk calling, the algorithm identifies the top 150 leads with the highest scores, resets their activity, and schedules them for calls. Lead scoring is partly managed in Zoho CRM, while additional information is collected through backend channels. These user signals contribute to the lead score calculated in Zoho CRM, with higher scores reflecting a greater potential for conversion—all of which enables prioritized calling.

Improving operations and standardizing processes with Blueprints

As a geographically distributed organization, Azent wanted to standardize processes across all of their locations to ensure students receive a consistent experience. To achieve this, it was essential to map out the entire student journey and build a process that would help them manage it in Zoho CRM.

Zoho CRM's Blueprint feature helps define every part of the student lifecycle, and has three main advantages, according to Kechit:

• Role-based access controls: With Blueprint, Azent can allow only relevant teams to access specific stage transitions based on their roles.
• Validation checks: These ensure that all necessary steps are completed before moving to the next stage in the process.
• Automated communication: Azent can manage all post-transition communications to students, parents, or internal teams.

Enabling a cohesive user experience through integrations

Azent has created multiple custom templates in Zoho Sign, which they've integrated with Zoho CRM to collect digital signatures from leads when necessary.

The team primarily uses email for all communications, except instances where students opt in to receive messages on WhatsApp. The team built their own API integration for WhatsApp and configured it with Zoho CRM using custom functions. 

Prioritizing data security

Zoho's robust access controls and data protections enable Azent to customize user access so that reports only display relevant data for each viewer and minimize data exposure risks.

For example, the leadership team has custom reports and dashboards to help track data at various stages, counselors can only view student data, and branch staff only see branch-specific insights—all of which reinforces data security.

Benefits

Zoho CRM's easy configuration simplifies the learning curve for new features and makes it straightforward for users who want to get started without extensive documentation, says Kechit.

With Zoho, Azent has achieved a threefold increase in productivity compared to their previous performance. Centralized data also helps keep the team aligned toward common goals and enables leadership to make decisions faster—sometimes reducing decision-making from a week to an hour during meetings.