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    CHALLENGEU SWITCHES FROM IN-HOUSE CRM TO HUBSPOT'S CRM PLATFORM

    ChallengeU

    Automate to reduce friction and improve students' customer experience

    • An integrated CRM platform to centralize data
    • Streamline work between teams by reducing the number of application tools required
    • Make work processes and software more accessible and easier for employees to use

    ChallengeU
    An educational platform approved by the Ministry of Education

    ChallengeU is not a school, but an educational platform used by school service centers to offer the chance to go back to school for free by distance learning.

    ChallengeU is the solution for those who want to go back to high school without going back to school.

    The educational platform enables students to take high school courses remotely, from their computers, tablets, or even mobiles!

    With the ChallengeU team, students are never left to their own devices. They are supported by the teachers at the school service center where they are enrolled. What's more, students have access to advisors and support groups on Facebook. A complete and effective service.

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    reduce dependence on human resources
    the decision to choose HubSpot crm and its products

    ChallengeU's various teams were working with outdated internal systems. Extracting data to generate reports was complex. This required programming, notably using SQL query language, and increased pressure on the already stretched technology support team.

    A lack of uniformity in the delivery of student services weighed dramatically on the mental workload of student support officers. Indeed, to register and track a student's school record, there's a lot to think about in order to plan and organize reminders, as well as the tasks to be done. This process required a great deal of training before an agent could be 100% operational.

    The negative consequences for students are numerous. For example, the time it takes to process an application for admission or enrolment at certain critical stages in the process. To improve the customer experience for students, it was essential to reduce these processing times.

    With the company's growth, the maturity of its managers, and their technological expertise, it was clear that ChallengeU's way of operating for 100 students was not going to work for thousands of students! So a complete redesign of existing technologies, processes, and people was called for.
    During the difficult period of the pandemic, a decision-making committee composed of the marketing management, sales and student support, and finance teams was set up. Unsurprisingly, the finance department approved the budgets.

    ChallengeU's philosophy is simple, understood by all, and based on:

    • The profitability of a project. If a project yields 1.1 times more than the amount spent, ChallengeU invests!

    • Maximum automation of processes, to reduce costs.

    With such a philosophy in mind, the committee quickly decided to start work on process mapping and ideation.

    After some research, access to certain grants for digital transformation projects helped accelerate this important project for ChallengeU.

    Challenge #1

    Switching from an in-house CRM to an integrated CRM solution

    ChallengeU being a back-to-school service, it was becoming unsustainable to have a technology team that had to manage 3 different technological products: an e-learning platform for students, an interface for teachers, and a CRM solution built in-house.

    As maintaining the in-house CRM was less critical to ChallengeU's mission, it became natural to replace it with a more powerful, modern CRM.

    ChallengeU evaluated Zoho CRM. However, as members of the management team and users were already familiar with HubSpot's CRM platform, they opted for Zoho CRM in the end. HubSpot is a solution that is equally suited to technical support teams, sales teams and marketing teams.

    The interests of each department are different:

    • The sales manager was more concerned about the Sales Hub and third-party application integrations.
    • The Marketing manager was concerned with transferring the website and blog to HubSpot's CMS.
    • The technology teams had a higher-level view of the solution's cost control compared to legacy systems, and then integrations with their in-house systems.

    So it's important to get everyone aligned before starting to implement tools and processes.

    Challenge #2

    Manage student's admission requests more efficiently

    Students wishing to enroll in adult education in Quebec must provide a great deal of information. Sometimes, they even have to provide documents to ensure that their identity and academic level are validated by the educational institutions.
    This requires a great deal of follow-up on the part of ChallengeU. For example, there is a dedicated team that does a lot of human intervention to solicit students to provide the elements necessary for their registration that are missing.

    To increase speed, it was necessary to replace the basic manual checks, so that:

    • No file was forgotten;
    • Eliminate bad manipulations.

    In this context, it became imperative to develop working mechanisms to automate several team tasks such as:

    • Calls to make,
    • SMS messages to be sent
    • Email reminders to be written.

    As a result, the ChallengeU team no longer needs to manually note follow-up tasks in the diary. Every day, the work to be done is already defined by the automated mechanisms!

    Challenge #3

    Greatly improve visibility of registration process issues

    With over 30,000 school files to process each year, the ChallengeU team needs to master the metrics of its enrolment process in order to improve:

    • At what stage(s) do students leave their enrollment?
    • Why do they do this?
    • Do long lead times discourage students at certain stages?

    ChallengeU wants to give as many students as possible the chance to successfully return to school.

    Indeed, the team behind ChallengeU is committed to eliminating irritants as far as possible, so that students can experience an online learning mode that could potentially reconcile them with an often difficult school experience.

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    CHALLENGEU'S PERFORMANCE FIGURES

    40%

    increase in the completion rate of the registration form

    40 000

    leads automatically pre-qualified each year

    60%

    increase in electronic signatures

    a comment about auxilio
    a deep expertise

    Etienne Giguere-Allard

    By working with Auxilio, you'll be amazed at the creative, transformative solutions they bring to your organization. The Auxilio team has robust in-inbound marketing expertise and a strong grasp of adapting business models in the era of customization.

    Etienne Giguere-Allard
    ChallengeU, Marketing Director

    Guidance from Auxilio experts
    A trusted partner to ease the transition from in-house CRM to HubSpot CRM

    Considerations before selecting a HubSpot expert

    It became clear that ChallengeU needed the help of an outside firm with HubSpot expertise. The allocation of human and financial resources had to be justified to the CFO. The CFO wanted an estimate of the additional revenues generated by HubSpot and the partner's help, compared with the costs. The faster the gains exceed the costs, the easier the decision! In fact, the partner's expertise played a key role in accelerating the creation and realization of ChallengeU's vision using the HubSpot CRM tool.

    Subsequently, an internal RevOps team has been set up. This team will act as a bridge between ChallengeU's needs and HubSpot's firm of experts. ChallengeU has identified internal individuals who will play the role of:

    • Project managers,
    • Functional managers: marketing, customer support, etc.

    Why choose Auxilio as a HubSpot Partner?

    Auxilio has undeniable cutting-edge expertise with HubSpot's CRM platform and ecosystem.

    For example, the Auxilio team perfectly masters the power of HubSpot functionalities such as the CMS, CTAs, workflows, tasks, and so on.
    What's more, Auxilio knows how to integrate solutions perfectly, both between HubSpot functionalities and third-party tools, such as :

    • Sakari for SMS,
    • PandaDoc for PDFs with electronic signature,
    • AirCall for calls.
    It was clear that Auxilio was no novice!

    Working with Auxilio also means relying on a small team of experts who don't subcontract work. This would be detrimental to smooth continuity since subcontractors don't have the same grasp of ChallengeU's business context as Auxilio does. For ChallengeU, this was clearly a "must", and it was really reassuring to be able to rely on such a partner.

    How does Auxilio help ChallengeU every day?

    Auxilio supports the ChallengeU team on a weekly basis as it implements its CRM vision.

    In such a support project, it's sometimes difficult to project oneself and measure concretely where ChallengeU will be in the medium to long term. With Auxilio, no worries. Their approach, which consists of mapping the 3Ps (processes, people, platforms), enabled us to draw up a RevOps plan that gave us an at-a-glance understanding of ChallengeU's current and desired situation. All that remains is to monitor the progress of the project against this plan, and ensure the accountability of all stakeholders.

    a comment about Auxilio
    Key support from hubspot experts

    Auxilio supported us in the extremely complex project of migrating from an in-house developed CRM to the HubSpot platform. In the process, they also supported us in abandoning our Wordpress website, as well as unifying many third-party tools. Thanks to the quality of Auxilio's service, we paid off a few years of technical debt in just a few months.
    Joël Chartier
    ChallengeU, Head of Technology

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