G.D. Goenka World Institute Keeps Track of Enquiries with ACT! by Sage

The GD Goenka World Institute has been started by the GD Goenka Group to cater to the rising demand for quality higher education in India. Established in 1982, the GD Goenka Group has varied interests in fields ranging from real estate to tourism, garments and educational institutions. Having successfully established itself as a trendsetter in providing quality education up to the high school level with the GD Goenka Public Schools, the group has now entered into a partnership for higher education with the prestigious Lancaster University, UK to offer world class Undergraduate and Postgraduate degree programs through the GD Goenka World Institute. The Institute has a proactive approach to higher education and its foundations are based on the philosophy that quality education requires consistent efforts and new directions in the area of teaching, learning, research and training.

The admission process usually starts with the appearance of print advertisements in leading newspapers which trigger walk-ins and call-ins from interested candidates. This spur of activity spans a couple of months and involves a number of activities like document submission, campus visits etc for the completion of the admission process. “Since our entire marketing efforts are concentrated in a two-month time frame, the enquiries thereby generated are too numerous to be tracked manually. The enquiry needs to be logged in, the contact details need to be captured and the schedule of follow up activities needs to be drawn and stringently followed. Manual tracking of enquiries could result in leakage of leads and since each enquiry represents a potential business opportunity, this would translate into high value business loss. In order to ensure that all the enquiries generated from our marketing activities were tracked effectively and to streamline our follow-up activities, we decided to implement an enquiry management solution,” explained the Executive Director, GD Goenka School of Business. 

G.D. Goenka World Institute and ACT! By Sage – A Perfect Fit

Talking about the attributes that they were looking for in an enquiry management system, The Executive Director recalls, “We were looking for a robust enquiry tracking mechanism that would ensure that every enquiry was being entered into the system and prevent any leak of opportunities. We also wanted a method of having a real time view of the status of each and every enquiry, supervise our executives and assess the effectiveness of our various marketing activities.”

GD Goenka World Institute implemented ACT! By Sage even before launching their course in India in March 2009 to ensure that their marketing efforts were well leveraged and the admission peak season was capitalized.

“ACT! is a web based enquiry tracking system that offers best-in-class performance coupled with a great degree of customization, reporting and integration capabilities. After evaluating other options, we found ACT! to be the most comprehensive and easy to use system offering robust activity scheduler, single tabular view of customer information and strong integration with excel worksheets. We therefore felt that it was the best system suited to address our specific needs,” opined the Executive Director.  “With a strong implementation partner in Interlink Information Systems, the speed with which ACT! was deployed in our system has really been exceptional. The team has been instrumental in understanding our entire business flow and customizing our reports as per our requirement. In fact the entire sales and deployment process was completed in two months,” he added.

GD Goenka World Institute is currently using a 10 user pack of ACT! premium for web.

Streamlined and Process Centric Enquiry Management

GD Goenka World Institute generates enquiries from various marketing activities, primarily newspaper advertisements, hoardings, exhibitions etc. that are rolled out in the months of February and March each year. As a result, a voluminous number of enquiries are generated through walk-ins, call-ins and emails. Each of these enquiries has to be registered and relevant information such as contact information, past academic record, course of interest etc. have to be keyed in. Once this has been done a follow up schedule has to be drawn up including follow up calls, campus visits, document submission etc. for the enquiry to be converted. If this process is done manually it is open to error and might result in loss of opportunity and wastage of precious marketing spends. If the follow up process is not well defined into specific steps with reminders then the customer experience hinges on the quality of the individual and can result in loss of opportunity for the institution. Also since the funds involved for the various marketing activities is substantial there is a need to link each enquiry to the activity that has generated it in order to assess the efficacy and conversion potential of that activity.

ACT! allows users to log each enquiry and track it till the admission stage. Using the contacts module it is possible to record all requisite information regarding the candidate such as contact information, previous academic record, course he would like to pursue etc. as well as personal information such as his birthday, house address and so on. The activity module enables users to schedule activities such as follow-up call, document submission, campus visits etc. for each enquiry and set reminders through pop-ups to ensure that no enquiry is left unattended. It also allows users to record the source that the enquiry has come from thereby providing precious information on the reach and conversion potential of each marketing activity.

360 Degree View of the Candidate in a Single Window

The Notes tab lets the student counselor scribble remarks regarding discussions and interactions that have taken place with the candidate while the history tab keeps a record of the entire gamut of communication that has been exchanged with the candidate as well as the activities that have been completed like campus visit, fee payment etc. The documents tab maintains a log register as well as a copy of the documents that have been sent to the candidate such as the college brochure, fee structure etc. so that the counselor is aware of the stage that the candidate is within the conversion process at the time of interaction with the candidate. Once the admission process is completed it also maintains a repository of the documents submitted by the student at the time of admission.

“ACT! offers a single user interface in a tabular structure, thereby providing us with a 360 degree view of all information pertaining to a candidate in a single screen. It is possible to access any information about the candidate such as contact details, history or documents by merely clicking on the concerned tab without having to change screens. This would definitely not have been possible in an excel worksheet,” opined the Executive Director.

Once the admission process is completed the activity schedule module sets reminders for fee payment and other routine activities. ACT! also has a strong mail merge feature that allows users to store pre-configured word templates of general operational communication such as institute introductory letter, GD/PI invitation letter, selection notice, class postponement notice etc. and then personalize and print it at the touch of a button.

Real Time View of Daily Performance & Pending Activities

The activity dashboard allows supervisors to keep track of the daily activities of the counselors, such as number of calls made, activities schedules for the next day, pending activities for that day etc. It provides the senior management with a high level, real time view of the daily performance of the front end executives by offering them a graphical interface of all activities that are pending, in action and have been completed for each day.

ACT! also provides reports on the number of calls that were made that day, the courses for which enquiries have been received, and the source of each enquiry thereby affording senior management with a complete view of the daily progress. “The queries are also segregated into hot, warm and cold on the basis of the activities that have been completed against them. For example if the application form has been collected the query is classified as warm and if the fees have been paid then it will be classified as hot and so on. Thereby the management gets a report of the total number of calls as well as a qualitative assessment on the basis of progress of each call which gives them an idea of the potential for conversion,” added The Executive Director (IT), GD Goenka World Institute.

Due to the strong integration with excel, it is possible to import and export data from excel worksheets to ACT!. As a result it is possible to import databases from excel worksheets and export reports from ACT! to excel for the purpose of presentations or mail outs.