Berlitz Corporation is a language education and leadership training company which is based in Princeton, New Jersey. The company was founded in 1878 by Maximilian Berlitz in Providence, Rhode Island in the United States. The company is owned by “Berlitz Holdings”, a company established through a 100% investment by ILSC Holdings LP, with more than 547 company-owned and franchised locations in more than 70 countries. The corporation also has multiple outsourced locally owned franchises across Europe, Asia and South America.

The Berlitz franchise has a fast paced business process. There are new walk-in customers, telephone inquiries and more on a day to day basis. The company had to manage the sales, service and marketing processes using the following channels.

1. Emails
2. Website support
3. Social media
4. Walk-in customers
5. Telephone support
6. Fax (albeit rarely)

These communication channels had a few common queries that involved managing customer payments, course progress, general business inquiries, certificates among others. Being managed using un-synced data nodes, different channels had different data to relay to the customers. Furthermore, the business ran multiple nationwide ad campaigns. Having the staff brought up to speed to entertain customer inquiries regarding the ever increasing number of offers, subscriptions and campaigns left loopholes where a customer won’t get the information they required, or sometimes, even being relayed the wrong information.

Exerge IT, and its sister concern, Whinstone was tasked to streamline these omnichannel communications while managing the company’s day to day operations across multiple regions.

Exerge took an interesting perspective to the problem and addressed it by dividing the requirements in a few modules built on a microservice architecture to develop one solution that addressed the above issues and more.

Using the in-house custom CRM solution, the Kordeva CRM, a customized CRM was built for Berlitz. The system was integrated with the company website, its social media channels, official emails and call center (more to follow on this later). This was complimented with specific localized user roles for the front desk, call center, social media and marketing teams.

The marketing team at Berlitz could run social media campaigns to generate leads that were fed directly to the CRM. Thereon custom workflows are automatically initiated to push the leads down the pipeline. This included starting drip email campaigns, feeding the data to outbound call center operations teams and more. If a lead walked in to any of the Berlitz offices, the front desk team now has a complete visibility on how the customer heard about Berlitz and which programs are they interested in.

Complains, concerns and recommendations from existing customers were managed within the CRM. If a used has an inquiry about their payments, their ticket would be logged within the CRM and the accounting department will be notified

This omnichannel experience in the sales and marketing customer journey is now streamlined and follows multiple customizable pipelines. This helps eliminate any cracks in the system and results in a better optimization of the company processes

While the CRM covers all other communication channels, we intended to bring the call center teams on-board the CRM. This would record customer communications for quality control as well as for legal documentation.

Using Asterisks server, we migrated the company’s telephone lines on the CRM system. Now, not only can the call center teams manage inbound and outbound calls, transfers between different user roles becomes seamless. Agents know who is calling and is notified of their issues or tickets that were previously generated before the call starts.

Imagine providing the personalized experience of “Hi John, how can I help you today?” instead of asking the customer for their name and other details everytime they call.

Since all communication channels are now brought to one software solution that not only assists its users, but also drives the processes they need to follow. This makes run-time reporting for the company a reality. Details about all payments, average call times, and conversion rates for different campaigns are all visible within the one-window administration and management dashboards.

The system manages and shows team KPI’s to individual team members and their managers thus motivating teams in general and pushing the underperformers to identify exactly what they need to work on to improve their statistics.

The business process management at Berlitz was given a new life. Not only the solution made it easier for managers to manage their teams and KPI’s, the software brought ease of access and division of tasks between individual team members. Customers, on the other hand, got a seamless experience through any channel they used.

Since the software managed customer signups, linking it to the Berlitz website made it easier for customers to make payments online using the payment method of their preference or view their results or report cards.

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