CASE STUDY
How EdSmart Achieved 30% Higher Retention with Usage Analytics Dashboard
AT A GLANCE
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Client: EdSmart
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Industry: Education Technology
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Location: Global Platform (Australia & International)
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Solution: Platform Adoption & Usage Analytics
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Key Impact: 50% faster reporting, 30% retention improvement, data-driven product development
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Background
EdSmart provides a comprehensive school communication and workflow platform serving hundreds of educational institutions across Australia and internationally. The platform facilitates critical school operations including permission slips, event management, parent communications, and administrative workflows.
As a SaaS provider in the competitive education technology market, EdSmart recognized that understanding and optimizing platform adoption was essential for customer retention, product development, and sustainable growth.
The Challenge
Despite collecting extensive activity data, EdSmart leadership lacked clear visibility into school-level adoption patterns, engagement metrics, and usage trends. The company couldn't effectively answer critical business questions that would drive retention and growth strategies.
Fundamental gaps existed in understanding how many schools were actively using various EdSmart features versus maintaining dormant subscriptions. The inability to identify at-risk schools before they churned meant reactive rather than proactive customer success interventions. Without insight into which communication categories drove the most engagement, product development decisions relied on assumptions rather than usage data.
Manual spreadsheet analysis made it impossible to track adoption trends effectively or support retention decisions with data-driven insights. The customer success team operated blindly, unable to prioritize outreach to schools showing early warning signs of disengagement. This reactive approach resulted in preventable customer churn and missed opportunities for expansion within existing accounts.
The Solution
GrowthBI built a comprehensive Power BI Usage Dashboard that transformed EdSmart's raw event-log data into actionable adoption analytics. The solution integrated automated ETL pipelines and SQL-based modeling to produce insights at both school and master-site levels.
The Active/Inactive School Tracking system segmented usage into 30/60/90-day activity windows by site type, providing early warning indicators of declining engagement. Top and Bottom School Analysis highlighted the most engaged institutions like Bacchus Marsh Grammar and Barker College while flagging least active schools for targeted intervention.
Key capabilities included:
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Category Breakdown Analytics: Communication types grouped into Co-Curricular, Excursion/Incursion, Permissions & Consent, Academic, Parent Communication, and Wellbeing
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Churn Risk Dashboard: Automated flagging of schools inactive for 90+ days while maintaining active subscriptions
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Slip Title Drilldown: Granular visibility linking communication content to school and subscription details
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Usage Evolution Tracking: Temporal analysis showing how platform adoption evolved across master and individual sites
Results
The Usage Dashboard revolutionized EdSmart's approach to customer success and product development. Automated Power BI reporting replaced manual extracts, accelerating insight delivery by 50% while improving accuracy. Early churn detection enabled proactive customer success outreach, improving retention rates by 30%.
Product development became truly data-driven, with usage patterns clearly showing that Sports Events and Consent Forms were the highest-engagement categories, guiding feature enhancement priorities.
Key performance outcomes included:
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50% faster reporting and insight delivery
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30% improvement in customer retention rates
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Data-driven product roadmap based on actual usage patterns
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Proactive customer success with 90-day inactivity alerts
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Strategic account management focusing on engagement leaders
The platform revealed that schools with diverse feature usage across multiple categories showed significantly higher retention rates than those using single features. This insight transformed customer onboarding to emphasize multi-feature adoption from day one.
Looking Forward
EdSmart continues to enhance their analytics platform with predictive churn modeling and feature adoption correlation analysis. The company is developing automated engagement scoring that will trigger personalized customer success interventions based on usage patterns and historical churn indicators.
Want to see the technical details behind this implementation? Read our technical deep-dive to learn how we built usage analytics with automated ETL pipelines and SQL modeling.