Manual mayhem: Navigating inefficiencies in lead and customer management
As one of Singapore’s largest early childhood education and services providers, NTUC First Campus (NFC) has over 180 centers, serving over 29,000 students, with plans to increase its enrollment by 10,000 in 2025.
With 5,000 employees, NFC needed to streamline workflows to improve its customer service, strengthen trust among parents who chose NFC as their children’s school of choice, while also boosting brand awareness and credibility to drive future intakes.
Previously, NFC's enrollment team faced difficulties managing leads from various channels, including social media and ads, due to the absence of a good working CRM. This made it challenging to keep track of parents' enquiries and respond in time.
“When I joined NFC three years ago, the organization didn't have an established Martech infrastructure and was finding it difficult to keep pace with their needs,” shares Eleanor Tan, the Chief Customer Officer at NTUC First Campus. “This led to inefficiencies in managing leads and integrating data, impacting their ability to engage with prospective parents optimally.”
Connecting the dots on a single, integrated platform
After evaluating various solutions, NFC chose HubSpot CRM to overhaul its entire marketing and sales operational workflow.
“With HubSpot, we could integrate marketing, sales, and support all in one platform. Getting the buy-in from employees was also quite seamless because of its intuitive interface," says Jeannie Ho, Technological Project Manager.
The migration to HubSpot came in phases, starting with the marketing side of the business. “We started with replacing the previous marketing system, followed by integration with our other systems. In total, we took about a year to complete the full migration,” adds Ms Ho.
Engaging customers effectively
The combination of the Marketing Hub, Sales Hub, Service Hub, and Operations Hub has enhanced the way NFC leverages its data and, consequently, the way it operates marketing campaigns and nurtures leads. In the past, many leads turned cold and were eventually forgotten. This was also the cause of the high level of dissatisfaction among its customers and potential customers.
Now, HubSpot’s automation enables NFC to send automated thank-you emails and effectively track more than 50,000 annual leads, ensuring that all customers are engaged and happy while keeping processes running smoothly. The CRM consolidated NFC’s data into a single source of truth, ensuring continuity even with staff changes.
Customizing campaigns with workflow automation
With a few hundred workflows taking place at any time, NFC now manages lead management and customer service like a well-oiled machine.
“We now have a proper process in place to track customer journey from the moment they fill out the interest form on our website” says Ms Ho, adding that having full visibility gives the team much more clarity on the user journey, as well as helps them identify any gaps in the business.
HubSpot's intuitive and user-friendly design, combined with its extensive customisation options, enables any team member to get up to speed quickly. Marketing campaigns can now be created efficiently in just a few clicks, and the robust, flexible reporting functions provide the NFC team with quick, actionable insights quickly, facilitating more targeted and effective outreach efforts.
With a double-digit percentage increase in enrollments and steady improvements in the quality management stats of enrollment advisors, NFC continues to refine its processes with HubSpot. “We’re seeing at least 5,000 hours of productivity gains from our enrollment advisors due to the automations that HubSpot enables,” says Ms Tan.
A better-equipped team made for the future
By eliminating the need to sift through leads manually, enrollment advisors experience less stress and enhanced productivity . “Now, our focus is on converting interested parents, rather than worrying about identifying the right leads, which has significantly changed our approach to work,” adds Ms Tan.
With data like income level, date of interest, and proximity readily accessible on the platform, enrollment advisors are better informed when they speak to their leads.
“The quality of conversations with parents used to be more transactional as our advisors were not always able to get the right information, making it hard to have the right conversations. However, we’ve since noticed a major improvement in the quality of discussions between our enrollment advisors and parents,” Ms Tan explained.
“With HubSpot, the marketing and sales team no longer work in silos,” says Ms Ho. “Now that everything is on the same platform, the teams can speak the same language,” Ms Ho shares, adding that beyond the productivity gains, there is also less friction between teams.
Planning ahead
Moving forward, NFC plans to improve efficiency and effectiveness further when marketing and managing customers and leads.
The organization is exploring HubSpot’s Service Hub as a solution for survey collection and support ticket management, with its ability to deliver self-service support at scale and 24/7 availability, which is a helpful method in enhancing the overall customer experience. Being able to link the Operations Hub and all other integrations that work in the background will allow NFC to be more strategic moving forward, all while keeping the customer first.
“We are eager to explore new content and AI features from HubSpot, and are very happy that new features are introduced daily. We will look more closely into these products to see how we can implement them accordingly as we improve our service levels,” Ms Tan says.
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