Internship Placement CRM and website

Website and workflow management web app for a startup

Asia Internship Programs CRM web app

Asia Internship Program is a young startup that has been offering since several years internship applicants placement all over South-East Asia. They mainly target students from western countries to offer them packages with multiple options, including of course an internship in some of the best international companies, but also assistance, accommodation, among other services.

After dealing for years with a Wordpress website and handling applicants with a combination of emails and Excel files that had become complicated to manage, they decided to have a complete  redesign of their website and were also looking for an alternative to Wordpress to build an online tool that could help their team of over 30 people to fully manage their interactions with internship applicants in a single web application.

Team
1 Project Manager
1 Web Designer
2 Front-End Developers
2 Symfony Developers
Methodology
Waterfall & Agile
Tools
Glip
Adove XD
Teamwork
Technologies
HTML5, CSS, Symfony, Vue.JS
Timeframe
4 months

A new design for a better user experience

The redesign of AIP was a wise and necessary choice. After having rebranded their corporate identity, AIP reworked the whole user experience with a new sitemap to be much more user centered. A slick user interface design with custom icons and branded component allowed AIP to make this User Experience stand out.

As we all know, a pixel perfect work is satisfying and important for everyone – from a detailed designed interface, the frontend integration had to be thorough.
This integration required more than just static content implementation. Through the application form and many other components, a big work on interactions was necessary in order not only to make the platform visually appealing but also for to ease as much as possible the user journey.

AIP3

Choosing the best technology for the backend

We directly understood that WordPress, which was their initial request as the Content Management System, was not fit as their objective was to build a rich web application to manage their website’s content  but also to handle their customers’ requests through a CRM tool. Forcing the features required into the WordPress mould was technically possible, but not a wise choice, and the few advantages we would have got from the WordPress admin panel would have been outbalanced by its not advanced database structure.

The obvious technical answer was to create a custom built web application from scratch. We used the Symfony PHP framework, which would give us a full control of how the web app should look and behave, and would allow us to model the database to the exact needs of the project. Symfony is one of our frameworks of choice for such projects, it’s robust and polyvalent, it allows to implement complex business logic into a well-structured code structure and provide a personalized digital experience, directly elaborated from the customers needs.

AIP4

An admin panel for each user type

They actually needed 2 different user panels, one where their customers could follow up with their application and another for their staff to handle applications, manage interviews, manage users, follow up application requests through a custom developed kanban view pipeline etc.

The customer panel needed, on top of being properly branded, a simple and clear user experience (UX) and interface (UI) in order for the applicant to easily follow up with his application’s status. This panel also allows the applicant to schedule an interview with AIP, be aware of any news from AIP, be able to make a payment through several methods such as credit card or crypto currencies, upload requested documents and manage them (application forms, identification documents copy etc.).

The admin panel on the other hand, needed a bit less of a UI branded work although required a lot more details in its structure.
Indeed, the admins (depending on their role) are able to manage every bit of the platform, from the actual site content management to the sign off of an application request management. Therefore, a well thought structure through main menus, sub-menus and components was very important to keep the best management efficiency in AIP team.
Another important point was the main admin dashboard view. This view displays key numbers that are the source of AIP KPIs so it required to be well structure throughout the design with a proper choice and usage of graphs.

AIP2

Integrating Payment Gateways

Applicants for an internship are required to pay during the application process a deposit and finally the balance payment, they have different payment methods possible and can directly pay through their applicant panel. We implemented Stripe, one of the main payment gateways which allows to receive payments with all the major debit and credit cards (VISA, Mastercard etc), we also integrated the Coinbase Commerce payment method which gives the possibility to pay with Bitcoin, Ethereum or Litecoin among other cryptocurrencies. Of course all these payments are recorded in the database, as well as bank transfers requests.

payments

Summary

The web app we developed became a cornerstone of AIP’s business model with many of their  customer relationship processes, their team didn’t take long to get used to this new system which soon helped them automate tasks and better answer their customer’s requests. 

We can definitely say we had a great experience working with Daniele and his team, and we of course continue to support them with all their needs on the web app, with already several additional features planned in the development pipeline

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