Premier Chess Academy scales globally with Bigin: From spreadsheets to seamless CRM

The company

Engineering batch-mates Deepak and Renjith took distinctly different paths after graduation; Deepak ventured into a marketing career after an MBA from IIM Bangalore while Renjith explored the tech side of business with large Silicon valley companies like Salesforce, Yahoo, and Meta. Despite their different career trajectories, they remained close friends. In 2020, amid the COVID pandemic, they saw an opportunity that sparked their interest: to build and scale a chess coaching startup.

It wasn't just an opportunity, but a shared mission to ignite creativity and imagination in children through chess that inspired Deepak and Renjith. Thus, they registered Premier Chess Academy in the United States and decided to commit fully to building the business. By 2021, the business had grown enough for them to leave their main jobs—Renjith from a plush job at Facebook and Deepak fro his own startup—and build Premier Chess Academy full time.

Premier Chess Academy is one of the largest live coaching chess academies in the world that focuses on children. It has truly lived up to its vision of igniting kids' passion for chess. Of course, the journey had just begun for Premier Chess Academy, who still had a long way to go.

Together, they've trained over 15,000 students all around the world. With their passion for both entrepreneurship and children's development, they've grown Premier Chess Academy into a thriving business that continues to have a positive impact on the lives of both students and coaches.

The challenge

From the very beginning, the company operated fully remotely. Having worked in large organizations like Salesforce and Facebook, and with over 30 years of combined experience between the two, Deepak and Renjith knew they needed a solid CRM to scale their business. Initially, they relied on spreadsheets and WhatsApp, but as the team expanded, they realized the risks: The data wasn't secure, and even a small change to the sheet could ruin all their hard work.

Their priority became finding a CRM that was simple and easy to use. One of the digital marketers they worked with early on recommended Bigin, so the co-founders decided to give the free trial a shot.

The solution

The sales team at Premier Chess Academy uses Bigin from start to finish, generating leads through various channels like referrals, email campaigns, Facebook Ads, Google marketing, and organic efforts. All these leads are funneled into a Google Sheet, which is then manually uploaded into Bigin after validating certain fields. Since the lead volume is manageable, this manual process works for them.

Once assigned, the sales team reaches out to potential customers. They use colored tags to segment leads via the channels from which they're sourced. Leads sign up for a free trial, which triggers a workflow in Bigin that assigns the lead to a coach. The entire workflow, from trial to conversion, is easily visualized on Bigin's Kanban board.

Coaches are then assigned tasks via workflows to conduct trial classes, for which they add notes and close tasks. Roles and permissions in Bigin ensure coaches only see relevant information about students. After each trial, the sales team follows up with each student to discuss group and individual class options to work towards closing the deal.

Students can reach out to the academy through WhatsApp, and these chats are managed by the sales and support teams on a round-robin basis.

Automations are a key part of their workflow. The team has set up automated lead qualification emails such that when a lead is closed, they automatically send a welcome email, whereas when a lead is lost, a thank-you email gets triggered.

Managing the business from Canada, Deepak relies on Bigin's mobile application to stay on top of everything. He uses dashboards to monitor revenue, trial accounts, conversion rates between trial and starter/advanced classes, daily incoming leads, and much more.

Benefits and ROI

• With Bigin as their primary tool for customer operations, the company has successfully scaled to support a five-times larger team and manage 10 times the lead volume without manual errors. The ability to maintain detailed customer notes and categorize them ensures seamless handovers between team members and results in a significantly improved customer experience. Previously, when relying on Google Sheets, manual errors were common, and there was no early warning system to mitigate their impact.
• By leveraging Bigin's integrations with Zoho Campaigns, the company can now send newsletters and campaign mailers to a large audience in a fully automated manner to achieve industry-standard open rates and CTRs with minimal effort.
• Bigin's WhatsApp integration has been beneficial for the support team, leading to a 90% drop in customer complaints. It has also eliminated issues like manual errors, delayed responses, and missing tickets.
• With Bigin's automation capabilities, the company has streamlined outreach to cold leads, increased sales efforts, and driven a 5% improvement in conversions every month.
• Bigin has helped streamline operations so that the teams at Premier Chess Academy are able to maintain customer data confidentiality across the organization during the entire onboarding process, which is impossible when collaborating via tools like Google Sheets.

Looking forward

The team at Premier Chess Academy is planning to start using Bigin's built-in telephony feature to streamline communications for their business. Additionally, they aim to make more robust use of the email integration and enhance how they manage and track their email interactions with leads and customers.