REPURPOSED CRM FOR HIGHER ED
Accordion SRM circa 2012
By Steve Bowler
Contacting potential students for master and PhD programs is somewhat different than calling on sales prospects. Yet there was enough overlap that when an enrollment platform was needed we started with an open source CRM and modified it. Sounds simple? Not exactly.
When I took over the project, the previous PM had done an amazing job of getting the platform running in as tight a time frame as could possibly be done. However, the resultant reliability was poor, many features not fully functional, crashes were constant, and to make matters worse the engineering team was in China so not available during the day. Phone calls and emails from the enrollment specialists were continuous and IM's from the VP Operations were frantic.
The use case we were servicing was teachers seeking Master of Education degrees. They would search the Internet or respond to banner ads and fill out information request forms. We wanted to achieve subminute callbacks so that they would still thinking about our school. To do so we needed to integrate a cloud based call center app with our CRM.
Step 1 was fire the team in China who had exhausted their capabilities to get it this far. We replaced them with a team we knew in Vietnam. Step 2, we split the coding from operations and hired a contractor in the US to manage the stack and the releases on AWS. He also went about rebuilding the back end for reliability. Step 3, we set up a triage using commercial project management and bug tracking software. At first the highest priority releases were going to be have to be sub-weekly. Once things were under control that was extended to bi-weekly in an Agile Development Scrum-Sprint process.
Within a few months our uptime increased from 50% to 99.99%. Our releases were becoming more centered on productivity improvements and yield than on bug fix. The UI/UX changed to mimic best practices brainstormed from the team, some of whom came from more mature companies, some who had just been waiting for someone to listen to their ideas for improvement.
This was a global development operation with the program and product manager in Boston, development in Vietnam, operations in California, call centers in Arizona and Portland, Oregon, and business development in Chicago.
At the same time this was going on, marketing was ramping up lead generation and enrollments took off. The company tripled in size and the university partner had a legitimate online degree program to compete with the best.
Steve Bowler is a Co-Founder of HotChalk, Inc., Inc. an early pioneer in K12 EdTech and an Online Program Manager for Post Secondary Education. He also Co-Founded ProductFactory, Inc., a provider of enterprise Product Portfolio Management that was acquired and a Founder of Venalytica in Consumer Preference Analytics. Steve is an expert in Product Management, Program Management and Agile Development.