EdTech

How APCA Chef Online rebuilt its Zoho stack to drive enrollment and monthly revenue

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Company overview

APCA Chef Online is a professional pastry and culinary skills platform offering online learning programs globally. 

Industry

EdTech

Headquartered

Malaysia

Context

 APCA Chef Online teaches people to cook professionally — and it does so at scale, with a diverse catalog of online culinary programs attracting students from around the world. But the operational infrastructure behind that ambition wasn't keeping pace.

Student enrollment was underperforming. Revenue from online programs hadn't reached its potential. The Zoho CRM that was supposed to be driving lead management and marketing was full of manual processes, incomplete data, and no meaningful segmentation. Automated emails went out without personalization. Leads arrived without owners. Alumni and lost prospects sat in the database with no re-engagement plan. The platform had the courses — it just didn't have the system to fill them. RevX came in to rebuild the Zoho environment from the ground up and connect every lever that would drive enrollment and revenue. 

The challenge

APCA Chef Online's challenges spanned the full length of the enrollment funnel — from how leads entered the system to how they were nurtured, qualified, and converted. Each gap reinforced the others, creating a cycle that kept enrollment and revenue below where they should have been.



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A Zoho CRM held together by manual effort
The existing CRM setup depended heavily on manual data entry — updating lifecycle stages, recording disqualification reasons, assigning lead owners. These weren't edge cases; they were routine operations that happened with every new contact. The manual burden created inconsistencies, slowed response times, and consumed capacity that should have been going toward actual enrollment activity. A CRM that requires constant human upkeep to stay accurate isn't working — it's being worked around. 
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No segmentation and no personalization in email marketing

APCA's automated emails were going out without meaningful personalization or audience segmentation. Students, alumni, closed lost leads, and renewal prospects were being treated as a single undifferentiated list — receiving the same communications regardless of where they sat in their relationship with the school. In an EdTech environment where the path from interest to enrollment involves multiple touchpoints and different motivations for different audiences, that one-size approach was leaving significant engagement potential on the table.

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Leads arriving without owners, with no structured conversion path
New leads were entering the system without being assigned to the right sales or admissions owner, and without a structured process for moving them toward enrollment. The absence of lead assignment logic and a clear qualification framework meant that genuinely interested prospects could sit unengaged for too long — or be handled inconsistently — while the team had no reliable way to distinguish high-intent leads from low-quality ones. 

Our solution

RevX approached this as a full Zoho ecosystem build — cleaning and structuring the CRM data, connecting the tools around it, and building the segmentation and email marketing infrastructure that would turn the platform into a genuine enrollment engine. 

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CRM maintenance, data upload, and strategic segmentation
RevX conducted a thorough assessment and optimization of the Zoho CRM — rectifying the manual data entry issues, ensuring lifecycle stages and disqualification reasons were accurately maintained, and orchestrating the upload of user data across distinct categories: closed lost leads, alumni, renewal leads, current students, and leads from the new Learning Management System. That categorization wasn't administrative tidying — it was the foundation for every targeted campaign that followed, enabling communications that reflected each group's specific relationship with APCA. 
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Email marketing, website, domain, and lead inflow infrastructure
RevX connected APCA's new website and email domain, improving online visibility and providing a more professional foundation for outbound communications. PopUp forms were configured to capture leads directly into Zoho CRM, creating a frictionless inflow path from the website. Zoho Campaigns was then used to design and execute targeted email marketing campaigns — leveraging the newly structured segmentation to deliver personalized communications to each audience group, from prospective students to alumni to webinar registrants. 
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Chatbot, LMS sync, and reporting infrastructure
RevX set up a Zoho Chatbot to streamline direct interactions with inbound leads, enabling SDRs to engage and convert prospects more efficiently. The new Learning Management System — FreshLearn — was synchronized with Zoho CRM, connecting enrollment and course delivery into a single operational flow. Comprehensive reporting dashboards were implemented to give the APCA team the visibility they needed to make informed, data-driven decisions across marketing strategy, enrollment performance, and revenue optimization. 

The impact

The integrated rebuild of APCA Chef Online's Zoho environment produced results across every dimension of the enrollment funnel — revenue, lead volume, audience reach, and re-engagement of contacts that had previously been left dormant. 

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A substantial increase in monthly revenue through targeted campaigns

The targeted email marketing campaigns delivered through Zoho Campaigns translated directly into a meaningful increase in monthly revenue. With the right message reaching the right audience at the right time — students, prospects, and re-engagement targets each treated distinctly — the campaigns converted interest into enrollment at a rate the previous undifferentiated approach had never achieved. The CRM rebuild made the campaigns possible; the campaigns made the revenue move. 

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More leads registering, more alumni and lost prospects re-enrolled

Strategic segmentation and personalized email communications significantly elevated the number of leads registering for APCA's online programs. Equally notable was the re-engagement story: targeted campaigns aimed at closed lost leads and alumni successfully brought a meaningful portion of those contacts back into the enrollment funnel. Contacts that had been sitting inactive in the database became active prospects again — a direct return on the investment in getting the CRM data right. 

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A connected, visible operation with the data to grow on

The combination of chatbot-assisted lead conversion, LMS synchronization, popup form inflow, and reporting dashboards gave APCA Chef Online something it had lacked entirely: operational visibility and a connected system that worked as a whole. Daily website traffic increased, webinar audiences grew through targeted email channels, and the reporting infrastructure gave leadership the insight to make decisions based on what was actually happening — not what they assumed was happening. The platform was finally built to match the ambition behind it. 

Stats

The new PPC setup helped the company achieve top ranks in high intent keywords and re-target existing customers, yielding a notable increase in revenue. 
2x
revenue within the first 6 months

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