The announcement of Hong Kong’s Distance Business Programme (D-Biz) demonstrates the country’s effort and determination to ensuring that Covid-19’s effect on businesses and consumers will be stemmed as quickly as possible.
Having rolled it out, the D-Biz program is a strong indication that the economy is rapidly changing and shifting towards an environment that is largely cloud-based, giving both business owners and consumers the ability to maintain a safe distance from other people while continuing to go about their daily lives. We built EngagePlus with the goal of allowing learning centers and schools to focus more on the children and less on the administrative tasks, thus allowing parents to focus more on their children’s education rather than the tedious transactional and logistical elements of enrolling in an education program. While we, along with virtually everyone else, hadn’t anticipated a global pandemic, EngagePlus’s core functions allowed us to help businesses to swiftly move their programs online with virtually no noticeable difference to the quality and speed with which they could react to the changing marketplace. Every education provider that was originally a brick-and-mortar learning center and/or school was now an online business, whether they had intended to be or not. At its heart, EngagePlus is an Education Operations Management System (EOMS) that is specifically tailored to small and medium schools and learning centers. It was designed to help these businesses reduce the time spent on administrative tasks while improving their output, accuracy, efficiency, and quality. But since it was built from the ground up without compromising on any capability, our goal of fundamentally changing the way that businesses operate in nearly all other aspects quickly became a reality. Schools using EngagePlus were able to be accessed online through our proprietary and user-friendly web portal, they took a giant step forward with the global release of our integrated EngagePlusApp, available through Apple’s App Store and the Google Play Store.
EngagePlusApp, which centralizes parents’ education information and puts it in the palm of their hands, anytime and anywhere, means that parents can take care of every element of their child’s education without leaving their house. It is a digital customer experience enhancement that has – even to our surprise, admittedly – never been offered in Asia to the broad market. EngagePlusApp allows parents and schools to do, almost literally, everything that they would normally do over the phone or in person. Schools can now do their customer services and engagement, even while social distancing. Administrators can send messages and manage their school’s classes without going into the center, while the parents can know exactly what has been done and what is upcoming without leaving their homes or waiting for business hours to check. It’s all broadcasted live (real-time updates). Another important function is how finances are handled by the school and the customers. Through the app or online portal, customers are now able to sign up for and pay for classes without any admin intervention. The way that it integrates with EngagePlus EOMS means that classes can be booked to capacity without ever exceeding capacity. With the EngagePlusApp acting as a mobile point of sales (POS), it can handle digital payments and secure the customer a guaranteed spot in a class while avoiding a waiting list or, again, waiting for business hours to get a confirmation from an administrator. At the back end of the platform, schools’ accounting books will always be up-to-date, and they can have the confidence that the money that they expect to receive will land in their account swiftly, securely, and accurately. With everything having now been moved online, including booking, payments, and accounting, EngagePlus is not just an EOMS but is also a cloud-based financial management system. While the system does help schools to organize their finances, EngagePlus deliberately stops at their accounting software to allow them the flexibility to continue using whatever their accountants or financial controllers would prefer to use for their auditing and banking purposes. For their own security and peace of mind, we purposely do not have any visibility of their banking details or other auxiliary transactions that are not directly linked to the education side of their business. The D-Biz Programme in Hong Kong is focused on ensuring that, in the short term, businesses can move towards an ideally normal functioning while factoring out the element of regular and close human contact. The long-term assumption, it appears to be implied, is that conducting business at a safe distance from one another is going to be the new normal. While we developed EngagePlus to be the best EOMS in the education sector, whether for brick-and-mortar centers or learnings centers that were semi or fully online, the tides are quickly changing towards all business having to limit distance as much as possible. Learning centers and schools that are using EngagePlus – along with the customers that are using the EngagePlusApp - are now realizing how useful of a platform it is for moving with the tides. You can find out more or request a free demo of EngagePlus at www.engageplus.io.