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From Excel Sheets to Exponential Growth: TK Tours & Edvisor's Digital Revolution

TK Tours, a Mexico-based educational travel and student recruitment agency, has undergone a remarkable transformation. They've replaced manual processes with digital tools to enhance efficiency. Access to the Edvisor platform has not only improved quotation quality but also streamlined their internal workflow. Delve into their story to explore how these digital innovations have reshaped their business.

Meet TK Tours

TK Tours is a Mexico-based educational travel and student recruitment agency that connects students with camps, sports clinics, youth tours, language programs, and full-time school enrolment up to and through post-graduate degrees in Canada, the US, the UK, Ireland, and Germany.

The agency was founded on the principle that education and exposure to other cultures is the best way to ensure an international student’s successful future. 

TK Tours strives to offer students the best educational opportunities tailored to their individual interests while delivering top-notch personalized service. They take pride in nurturing strong customer relationships through client-focused follow-ups, fostering brand loyalty.

TK Tours provides clients with excellent travel options at affordable prices. That’s why they rely on cutting-edge technologies to help optimize costs associated with international education and travel.

How inefficient communication affected the sales process

Luz Maria Leon Campos—owner and co-director of TK Tours—handles the administrative and planning side of the business. Her focus is to work directly with partners like international schools, suppliers, insurance companies, and others to build packages and present them to interested students. 

Over a decade ago, TK Tours started to move from a manual process toward a more digital system of operations to streamline the sales process. 

Due to the lack of access to tools, Luz manually collected information from each vendor individually, entered it one by one into preconfigured Excel sheets, calculated totals, and created a quote for the student with the information. 

“Everything was quoted by hand with pre-configured Excel sheets that took a long time to populate." 

Besides the repetitive, and time-consuming manual process of collecting information and creating proposals, TK Tours lacked access to a central platform that helped the agency communicate with schools and register students. 

Each student registration involved a series of back-and-forth emails between the agency and the school. Additional questions from the students or partners caused the process to take even longer. Emails easily got buried in the school’s inbox and risked going unanswered for extended periods. 

A lot of the time, after clients received the quotes, they had more questions about how the final prices had been calculated. The lack of access to digital tools made it difficult to share these details, and Campos needed to create itemized reports for customers herself.

TK Tours searched for access to a digital quoting tool, or centralized communication platform, to provide clients with the information they were looking for in a timely manner. Sales opportunities were at risk or lost if the process took too long, which often remained out of TK Tour’s control.

Building lasting relationships

Access to Edvisor’s tools changed things and helped TK Tours streamline internal processes and reach more customers.

"It's a more complete platform helping us show students the available schools, and enabling direct and fast communication with partners." 

Leveraging all of the features available on Edvisor, such as customer relationship management (CRM), lead generation tracking tools, partner communication tools, and quote generation ensured that TK Tours was able to efficiently manage student recruitment operations while minimizing wasted effort on repetitive tasks. 

“Edvisor helps us quote faster, and our response to customers is more efficient and accurate. Nowadays, schools send promotions all the time and we can find them directly on the platform." 

Using Edvisor freed up more time for TK Tours to focus on other important educational outreach initiatives. 

"We seek to maintain a lasting relationship with our customers through after-sales service and efficient follow-up to foster loyalty and ensure satisfaction." 

Due to a streamlined workflow for student recruitment sales activities, TK Tours can focus on growing the business and increasing its number of satisfied clients.

“For the company, Edvisor has been a very useful tool to quote, search, contact, and enrol students in programs.”

Contributing to Edvisor's growth

In the early Edvisor stages, TK Tours played a significant role in fostering the growth of Edvisor's network. TK Tours shared information about the educational institutions it partnered with, which subsequently joined the Edvisor platform.

This collaborative effort not only benefited TK Tours but also expanded the options available to other agencies. By sharing their knowledge and connections, TK Tours helped enrich the Edvisor ecosystem, making it even more comprehensive and diverse.

This partnership reflects TK Tours' commitment to providing students with the best educational opportunities while utilizing Edvisor's platform to streamline their operations. It also exemplifies how collaboration within the international education industry can lead to mutually beneficial outcomes.