When education support services supplier GEMS Education needed to effectively manage its varied IT systems it turned to Finesse.
GEMS Education, one of the world’s oldest and largest K-12 private education providers, has been managing its marketing, admission and leavers’ process on Salesforce since 2017. Currently Finesse is engaged with GEMS Education in supporting lead generation, student enrolment, student management, standard opportunity management and marketing campaigns on the Salesforce CRM platform.
Finesse’s team is also handling the following products:
- Pardot used for the automation of marketing campaigns
- Informatica used to sync data between GEMS’ in-house products and Salesforce
- HexaBPM used for business process management
Intelligent CIO asked Krishnan Gopi, CDO (Group Chief Disruption Officer) of GEMS Education, further questions about how Finesse has supported GEMS Education.
Tell us about GEMS Education existing enrolment and marketing processes.
Our student enrolment system is on the Salesforce CRM platform which is integrated with the existing fee management system. There are a few other applications which are used along with the CRM application, while the marketing team uses Pardot for marketing automation.
What were the main challenges?
It’s important to have the right mix of resources, automated and optimised processes and intelligent tools to maintain a streamlined service delivery. We wanted to adopt a ‘bifocal’ approach: achieving the near-term imperative of keeping the lights on, and getting things moving quickly, while setting in place the longer-term conditions of success.
What can you tell us about Finesse Managed Support?
Finesse has a pool of technically skilled resources. GEMS Education is utilising the technical know-how of Finesse for continuous development and maintenance of salesforce processes and applications. The support provided by Finesse’s consultants has helped us to streamline the operational turnaround time for changes and has improved the end user customer satisfaction levels. It is important to have aligned technology partners to support our requirements and Finesse has been able to provide us with the right level of support to help us enhance our service offerings.
How have user and application needs been changing?
The rate of innovation and the adoption of technologies has increased exponentially in the last few years. Customer behaviour is changing, led by technology innovation, mobility, Big Data and social networks – disrupting customer expectations, creating new business opportunities, and enabling new competitors. In this highly disruptive technology landscape, one of the keys to any successful operation is the ability to come up with innovative ideas to keep operations, products and services afresh.
How do you keep internal users updated with the change in features and applications?
Post any system changes/ enhancement, we invest in continuous training for our internal users about new features and guide them on improved user interface. End user training is imbibed as an important practice in any system changes. The presence of skilled technology partners helps us meet our training objectives in an effective manner.
What is contained in your future roadmap?
GEMS Education is committed to keeping pace with revolutionary changes in the education industry by ensuring innovation is at the core of everything we do.
We envision a ‘GEMS Future State’ with:
- End to end platforms for enhanced journeys across all stakeholders
- Enhanced teaching and learning offerings (virtual school, future curricula among others)
- Building data hubs that capture required data to enable faster decision-making, greater competitive intelligence and data monetisation
- Building our own software intellectual property for competitive advantage
- Developing integrated and fully-automated processes using advanced technologies such as Blockchain, robotic process automation and the Internet of Things (IOT)
- Connected Campuses to enable seamless interaction between humans (students, teachers, parents, staff and partners) and machines (devices, systems and sensors)
