When conducting business abroad, your passport alone is not enough. Along with travel or business preparations, you’ll need to bring an extra set of skills and expertise to meetings outside your home country. Some familiarity with the language, culture, and customs of your international partners is key to establishing a harmonious relationship from the very beginning - before you get down to business. Effective cross-cultural communication is more important than ever, particularly for traveling professional in business, nonprofit, or government sectors.

Bridging the culture gap

Netherlands-based Elycio Talen believes that at the heart of every successful business meeting is good communication. By providing integrated language and culture courses, they aim to equip professionals with the skills and confidence they need to communicate effectively when abroad. From Arabic to Swedish, the company provides customized training programs for individuals and organizations, both in-person and online.

The company wanted to upgrade their systems in order to modernize the user experience and improve workflow for their program administrators. They had been using a legacy Microsoft Access application for enrollments and administration, however it no longer served their needs.

Delivering training on Heroku

Elycio Talen partnered with development house Gen25 to help them design and build a program administration system that would provide a sophisticated user experience for their students and an easy-to-use administration tool for their staff.

Our client was frustrated by the siloed nature of their legacy systems. They wanted a single, integrated system, and the Salesforce/Heroku combination fit their needs perfectly. Manuel Lopez, Managing Partner, Gen25

Gen25 designed an architecture that put Salesforce at the center, integrated with two primary customer-facing apps built with Python and Django, and running on the Heroku platform. The first customer app provides a streamlined, yet data-intensive enrollment experience that includes an intake process and placement exam to assess skill level. The second app is the student’s main online interface throughout their program — providing homework, teacher or program communications, and other learning support.

The development team used Force.com to create a CRM system to help them manage student, company, and program data and communications. Using Heroku Connect, data flows seamlessly between the web apps and backend. The team chose Heroku Postgres as their database and Heroku Add-on Postmark for transactional emails, and provisioned two performance dynos at launch.

Heroku Connect is the glue that unites our customer-facing apps with our administration backend. Data synchronizes back and forth seamlessly. Ron Amsterdam, Owner & Managing Director, Elycio Talen

After going live with the new system just a couple of months ago, Elycio Talen has seen an increase in enrollments and ongoing users, as well as fewer customer service calls. Global professionals can now add cross-cultural communication to their business toolkit.

The program administration process from intake to planning to student communications used to be a hassle. Now it’s more seamless and integrated. Ron Amsterdam, Owner & Managing Director, Elycio Talen

App experience

New students enroll in one of Elycio Talen’s training courses through an intake process that includes a placement exam. The test results are reviewed by the company’s program staff to assess the current skill level of the student. Based on this, a custom training program is compiled and sent to the student. Once the student is fully onboarded, they then have access to their personal dashboard, the "Classbook" app, where they can receive homework assignments and communicate with their teacher or the program administrators.