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5 REASONS WHY YOU NEED TO MOVE TO AN EDUCATION CRM SOFTWARE

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What is a CRM Software?

Before we begin to tell you why education-specific CRM software is your ultimate solution, it is important to understand what a CRM is and what it does.
A CRM (Customer Relationship Management) is a software system that helps to unify all communications and data in one place. This is inclusive of streamlining and automating workflows, administrative tasks, tracking contacts, responses, measuring success, and even managing marketing campaigns.

How is regular CRM software different from an Education sector CRM?

A CRM software customized to fit the requirements of the education sector focuses on enhancing the overall student experience as well as easing out the tedious administrative tasks for the institutions. With the education industry becoming a highly competitive market, its CRM systems are also becoming increasingly multifarious. The system has been built to manage your day-to-day operations. An all-encompassing software that takes over student recruitment and engagement improves outcomes and efficiency by automating a lot of the processes across the student life cycle.

How does an Education sector CRM trump your everyday organized spreadsheet?

The Ultimate One-Source Data Hub

You don’t have to go flitting through multiple excel sheets to find the data you need. The CRM software will accommodate up-to-date information about everything within the institution for easy access to anyone within the institution. Student data, admissions information, emails, responses, analysis, reminders, monitoring, and tracking completed tasks and pending jobs are just a few in the sea of information the CRM software will store. Furthermore, the CRM prioritizes data security, a quality a spreadsheet lacks.

Automate Your Daily Administrative Duties

Need to constantly import or export your data from your spreadsheet to various business tools for various purposes and tasks? This is taken care of now. Once again, data storage and tracking prove to be CRM software’s strongest quality. From the tiniest inquiry into the institution through to enrolment, communications, interests, and many other miscellaneous details required for event management or email campaign solutions or any other purpose for that matter – it is all in one place. A CRM will eliminate the process of having to switch between
multiple software’s for different tasks. You can do it all in one place – the integrated CRM software. You can track prospects for different purposes, all within one platform.

Reliable Communication Trail

Imagine having to go back to every email you have sent to thousands of students to track when a communication was initiated and at what stage of the progress a certain student may be at, and then enter it manually into a spreadsheet. Sounds tedious?

A CRM software automizes this process for you by keeping track of every single interaction in chronological order right from emails, calls, tasks, notes, and any other form of engagement used through the student life cycle at the institution.

Standardize The Communication Between the Institution and Students

Let’s face it! Spreadsheets can be cumbersome to browse through and are not really collaboration friendly. Taking on from the data storage aspect of the CRM software, once again, all interactions with an individual are collected and stored by software, allowing you to not only access and share necessary information, but also keep track of notes, assign tasks, and even receive notifications for tasks that require attention. You won’t have to manually keep track of this information on a spreadsheet anymore.

No More Generic Communications

Over a certain period, it becomes a longer drawn-out process to peruse a spreadsheet and send out targeted communication to various students based on their interests. It also becomes easier to send out a bunch of generic messages and hope that one grabs their attention enough for them to engage. A CRM software will effortlessly segregate data based on individual engagement, interests expressed and demographics via the data store through recruitment, applications, and enrolment processes. This makes it extremely easy to target your communications with students specific to their areas of interest.

Say goodbye to the manual work. Do away with those spreadsheets. One pivotal benefit of using a CRM software is its knack for making every single task more time effective. Browsing through or switching between spreadsheets or even importing and exporting data to and from spreadsheets is a time-consuming process. A CRM is a very comprehensive one-stop for any educational institution. With everything you require to ensure a smooth and efficient functioning, centered on one platform, the amount of time and effort saved is remarkable.

Why Automation Is Indispensable For The Growth Of Your Institute

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— VANDANA DEVI SREEJITH

Why Automation Is Indispensable For The Growth Of Your Institute

There is a reason why institutes around the world have been increasingly adopting a technology-centric approach since the turn of the new millennium. Moving towards automation in managing academics is not only guaranteed to enhance student experience, but can also significantly improve the pace of your institute’s growth. Read on to know how!

  1. Automation helps in minimizing manual efforts and eliminating human errors

Technology provides you with a valuable platform that can help reduce manual efforts while bringing errors down to zero. Automated IT operations effectively perform the tasks of several people at once, leading to savings on the cost of labour. Processes tend to be streamlined better and accuracy level increases, thus eliminating human errors by a wide margin. Unlike human labour, automated processes require minimal supervision, and are capable of giving a better ROI, along with increased productivity.

  1. Automation helps in streamlining the fee management system of the institute

Technology has come a long way in alleviating the burden of fee collection that’s usually part and parcel of the running of an institute, by enabling fee reminder options for your wards who have outstanding fees’ pending, as well as by offering them multiple payment options on their student app, which is helpful in prompting them to do payments via bank or credit card transfers. It also regularly provides reminders to your administrative staff to conduct follow ups with students whose payments are overdue, thus helping institutes optimize payment recovery.

  1. Automation is both cost effective as well as time effective

One of the biggest advantages of automation, that has incidentally caused a major shift towards technology in the educational sector since the past few years, has been the ease and speed with which day to day activities are performed – from receiving system generated updates on fees or admissions and timely reminders about scheduled classes or lectures, to getting notifications about early class dismissal or upcoming college events – all this without the need for any manual intervention! Automation makes it possible for your admin staff or teachers to share institute related or examination related updates to several hundred students at one go, thereby saving precious time and effort. Automation turns out to be cost effective as well in the long run, as institutes can employ a lesser number of staff to manage administrative and operational activities, and can themselves turn environment friendly by transitioning to a paperless mode of functioning.

  1. Automation helps in tracking and converting potential leads to actual customers

Automation can be a powerful tool for institutes who wish to augment the efforts of their counsellors by providing detailed reports about interested students, potential leads, as well as actual conversions. These reports can be accessed in a date specific or month specific manner to help them identify the peak admission season, thereby mentally preparing the sales team to put in aggressive efforts. Conversely, these reports can help institutes identify the lean periods as well, thus providing them an opportunity to analyze their team’s marketing efforts, and prompting them to take corrective measures as necessary – either by offering limited period discounts or early bird offers. Apart from admission trends, institutes can also benefit from an automated software by viewing reports on the kind of subjects or courses that are most sought after, or even about the faculties who have been rated highly, so that these factors can be utilized effectively by their counsellors in securing more admissions.

  1. Automation provides valuable and real time data analytics to support decision making

An advanced institute management software can readily generate detailed reports that help institutes inspect relevant data concerning both academics as well as operations, thus helping them discover useful information, conduct a thorough analysis, reach important conclusions and formulate valuable decisions. Data obtained from system generated reports are real-time and auto-updated, thus helping institute heads track the centre and batches’ progress in a more efficient way. Institutes can take prompt and well-reasoned decisions anytime, either on the academic front or the operational front – thanks to the constantly updated and automatically segregated data generated on their institute’s ERP platform. Moreover, automation being a scalable option, institutes can retain valuable data in an organised way on the software, without the fear of losing them, for years and years – and access them whenever needed, with just a few clicks. Only the owner would retain the complete access over the institute’s data – thus ensuring that no information is modified or manipulated without his/her consent.

  1. Automation helps in improving the scalability of business

Any cutting-edge institute management system can help educational institutions standardize operations across its centres or batches, thereby allowing their business to become more centralised. While this in itself is good, an automated system also allows institutes to cover repeated processes digitally, thus saving on time, and helps institutions streamline their backend processes, so that their centres operate more efficiently, helping them grow to scale. A software that has been designed to scale can be adapted according to the latest needs of the institute, and in line with its exponential growth. A scalable system also ensures that as more and more of your staff, students and parents start accessing the purchased software, it would not crash, hang or in any way become unusable or redundant.

  1. Automation helps in streamlining staff schedule

Resource allocation is another major advantage of utilising an automated learning management system, wherein the schedules of faculties along with the shifts of the administration and support staff of the institute can be tracked, and even streamlined, if necessary. Both the institute as well as the students are provided with an overview of the teachers’ calendar, helping them book lectures at their available time, without worrying about classes clashing with each other. In case of any last-minute cancellation, the same can be viewed and rescheduled according to the mutual convenience of the faculty and student. Institute heads can also gain insight into the workflow of their teachers, helping them accurately rate their professionalism and performance.

  1. Automation is the most environment friendly choice

When you actually think about it, most of the administration work in schools and colleges involves form filling, maintaining records, printing invoices or fee receipts and preparing exam questionnaires – which eventually translates into piles and piles of paper! Adopting technology in the form of automated institute processes not only saves precious time and effort on the part of the admin team, counsellors or teachers and increases efficiency, but also helps your institute take a leap towards becoming more eco-friendly and reducing the consumption and printing of paper – which, in due course, leads to a better brand image.

  1. Automation can help scale up the institute’s record keeping practices

Maintaining the colossal mountain of records at your institute can be a tiresome, and often thankless, task. A highly scalable and advanced software, however, offers you powerful reporting features that help you retrieve any kind of institute-related data that you are looking for, to help improve your institute’s administration and day to day operations. Such data includes (but is not limited to) batch count, student information, faculty attendance, resource allocation, course module, admission enquiries and follow up, exam schedules, fee payment updates, registered grievances, lecture feedback, lesson plans and more. This helps you in not only evaluating your institute’s performance as a whole, but in also formulating measures that improve your institute’s revenues.

  1. Automation helps bridge the gap between institutes and students

A major reason why automation has gained popularity in recent times is because of the way it managed to revolutionize the traditional classroom, and bring in personalised attention and friendly rapport between the teachers and their students. Not only has this led to students understanding their subjects and liking their courses better, but has also led to greater job satisfaction and reduced burnout for the teachers. The ultimate benefit, is of course reaped by the institute for whom automation has led to goodwill, trust and increased student count year after year.

Although its possible to still go on listing the innumerable benefits that automation has bestowed upon the educational arena, it may be sufficient to say that automation has surely ushered in an era of increased visibility and improved functionality for institutes, which has ultimately resulted in an improved learning environment and a more enriched brand image for institutes, whose leaders can now proudly hold their heads up high!

TECHNOLOGY IN TIMES OF COVID – and how it helps in boosting education

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— VANDANA DEVI SREEJITH

A classroom in 1991:- The teacher walks into the classroom with an armful of books. She greets the class and turns to write on the blackboard. Her students, meanwhile, spend most of their time rummaging through endless books and stationery, trying to find the right ones while half listening to their teacher’s words.

Fast forward to 2020:- The Covid pandemic has hit humanity worldwide. People remain closeted in their homes, hugging on to their lives while shops and schools remain shut. The tech savvy generation that they are, kids happily play on their parents’ gadgets with scant regard for what’s happening outside, while parents and teachers alike fret over the waste of their child’s valuable academic year.

Enter Online Education. A special kind of technology based learning methodology that answers parents’ prayers while alleviating the woes of educators to a great extent. A solution that is a definite win-win for everyone involved, as it is easier to keep the attention of a kid focused on a gadget than on a blackboard. Technology offers unprecedented solutions, and hitherto unexplored avenues to enhance the learning experience, not only for students but also for schools and teachers alike. While animation videos and graphics can be effectively used to teach challenging concepts to smaller children, college going students can benefit from explanatory videos that instruct them thoroughly without the need for a mediator. Technology helps everyone follow the norms of social distancing well by converting face to face classroom interaction to online lectures on video-based digital platforms. Such learning becomes more personalized, as students are now able to tune out distractions that are common in classrooms, learn at their own pace by replaying videos or lectures as and when necessary, and are free from peer pressure to perform well in front of others, thereby bringing back a sense of calm and genuine curiosity to learning.

 

Learning Management Systems developed by experts such as AGAM are now being touted as a one stop solution for schools and colleges alike. Priced reasonably for their end users, it offers customized software that can not only help institutes in tracking admissions, managing fees and monitoring daily attendance, but can also support educators in devising lesson plans, scheduling examinations and handling the daily work flow. It brings a host of benefits over traditional methods of teaching, as LMS based models can ensure more transparency in the parent-school interaction, and facilitate a student guided approach to teaching, that focusses on allowing students to understand concepts deeply, while moving through the pre-designed curriculum at a faster pace.

 

The biggest benefit, however, is how the world of teaching has transformed into one big platform overnight since the advent of the pandemic. Regardless of subject or region, teachers all over the world have taken to conducting classes online, while continuing to interact personally with their students. While teachers enjoy the benefits of teaching across borders or instructing the wards of their competitors, students now have access to a wider range of specialists, from whom they can pick and choose the ones most suited to them. A French student, for example, can choose to learn directly from a native teacher, sitting in France instead of attending French classes within his locality. The rising cases of Covid has encouraged educators around the world to collaborate on teaching methods with the help of technology, and to use digital solutions to refine education to suit modern day sensibilities and values.

 

In short, as our day to day life becomes more and more dependent on technology, it makes sense to digitalize the education sector as well, which is not just the most feasible solution during this global crisis, but is also hands down the best way to introduce our future generation to the miracles of the online world!

 

Coaching & Training Institutes vs Schools and Colleges

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Educational Institutes scale and structure is becoming wider, deeper and broader in every sense. Educational sector is no more just conventional School colleges, but far more than that, with various unconventional institutes, e.g. Vocational Training, Skill Training, Coaching Classes, Tuition, Competitive Exam Preparation and many more…

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What is Student Life Cycle Management?

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Let us first understand what is LifeCycle Management. Life Cycle Management means governing an object from its inception through its growth, maturity and clearance. We do LifeCycle management to track, analyse and improve in order to achieve.

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