5 Must-Have Tools in Education Tech Stack for 2024

With 2023 opening, the education industry is set to witness more advancements. Digital transformations are up the sleeve. However, there is limited knowledge of tech-based tools for handling such modernization.

An efficient education tech stack during such times is a priority. A tech stack that removes roadblocks to success.

But before making the apt choice, a vivid knowledge of the targets that the education tech stack will be going to serve is also essential. In this blog post, we will discuss everything you need to know about the subject and help you choose the best tech stack for your requirements.

Although participating in technology-oriented growth, the education industry is still a less explored sector in terms of tech research. Be it the functions of a sales team or the support, accounting, or product management, the education market has been facing several growth challenges.

Some of these are as follows:

• loss of tracks of leads
• tedious manual call sorting and saving notes
• heavy paperwork leading to errors in accounting
• missing of deadlines
• interdepartmental confusion

Cloud systems have been proving to be the best technological platforms for massive data organization and storage. When working on the cloud, you can handle multiple applications with ease. But these, in turn, need to be properly stacked for better functioning.

The choice of your education tech stack or technology stack should serve your purpose of business. A correct tech stack improves customer experience and strengthens your relationship with your customers.

Why Is Technology Important in Education?

The education sector is finally shifting away from traditional in-person classroom training thanks to the COVID-19 pandemic. It has had to adapt to new learning modes and find better and more efficient ways to impart education.

As the needs of the workforce become more demanding, the education sector has to keep up with the times as well, and this is where adopting technology becomes key.

CRM – Manage Your Leads

Are you getting burdened with time-consuming work? Are your sales reps losing track of your leads? Do any strategies for upscaling your revenues…?

Then reading the following will surely drop you to solutions.

We all are well aware of CRM or Customer Relationship Management, a software that rightly handles your leads and customers. Building a positive experience with your customers in any industry lets you ride the curves of growth.

But before opting for any CRM for education needs, evaluate your objectives.

Talk with managers of every department who would be using the CRM. List their pain points and then search for the best CRM for your education tech stack. This way, you will get more leads, improve prospecting results, and make more sales.

Also, you must look for features like ease of integration with other tools or solutions.

Let us consider a simple use-case of CRM for education:

• In the marketing pipeline, the team puts notes and tags in the contact’s/lead’s profile. They can identify prospects that can be contacted further and forward these MQLs(Marketing qualified leads) to the Sales team. The sales team can use these notes for more conversion & to establish a better relationship with the lead.
• As for Sales, the team would be able to keep a count of the exact number of leads and customers in specific pipelines. Also, specific notes, tagging, and pipelines would assist the sales team in upselling and cross-selling. Questions like “how many deals get closed/won in a month” or “how much time is spent to bring the prospect to the negotiation stage” are all easily dealt with in the sales pipeline. The SQL (Sales qualified leads) are the prospective customers that the sales team now focuses upon for the next stage of conversion into a customer.

However, looking for these key features in your CRM will assist you in growing the bottom line (the backbone of your education tech stack)

1. Contact Management

You should be able to quickly view all the information and notes about the contacts/leads, along with all previous conversations. Contacts get saved based on the query status, which helps you manage them well.

Your CRM should distinguish different lead segments, for instance, whether the lead is interested in an online crash course or a happy customer wants to go for a complementary course.

The client wants to opt for a crèche course, and the customer asks for a course on increasing vocabulary. It should give you a complete note of your prospective leads plus customers.

2. Tracking of Conversations

Indulging in conversations with your leads is the best way to know their interests and goals. Keeping track of conversations lets you distinguish different prospects in marketing or sales.

You should stay updated with the latest status of the conversation. This will help you design potential strategies for customer generation as well as customer retention.

Put efforts behind leads that can be brought to the dealing stage.

3. Sales Pipeline – Lead management

Keep track of leads in the existing sales pipeline. Understand what efforts the sales team requires to convert into a final customer. Prospects can be prioritized and reached out based on factors like their buying capacity or their last subscription and followed accordingly.

It’s your seamless communication with them that generates maximum conversions.

4. Automation and Workflows

Your goal is to increase sales. You can do this only if you manage a good relationship with customers and, more importantly, retain it.

For instance, when a prospect fills in a query form regarding an online tutorial course in the education industry, his or her contact information enters your CRM. Thus begins his journey with you.

Soon after the first conversation with your prospect, you must manually send a follow-up text or an email. The automation feature saves you from this.

Again, considering your sales team, they can automate several features like follow-up emails, lead dialing, appointment scheduling, new feature updating, and many more.

Establishing such a workflow helps retain your potential customers. It also aids strategies like upselling. Conversion rates hike as well.

Now let us look into particular CRMs.

a. Pipedrive

It is the best for SMBs aiming for sales growth without any hustle around setup and management. After using Pipedrive in the foundation year of our business, I am confident that the Pipedrive team prioritizes the need for growing business.

Pipedrive is set to build and organize sales leads, track the subsequent processes plus follow up on the most critical deals. Users can adjust their dynamic workflows to align with their company’s processes and objectives.

b. Hubspot

It has almost every feature your sales, marketing, and support team will need. Setting up Hubspot is a matter of a few minutes and is free to set up.

But there’s an additional cost if you are looking for advanced add-ons like AI-based lead scoring. You can build a complete ecosystem around marketing and sales using Hubspot CMS for creating inbound leads and Hubspot CRM for conversions.

c. Salesforce

This tool is a complete suite for an organization with its full set of sales, marketing, and support features. Most enterprise users go for Salesforce because of the extended customization apart from the standard offerings.

Salesforce is a better investment if you want to use its advanced features best. Lead scoring is one of the most famous features available with Salesforce.

Helpdesk & Shared Inbox – Handle Customer Queries Efficiently

When a business expands, cluttered email boxes become a headache. Even with a shared login, the team members are unaware of who handles what. There is no particular ownership of a task.

As a result, it so happens that a customer receives multiple email responses or no email at all.

On the other hand, considering a Helpdesk, the issues escalated by a customer remain limited to the Support team’s response.

However, it hastily deals with the support-related queries but often leaves behind a bulk( related to Sales, marketing, and finance) unattended.

Shared inbox is popular among all business sizes- small, medium, and enterprise-level organizations. Additionally, if you are looking to solve queries using tickets and not on an individual contact basis, you can go to a helpdesk.

Choosing a Helpdesk and Shared inbox with the following features will provide you with a productive education tech stack.

1. Promoting Transparency

Transparency among teammates is an important factor. Who is dealing with which query, case, or issue? You should have a note of the best-dealt queries and also the ones where you failed.

This ranks an individual’s performance. The team members feel equally responsible for every bit of assistance rolled in and out of the helpdesk.

Feedback on activities can be shared among all, and members can learn from them.

2. Email Management

If you are getting overloaded with emails, this feature should help you filter emails according to priority. Email management should allow you to communicate or comment internally on any issue or query by using private notes.

You remain aware of completed tasks as well as due dates.

3. Seamless Integrations

Helpdesk and shared inbox can be integrated with several features of automation that reduce effort time and increase productivity. Let us consider the following use cases of integrations in the education industry:

• Your support team can easily handle queries regarding various courses when integrating the helpdesk with calls. When a  query is generated, the support team can call the customer instantly. Tickets will be resolved faster.
• Integrating it with CRM or the analytics platform will help you manage your customer profile and notify the sales team of any upselling or cross-selling opportunity.
  Integration with google docs will help you to send documents with just a click. Files with details of the choice of courses, syllabuses, ongoing recruitments, and much more can be made immediately available.

4. Automation

Your shared inbox solution should be able to reduce the workload of your agents with its native automation, as your support agents have to carry out multiple mundane tasks which are not productive.

For instance, a shared inbox should have the option to send previously saved replies with a click. Or rules for eliminating repetitive tasks such as picking the spam email and deleting it without any human effort.

After all, lowering response times is a priority.

Query tickets that bear similar tags can be clubbed together and answered with automated ticket replies. This reduces ticket queues.

5. Query Load Reduction

Solving customer queries quickly and efficiently is a top priority for any business. Whichever Helpdesk you are going for should serve this purpose.

For instance, Helpdesks is a repository where you can create articles on common queries. When a lead visits your website and enters a common query, the helpdesk will pop up the related article to the lead.

This manages the query load without any human interference.

The above features have been clubbed into some efficient software as given below.

a. Helpwise

Helpwise is a Shared Inbox tool for your team email accounts like help@, sales@, and jobs@. It ensures zero confusion between team members and speeds up customer service delivery with communication and collaboration.

I love the Pro plan of Helpwise, which is best for a growing team as it enables you to add any team members.

Features around Helpwise ensure better email collaboration – assign emails, chat with team members, and email collaboration with other team members. Moreover, integration with other business tools and ease in setting up workflows are pretty strong with Helpwise.

b. Freshdesk

Freshdesk is an apt Helpdesk solution for businesses looking for a combination of automated workflows, user-friendliness, and affordability.

It also smoothens the setup and customer support management across different channels (email, chat, and others) by eliminating many of the manual support processes you handle on a day-to-day basis.

Freshdesk also offers a gamification system called Freshdesk Arcade. The aim is to raise agents’ productivity and make their work interesting.

c. Zendesk

Businesses that receive a large volume of their support requests via social media or web chat should consider Zendesk apart from the normal support query.

Zendesk has robust social media support features, and its chat features allow sharing of product guides and image files with customers.

One of the unique features of Zendesk is automated ticket sharing. This feature enables ticket sharing between multiple Zendesk accounts.

It also offers deep chat integration with Google Translate, making it a great option for teams spread across the globe and those that need to collaborate with large documents.

Communication Software – Connect Seamlessly with Customers

What do you opt for when asking even the simplest of queries? You make a call…or drop a text.

Well, that is what gets resolved faster.

Communication is the easiest way to achieve customer retention for the company. You win a customer by solving his or her query or approaching him over a sales call.

And when you choose software that sets you free of all the pain of making entries of calls, notes of the customers, and tagging leads, your instant solutions to their queries become the building blocks of your success.

Communication software is a vital requirement in the education tech stack.

1.  Platform and Location-Independent – Remote Enabled

It enables you to make calls from your phone or laptop from any place you want. You can make calls with a click from anywhere, be it your office or your home. You never lose a chance to communicate.

All you need is an internet connection and a phone or desktop app. The communication software shall easily integrate with an efficient CRM that automatically updates all your customer details.

2. Call Monitoring and Analytics

You should be able to monitor live calls in real-time.

If your team member handles a call, and you listen to it live without interference, this shall ensure that the quality standards are met and customers are well dealt with.

3. Quick Purchase of Numbers

This feature lets you purchase numbers of your choice instantly. You appear more local to your customers.

Hence, it helps you manage your foreign clients with ease.

If all calls get directed to your web app, desktop app, or phone, you communicate even when you are on the move.

4. Automation Around SMS

You can use your SMS-enabled number to send bulk SMSs and easily communicate with all your contacts, clients, and teammates. All you need is an internet connection and the application.

Automation of this feature sends SMS replies automatically to clients by intelligently picking up keywords in their queries.

5. Enhanced Calling Elements

Good communication software provides you with auto-dialing features for seamless communication.  With the feature of IVR, calls get automatically directed to the suitable recipient based on their interactions with the caller.

A click-to-call option lets your prospect/customer easily contact you to sort out queries.

Software that has all the above features compiled in one relieves you of all tedious work, as follows:

JustCall

JustCall is a cloud telephony solution that makes effortless communication possible for businesses of all types. It’s platform-independent, and you can quickly make and receive calls from your desktop or mobile phone.

Moreover, your favorite CRM and Helpdesk will save all the calls, SMS details, and recordings.

At the moment, JustCall integrates with 30+ CRMs, Helpdesks, Sales enablement, and marketing automation tools. You can get numbers for 60+ countries, start making and receiving calls, and set up in 30 seconds. It provides you with three types of numbers, toll-free, mobile, and local.

Unique Features of JustCall

One of the critical features of Just Call is its ability to integrate with various communication channels, including phone, email, and messaging apps. Another unique feature of Just Call is its advanced call analytics capabilities.

The platform offers real-time call tracking, recording, and reporting, which can provide businesses with valuable insights into their communication processes.

Benefits of using JustCall

With Justcall, users can easily manage all their communication channels from a single platform, eliminating the need for multiple tools and applications.

This can help teams work more efficiently and effectively.

Additionally, Just Call is easy to set up and use, saving businesses time and resources.

The Competitive Advantage JustCall offers

With such an extensive feature list, Just Call gives users a competitive advantage in the marketplace. It enables organizations to communicate, collaborate, and make data-driven decisions accurately and efficiently.

As a result, there is increased productivity and profitability.

Overall, Just Call will change how your organization communicates and works.

Accounting Software – Handle the Money Bag

To achieve the set business goals, you, as an owner, must have the right accounting software that helps you assess whether or not your business strategies are working at a pace to generate profits.

You can thus relate your cash flow and your sales forecast. You know your financial position.

When you are managing the financial desk, you handle the money bag of your firm. You must balance increasing revenues, rolling out payrolls, and keeping selective checks on expenses.

How about choosing software with features that helps you efficiently handle all of this with no paperwork filings and spreadsheets? This simplifies your financial workflow and makes your education tech stack economically suitable for your business.

1. Invoicing

Cracked a deal? Generating an invoice with this feature should be as easy as possible. This feature allows you to design invoices according to your business with the availability of multiple templates.

You can also view the status and ensure whether your client has viewed it or not.

2. Bill and Expense Management

You are clear about where you have spent more and where you need to improve investments with key analytical features like charts. You can add tags to payments to divide them into sections.

Multiple bills can also be paid if features allow you to club together different account payments and complete it all in one go.

3. Informative Dashboard

The dashboards help you keep up with the financial health of your business. They depict your company’s performance by using graphs and charts.

You know about your overdue. It also comes with features of easy customization of reports. You should know which month or period has brought in fruitful income.

By looking into various sales statistics, you can analyze your business performance.

4. Document Management

Users can manage and track customer sales and the flow of cash and monitor processes like which customer is enjoying promotions and schemes. You can keep a note of customers availing discounts.

Which course is more in demand, and which two courses clubbed are converting more leads? Now you know it all!

Now that you know which features to look for while choosing communication software for your education tech stack, we enlist some accounting software to make it easier for you.

a. FreshBooks

It offers you a complete package of account management software. With its easy-to-setup feature, FreshBooks helps you create invoices, automate payments, track and view expenses, and collaborate on projects.

However, it has limited report offerings. With all data online, your accounting is safe and seamless. You can go for FreshBooks if you are running small businesses or startups.

b. QuickBooks

The software comes with easy built-in customization features once you get started. Customers can pay directly from invoices. You can create multiple sectional reports. You can also apply individual payment reminders.

It also allows in-window report-making that can be managed with just a few clicks.

The reporting and dashboard features make it suitable for small businesses, but they come with fewer customization options.

c. Xero

For medium to large-sized businesses, Xero is a great choice. The setting up procedure is a bit complicated, but the setup wizard guides well through. It provides invoice customization by uploading templates.

You can design it using a set of templates. It generates automated invoice reminders. You can make use of recurring invoices that save you from a lot of manual data entry.

Paying bills is also a lot smoother with a countable number of steps. You can track your cash flow with accuracy.

Product Management Software

With multiple tasks and developments going hand in hand, overall management needs to be carried out, so the company collectively and timely runs towards execution.

A product manager designs a roadmap and updates his team on where they are heading to. While designing your education tech stack, the following features will help you to sort out suitable product management software.

1. Task Management

The road to a good product requires a clear roadmap.

• Set daily or weekly targets
• Assign tasks
• Use the task management feature to create multiple tasks on your board as assigned and track their status
• Keep a note of tasks taking more time or those remaining
• Set goals, priority lists, and due dates
• Create different channels with segments for personal discussions

Plan events, set reminders, and never miss deadlines.

2. Team Management

When broken down into segments, a big task becomes easy to complete. Members can segregate into teams based on tasks.

Teams work in collaboration. You communicate better and remove the need to often calling for meetings. You can tag people and ask separately, although conversing in a group.

As a result, no one lags or remains unattended. You manage the team as a whole.

3. Dynamic Dashboards for Work Visualization

This feature brings in project flexibility. You can analyze your company’s performance. Submissions or transactions made by a member can be viewed.

You perceive the amount of traffic coming in and which segments stand most visited via charts and graphs. Thus, you monitor your progress live with the real-time dashboards that help you with previous as well as ‘at moment data.

This helps you to predict future targets better based on live progress reports.

You can make calls for instant meetings to wind up queries faster. It’s the manager who knows how the team understands better.

Expressing the roadmap by choosing from a set of templates helps to discuss queries among teammates and escalate solutions faster and easier.

4. Customer Feedback

Building customers with quality service should be the prime goal. Make a query web portal available that allows the customer to drop in reviews or ideas.

Open-ended questions can be asked to the customer via a personal interview to know if the target services of the business have been met. When shared and discussed with the customer support teams, such platforms provide the best results.

5. Communication

This promotes enhanced communication between different segments. You can write reviews for a task or project or comment on the team as a whole. You can upload files, emojis, and videos as well.

Respond to conversations using several features.

You can communicate with clients as well. However, they shall have limited access to it. Only what you choose to make visible.

Considering the above features, here is some software you can count on

a. Asana

Asana is a very well-known product management tool. I prefer its usage for product managers at small startups plus enterprise-level companies.

It comprises more of a road mapping software that vividly depicts work status over a set period of time. Its robust Kanban support gives product management more flexibility.

It allows the collaborative work of teams. You can turn conversations into actionable tasks- that’s what is needed.

It increases your scheduling efficiency with multiple charts and metrics. In many ways, Asana acts as an intelligent task manager.

b. Monday.com

This is for teams big and small across various industries. With its powerful productivity features of time tracking, automated notifications, customizable workflows, timeline views, and integrations, your team achieves results better and faster.

Monday.com uses a unique Board concept that provides even the minute advancements or slow-downs of individual projects and tasks. This gives a complete view of your company’s performance when in need.

c. Basecamp

Basecamp is for entrepreneurs, freelancers, small businesses, and groups inside large organizations. This is more of an open-ended tool that serves multiple purposes beyond project management.

It makes communication across the organization(both at a team and individual level) much easier.

Teams collaborate better to yield more productive results without chaos. You can easily track projects and escalate issues to various departments for instant action.

Easy file-sharing options make it much more user-friendly.

Choosing the Right Technology Stack

Choosing the best tech stack is vital for success when building an education tech platform. A technology stack comprises various programming languages, frameworks, and tools to build and run a software application.

Here are a few tips to help you select the right technology stack for your education platform, which can significantly impact its efficiency, security, and scalability.

Identify Your Customers’ Needs

Before selecting a technology stack, it is crucial to identify your customers’ needs to ensure that your platform delivers the features and functionalities required to meet those needs.

Doing so will enable you to select the most suitable technology to create a customized, user-friendly platform.

Security and Compliance Requirements

Security and compliance are essential considerations when building an education tech platform. A suitable technology stack can help you meet regulatory requirements and ensure the safety of your users’ data.

Choosing the right technology components that offer data encryption, secure connections, and user authentication is crucial to protect your platform against cyber attacks.

Evaluating Technology Partners

Technology partners are essential to building an efficient tech stack. Choosing the right technology partners can significantly impact your tech stack’s efficiency and scalability.

Therefore, evaluating your technology partners based on their experience, reliability, and support is crucial.

Increased Customer Engagement

An efficient technology stack can enhance customer engagement and user experience. This can be achieved by selecting the right frontend technologies that offer features such as real-time updates, personalized recommendations, and easy navigation.

By creating a user-friendly and engaging platform, you can increase customer satisfaction and drive user engagement.

Increased Efficiency

Building an efficient tech stack can increase the speed and efficiency of your education platform. This can be achieved by selecting backend technologies with scalability, speed, and reliability.

Choosing scalable, reliable, and efficient backend technologies can help you manage large volumes of data, increase platform speed, and reduce downtime.

An efficient technology stack for your education platform is critical to its success. The above tips can help you create a platform that uses the best educational software and offers an exceptional user experience while being scalable, reliable, and secure.

Successful Incorporation of Cloud-Based Education Technology Tools

Here are a few examples of cloud-based education technology tools successfully incorporated into real-life scenarios.

New York City Department of Education

The New York City Department of Education (NYCDOE) implemented Azure Active Directory and Azure Resource Manager to migrate educational services to the cloud.

The move allowed the NYCDOE to provide its K-12 students and teachers with access to a wide range of cloud-based tools and services while maintaining the security and privacy of sensitive data.

The cloud-based solution also allowed for more efficient management of IT resources and reduced overall costs.

Carnegie Mellon University

Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) implemented Azure Stack to create a hybrid cloud environment allowing it to run its workloads on-premises and in the cloud.

The move permitted CMU to modernize its IT infrastructure and reduce costs while controlling sensitive data.

The university also streamlined its IT operations and provided better student, faculty, and staff services.

Classcraft – Gamifying Education

Classcraft is an educational technology platform that uses gamification to enhance the classroom experience. The platform uses Google Cloud Platform to provide a secure and scalable infrastructure to deliver personalized experiences to its users.

By leveraging Google Cloud’s data analytics and machine learning capabilities, Classcraft can provide its users with real-time feedback and insights into their performance.

The cloud-based solution also allows Classcraft to scale its platform rapidly and quickly deliver new features to its users.

Challenges in Building an Efficient Technology Stack

Building an efficient technology stack for an education platform can be daunting. Several challenges can hinder the process and impact the platform’s performance.

Here are some common challenges in building an efficient technology stack and how to overcome them.

Legacy Systems and Data Privacy Concerns

One of the significant challenges in building an efficient technology stack is dealing with legacy systems and data privacy concerns. Many education platforms still rely on legacy systems that need to be more challenging to integrate with modern technologies.

Integrating legacy systems into a current tech stack can be time-consuming and expensive.

Resistance to Change

Another significant challenge in building an efficient technology stack is resistance to change. Many stakeholders, including teachers, students, and administrators, may resist new technology tools for education.

This makes adopting and implementing new tech stacks challenging.

Resistance to change can hinder the adoption of new technologies, resulting in delays and increased costs.

Emerging Technologies in The Education Industry

The education industry continually evolves, and emerging technologies are crucial in shaping its future. Let us look at two emerging technology tools for education that are transforming the education industry.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) & Machine learning

AI and Machine learning are improving the education industry by automating processes and providing personalized learning experiences. With AI-powered tools, educators can gain insights into student performance and provide customized feedback.

Machine learning algorithms can also help identify patterns in student behavior, which can be used to improve teaching strategies and develop targeted interventions.

Cloud Computing

Cloud computing is another emerging technology that is transforming the education industry. Cloud-based solutions allow educators to access resources and collaborate from anywhere.

Cloud-based tools also allow for more efficient management of IT resources and reduce overall costs. In addition, the scalability of cloud computing allows for rapid expansion and the ability to adapt quickly to changing needs.

Wind-Up on The Education Tech Stack

The vision of digital education cannot be marveled without a strong technological arsenal. The education industry has scores of opportunities, but adequate technology infrastructure is required to make their best use.

The points discussed in this article have been gathered, keeping in mind the basic tools that the best tech stack must comprise to serve the education industry.

Being an active part of the education industry, you can make your customers discover the potential of digital learning only when you have properly stacked tools that work together in harmony.

With a clear set of objectives, this blog post will assist you in increasing the growth and productivity of your team. With the correct education tech stack of your choice, there you go!

Let us know if you are still in doubt about your tech stack by clicking on the intercom button on the bottom right corner of the screen.