School photography CRM solutions are at the heart of Advancedlife’s digital transformation. As an Australian family-owned photography and print company headquartered in Brookvale, NSW, Advancedlife specialises in school photography for over 1,250 primary and high schools nationwide, serving more than 650,000 students annually with services like class photos, yearbooks, sports team images, and secure online ordering.
The Challenge
Fragmented, non-scalable homegrown systems and a limited Zendesk footprint.
To achieve their goals of stabilising the business and expanding into new markets, the team recognised they first had to overhaul an infrastructure that had become a bottleneck. Their existing Zendesk environment was restricted to the parent team, leaving the rest of the organisation to rely on homegrown systems that were increasingly difficult to scale. This fragmentation was compounded by a lack of telephony integration, which created deep operational silos and left leadership with poor data and limited insights. It became clear that to move forward, they needed to break down these barriers and consolidate their disjointed tools into a single, unified school photography CRM solution. You can explore more of our Salesforce consulting services to see how we help businesses tackle similar silos.
The Solution
A full Salesforce Service Cloud implementation integrated with RingCentral telephony and a complete data migration.
To bridge these gaps, the organisation implemented Salesforce Service Cloud as their single source of truth, centralising accounts, contacts, and case management into a unified platform. To solve the telephony disconnect, a robust RingCentral solution was deployed for 75 users, utilising Service Cloud Voice and Open CTI to create a high-performance call centre environment. This setup featured a state-based IVR and specialised queues for the Parent, School, Sales, and Reception teams via RingCX.
By enabling the Omni-channel Console, supervisors gained real-time visibility through call transcriptions and automated summaries, while agents benefited from automated call logging and wrap-up workflows. To ensure no history was lost, a comprehensive Zendesk data migration was executed, transferring everything from internal conversations to ticket data alongside the seeding of critical school contact information. Finally, the solution was rounded out with custom automations, email templates, and surveys, transforming the service department into a streamlined, data-driven operation.
The Result
A streamlined, data-driven environment with automated logging and 360-degree customer visibility.
The final transition to a unified Salesforce CRM has fundamentally shifted how the Parent, School, and Sales teams interact with their customers. By integrating RingCentral telephony directly into the workflow, the organisation successfully dissolved previous silos, providing agents with real-time queue visibility through the Omni-channel console and RingCX.
The impact on efficiency was immediate: inbound screen pops now surface critical customer data the moment a call begins, while automatic activity logging to Voice Call and Task records eliminates manual data entry. Furthermore, with the introduction of automated call summaries and transcriptions, agents are better equipped with high-quality information, leading to significantly improved data accuracy and deeper business insights through their new school photography CRM.
