Alps Education sees 60% increase in onboarding completion with Zoho Flow

About the organization

Alps Education is a UK-based educational software company that has been helping schools and colleges improve student performance for over 20 years. Their flagship platforms, Alps Connect and Alps Summit, provide data-driven insights to help institutions track and enhance student performance, especially for key stage 4 (KS4) and key stage 5 (KS5) students. Known for their robust methodology and high customer satisfaction scores (CSAT), Alps has established a strong reputation in the education sector.

As Alps transitioned to a SaaS-first model, they adopted Zoho One across their commercial, onboarding, finance, and engineering operations. With that, they started using Zoho Flow, and now it plays a central role in connecting their apps and internal systems.

Disconnected customer data across platforms

Problem: Alps needed to sync customer usage data, such as logins, uploads, and engagements, from their proprietary application into Zoho CRM to assess customer health scores and usage patterns.

Solution: Their engineering team developed an internal tool and used Zoho Flow to push login and usage data to Zoho CRM on a daily basis. One of their flows checks if a contact exists, creates one if not, logs the last login dates, and updates account-level metrics in Zoho CRM.

This data now powers their health scoring system, which alerts the team when a customer hasn’t logged in or uploaded data in over 45 days, facilitating timely check-ins and reducing churn.

Manual and fragmented onboarding process

Problem: Alps ran complex onboarding journeys involving multiple sessions (kickoff, data, education) for schools. These were tracked manually or across separate apps, and resulted in missed sessions, poor reporting, and inconsistent follow-ups.

Solution:Zoho Flow helped them integrate Zoho Bookings, Zoho CRM, and Outlook to categorize bookings by modules and automatically update CRM records. A few custom fields track onboarding progress and let them send session-specific emails and follow-ups with no manual intervention.

“We now know exactly which onboarding sessions have happened, and why some haven’t. Onboarding completion jumped from 55% to over 80%—and that’s directly because of Flow.”

Melanie MurphyZoho Systems Administrator,Alps Education

Complex invoicing and renewal process

Problem: Alps’ finance team used to create invoices and payment receipts manually, especially for multi-year subscriptions. During periods of peak financial activity, like renewals, this required intense manual effort by the team and was prone to human error.

Solution:Zoho Flow now takes in deal data from CRM, uses custom functions to determine billing structure, and creates draft invoices in Zoho Books with scheduled dates for future billing. On average, this flow alone saves them a month's worth of manual work annually.

“What used to take a full month now takes minutes. I got the entire month of July back, just from automating renewals with Flow.”

Sally Bridges-WickhamCustomer Success Manager,Alps Education

Limited visibility into finance and customer feedback

Problem: The finance team used to struggle with getting real-time updates on overdue invoices, and any feedback data that came from Zoho Survey wasn’t directly usable in CRM.

Solution: They built a flow that automatically tags CRM accounts when invoices go overdue in Zoho Books, keeping account managers updated on their accounts' statuses. Additionally, another flow automatically sends survey responses to CRM for centralized analysis and follow-up.

Benefits and ROI

By integrating their apps and automating workflows between them using Zoho Flow, Alps has seen significant improvements in their productivity and efficiency across departments. Here are a few of the key benefits they've identified:

60%+ increase in onboarding completion (from 55% to over 80%)
100+ hours saved annually in CRM data updates
1 full month saved annually during renewals
50% reduction in boardroom reporting prep time
Improved customer satisfaction and retention powered by real-time health tracking
Centralized customer and accounts data, with Zoho CRM acting as the hub

Moving forward

With 30+ Zoho apps already being used for a variety of business needs, Alps now plans to migrate even more of their operations to Zoho. A few examples for the near future are integrating PandaDoc with Zoho Sign for document signing, migrating existing Zapier automations to Zoho Flow, and continuing to build automations around CRM, onboarding, finance, and education analytics using Flow.

“We’ve been able to bring our best-practice process visions to life. Flow isn’t just an integration tool—it’s the backbone of how we scale.”