A company that provides advice on career guidance and choice of educational institutions. Their partners are colleges, universities, online platforms. They pay for the listed applicants.

1. Lead qualification stage – During phone calls agents were spending a lot of time on manual searches in search web-platforms for multiple schools. They had to fill the same search parameters to five websites to find appropriate schools and programs, then fill personal data before applying to the selected programs.
   
2. Subscription stage – The lead data needs to be sent to the educational institution. Thus the lead becomes an applicant. In order not to enter the same information into 2 different systems, it was necessary to connect the CRM and the Search Aggregator.
3. Analytics stage – Without integration with CRM, it is difficult to analyze the success of the selection of programs and the effectiveness of the manager’s work.

Optimization of the call center workflow was the main client’s need.  Since the project did not have a formulated technical specification, the Discovery Phase was previously used. That allowed us to understand the problem and find the right approaches to solve the customer’s problem.

To reduce the processing time of the lead, the decision was made to create a School Search Platforms Aggregator. This platform could be a single point of search and application. Our engineers investigated the integration capabilities of the external platforms. It appeared that all of them provided REST API which could be used to automate most of the user actions.

The next step was an investigation of each API and the possibility to unify search criteria. We have also designed a unified web form for a search. The unified submit form was designed for the submission of schools and programs of interest to all external platforms with a single click.

School Search Platforms Aggregator was also integrated to call-center CRM to allow automatically:

• track agent activity during a phone call.
• track quality of the search results received from external platforms.
• build additional reports to measure leads conversion and agent’s effectiveness.

The first version of the system was released 4 months after the start of development. During the pilot testing, our developers were able to fix integration issues, including interacting with the support teams of external platforms. The system went into production 2 months after the pilot launch.

Core features

• Making components for generating reports
• Developing a Search Aggregator, that combines specified feeds
• Implementing a dashboard with which it is convenient to track the results of the call center
• Helped to visualize work, control work-in-progress
• Frontend and Backend development of the project
• Working in an Agile environment

Results

• Reduced reporting time by 60%
• Speeded mailing and calling through CRM System
• Optimized searching and selection process of education programs by call center managers

Duration

7 months – development
1 year – on-going technical support

Team

5 Full-stack Software Engineers
1 Quality Assurance Engineer
1 Project Manager

Stack

C#, .NET Core, Java Script, Angular, Entity framework, MS SQL, API, Git