How workflow automation can help educational institutions

Running an educational institution today means relying on a variety of apps for admissions, data management, communication, and more. While each app serves a purpose, they often operate separately.

For example, think of managing inquiries; you could be using a form builder to collect student data, a CRM to organize and manage that data, and a scheduling app to communicate with them. While these apps can help you manage inquiries effectively, someone will have to manually work to transfer data across them.

Now imagine every process in your organization running this way. Manually transferring data every single time across these apps is time-consuming, error prone, and can create data silos within your organization. To avoid this, you need workflow automation.

How workflow automation can help

Workflow automation can help educational institutions automate repetitive tasks, connect disparate systems, improve communication, and collaborate better. Let's take that same process of managing inquiries.

With an integration platform like Zoho Flow, you can connect all your apps together. This way, any time someone submits an inquiry, every subsequent action, including adding them to your CRM and creating an appointment with them in your scheduling app, will happen automatically and in real time.

Now you have more time to focus on educational and academic development rather than routine admin work.

Many educational institutions around the world use Zoho Flow to streamline their operations and ensure a consistent flow of data across the apps they use daily. Here are a few of their use cases.

Enhanced educational software onboarding — Alps Education

Alps Education is a UK-based educational software company that helps schools and colleges improve student performance by providing data-driven insights.

Alps Education uses a variety of apps across the Zoho One ecosystem, and to connect them all and automate workflows between them, they use Zoho Flow. Zoho Flow helps them automate a variety of use cases, offering them connected systems, automated workflows, enhanced visibility, and streamlined processes.

One of their most important workflows is their onboarding process, where they onboard customers to their software—in this case, schools and colleges. This process involves multiple sessions, which were usually set up through Zoho Bookings, and the data used to be moved across these apps manually.

With Zoho Flow, they integrated all the apps involved in this process—Zoho Bookings, Zoho CRM, and Outlook. Now, the session in Zoho Bookings is automatically categorised and updated in Zoho CRM. Any emails or follow-ups related to these sessions are also sent automatically to the customers through Outlook, resulting in a 60% increase in onboarding completion.

“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-Wickham, Customer Success Manager, Alps Education

Check out the full story of Alps Education.

Streamlined enrollment inquiry collection — Punta Galea

Punta Galea is a Spain-based private, co-educational school that offers infant, primary, compulsory secondary (ESO), and baccalaureate education.

Punta Galea is listed in Mi Cole, an academic management and communication platform that's used to get information about schools in Spain. If anyone shares a particular interest for Punta Galea, the information will be shared with them to contact the prospect.

Mi Cole is one of the most important lead collection channels for Punta Galea, and to manage their leads, they use Zoho CRM. However, since Mi Cole is a locally used application that doesn't natively integrate with Zoho CRM, they had to move data between these apps manually, and it was time-consuming.

By connecting these apps with the help of webhooks in Zoho Flow, every inquiry in Mi Cole is now automatically updated in Zoho CRM and segmented based on the type of request. This helps them completely automate the manual process, saving them four hours per week and eliminating any potential errors.

"It automated our flow of information, saving us around four hours per week, with virtually zero errors. It's made us much more productive and efficient." - Luis Carlos Palacios Moreno, Deputy Director, Punta Galea

Here's a more detailed look into Punta Galea's use case.

Centralized customer communication — CASIOPE

CASIOPE (Centre d’aide et de soutien aux intervenants et organismes en petite enfance) is a training organization based in Canada that provides training for professionals working in early-childhood training institutions.

CASIOPE offers training programs for professionals, and to manage their customer data, they use Zoho CRM. They also need this information to be in sync with their subscription data in Zoho Billing. Any announcements or release notes will be sent out to customers based on this data.

Before Flow, once a subscription was created in Zoho Billing, they had to manually update the information in Zoho CRM to ensure data consistency across these apps. But doing this manually wasn't feasible, as it involved delays and errors, and it slowed down the process.

Zoho Flow enabled a seamless integration between the two apps, instantly updating new customer information in Zoho CRM based on the data in Zoho Billing. CASIOPE took this integration further by bringing Zoho Campaigns into the workflow, to accurately segment and reach all their users for any announcements.

"By using Zoho Flow, we were able to automate tasks that were previously done manually. We gained efficiency and increased our sales for training sessions by at least 70%." - Manon Chamand, Administrative Director, CASIOPE

Dive deeper into CASIOPE's story here.

Efficient student data management — Hanoi School of Business and Management

HSB, an educational institution located in Hanoi, is associated with Vietnam National University. They offer high quality programs, ranging from undergraduate to PhD.

Being an educational institution, HSB handles high volumes of student data, and they use Zoho Forms to collect that data and back it up to a sheet. However, they needed to add this data to Zoho CRM, as it helps them manage it more efficiently.

With scattered applications and little integration, any movement of data between these apps could only happen manually. Then, i3 Network Systems, a Zoho Authorized Partner in Vietnam, helped them solve this problem. They used Zoho Flow to connect three apps—Zoho Forms, Zoho Sheet, and Zoho CRM. 

And with that integration, any time a form is submitted by a student, relevant data is automatically captured in Zoho CRM and backed up in Zoho Sheet instantly. This helped them improve operational efficiency by over 70% and reduce manual effort.

"Zoho Flow helps create powerful integrations without the need for a developer. I strongly suggest that any organization running large amounts of data that needs to be automated in real time use Zoho Flow." - Dr. Hoàng Anh Tuấn, Deputy Head Of Training, Hanoi School of Business and Management

Check out HSB's full story here.

The growth that technology has brought to educational institutions is huge—and with the help of an integration platform like Zoho Flow, you can ensure that there's a seamless flow of data across all the apps you use.

While the cases above are just a few instances where education-related institutions and organizations have made use of Zoho Flow to streamline operations and save time, it's just the tip of the iceberg.

Check out Zoho Flow and start integrating your apps today!