Named one of the hot five franchises by CNN Money in 2013, School of Rock offers music classes for students and adults at franchise locations throughout the United States, and expanding globally. Looking to streamline the process of collecting and signing various business documents, School of Rock integrated DocuSign with NetSuite CRM+ and successfully mitigated risk, increased efficiency and established a scalable operational foundation to support rapid growth, all within a seamless branded experience.
Business Challenge
Since starting as one school in Philadelphia in 1998, School of Rock has grown to more than 100 locations, expanding internationally and expecting to add 30 to 40 new franchises in 2013. The company’s strong brand has supported its popularity, so the company wanted to protect the integrity of the brand through its growth. That brand experience included great service for customers as well as tight adherence to compliance of forms and minimizing liability. Between students, employees and franchise agreements, the company was processing hundreds of documents each month and was looking for a way to minimize the paper shuffle, maintain a consistent and efficient process across locations around the world, and gain improved visibility into documents and compliance. DocuSign Solution
School of Rock discovered DocuSign electronic signatures and immediately saw the opportunity to ease the pain of managing large volumes of paperwork submitted by different stakeholders, including customers, franchisees, and employees. DocuSign’s robust enterprise platform complements the existing network of other cloud systems used by School of Rock and helps ensure a consistent brand experience for customers because it can seamlessly integrate into existing processes and cloud products, such as NetSuite. Thanks to the robust API’s, thorough documentation and excellent professional services and support team, School of Rock launched a new customer e-commerce workflow with PowerForms and DocuSign Connect, integrated with NetSuite CRM+ and ERP in just 10 days. Results
“DocuSign is the only way we could have added electronic signature to our existing e-commerce process in a way that was seamless to the customer, and branded School of Rock,” said Evan Trent, senior vice president of corporate development at School of Rock. “The DocuSign platform is so extensible that we didn’t need to change systems or business processes, making it was easy to build DocuSign into our existing workflow with very little development effort.”
After a new customer completes online purchase via NetSuite’s e-commerce platform, the customer receives a School of Rock-branded email with a link to the School of Rock website. The webpage is a DocuSign PowerForm, which is a form within a company’s website that appears with the company’s brand, and fields in the form are auto-populated with CRM data gathered during the e-commerce transaction.
There are different sets of forms for each product, such as day camp or overnight programs, and the web page with the PowerForm automatically provides the correct set of forms, with the correct business entity—the franchisee. The PowerForm for new School of Rock customers auto-populates with customer information from NetSuite, and the signed documents are immediately sent back to NetSuite, removing the need for human intervention by School of Rock staff. Now the signup process can take place fully online. Signed documents are stored in the customer’s record in NetSuite.
“Franchisees are very happy with the way we’ve integrated DocuSign and NetSuite, preserving the School of Rock brand experience,” said Trent. “Our franchise partners affiliate themselves with us, in part, because they want to benefit from our brand, and DocuSign helps us offer the best possible experience. We specifically wanted to avoid having our customers receive emails from a third party electronic signature application, or be presented with confusing emails or web pages that took them away from our brand specific online experience.”
“We explored many options, and DocuSign was the only platform that could offer legal, secure electronic signatures for an online process, with deep NetSuite integration—while offering us the control over brand and user experience we sought,” said Trent.
Following the fast and easy launch of customer facing e-commerce with DocuSign, School of Rock looked to other opportunities to take advantage of integration between DocuSign and NetSuite. Uses include signing of franchise agreements—the company no longer uses pen and paper for those agreements. School of Rock has also moved all employee paperwork on to DocuSign, and has developed a robust onboarding process facilitated in large part by the use of PowerForms for the signing of HR paperwork such as the School of Rock Code of Conduct. As with the customer facing use of PowerForms, information collected from the onboarding process is used to pre-populate PowerForms, and signed documents are sent back to NetSuite and stored on employee records. As Trent put it: “We take compliance very seriously. DocuSign helps us mitigate risk because we can audit our compliance at the individual school, region or company level.”
