The client
La Jolie Ronde is an award-winning French and Spanish language learning provider for children, delivered through lunchtime classes and after-school clubs. They operate 1,600 language clubs with over 500 tutors and a current membership base of around 20,500 children. Like many education providers, La Jolie Ronde’s workload increases with the start of each term, where the return to school brings high demands supporting licensees, tutors, schools and pupils.
The opportunity
Although La Jolie Ronde already operated a separate website, Language Resources, to provide services to their licensees, this failed to meet expectations due to a dated visual interface, limited product information and limited functionality for both customers and administrators. Instead of reducing calls to the admin and support teams, the poorly performing website increased them, adding to costs and preventing growth.
Cursor had previously worked with La Jolie Ronde to deliver a media player app and website, so we were excited when they approached us to explore how we might improve the user experience for licensees and reduce administration through automation and integration.
E-commerce website
The project began with designing and developing an improved e-commerce website to take orders from both parents and existing licensees. We choose Craft Commerce as the ideal platform for the system as this would allow sharing of accounts between the store and media player system.
Public users would see a list of essential language training products. Further features and products for licensees (self-employed language trainers), tutors (employed by licensees to provide teaching) and schools unlocked after login.
The customisation continued with specific products that are only available to licensees, tutors and schools with different price lists (in GBP and Euros) for licensees and schools. Discount codes and promotions were also included with offers for fixed products, categories of products, individual customer account, licensee type etc.
Streamlining payment process
In addition to purchasing products online, we introduced a new way for licensees to pay royalty subscriptions online. Based on either a cost per pupil or gross income basis, bringing these service payments online was a key feature in reducing demands on the La Jolie Ronde admin team.
Another improvement was the introduction of a bespoke telephone ordering system. This system was introduced to improve the efficiency of approximately 10,000 lower value orders taken over the phone and reduce the requirement for a separate order flow. Previous orders, delivery addresses, and other order information were now available to telephone operators, making the process easier and more efficient.
Stock and accounts integration
We worked with La Jolie Ronde to introduce improvements to stock control, accounts and invoicing. We developed a new API based integration with Xero accounts to query available stock and update the availability on both the website and telephone order systems. Orders from across the three possible channels (e-commerce website, royalty/service payments and telephone ordering) are passed through to Xero along with appropriate calculations for VAT, discounts and exchange rates.
Another essential feature was managing bundled products; the bulk purchase of learning resources, some of which were VAT exempt. Automating paperwork for cross border purchasing from the UK into the Irish Republic significantly reduced the administration load.