Italy Made Easy specializes in teaching English speakers to learn, practice and master the Italian language. We jumped on a call with Manu, founder of Italy Made Easy, to learn how using Gruveo has enabled Italy Made Easy to expand its service offerings to deliver lessons to their students.
Can you tell us about your business?
Italy Made Easy is a language learning platform to help anyone learn Italian. We provide digital courses at all levels and our mission is to help anyone interested in the language to learn, improve it and master it. What we realized was missing from the digital courses was the human interaction aspect, which is why a year ago, we came up with the idea of offering our students a video chat service provided by Gruveo, in which our students are able to connect easily with native Italian speakers to converse in Italian.
What kind of interactions do you use Gruveo for?
We have integrated Gruveo with the TeamBooking plugin where a Gruveo room link is generated and added to the confirmation email that the students receive for their bookings. At the scheduled time, students and teachers can jump on a call and start speaking Italian immediately. Gruveo is amazing for us so far because there hasn’t been any problems for our students, even on the iPad.
We also provide an unlimited video chat service through our website, via a messenger widget (CometChat), which allows members to chat with each other and with our native Italian speakers. However, there is a waiting line for students using this service and we realize that not everyone wants to wait for their turn to speak or simply wishes to speak for longer (our unlimited chat service has a limit of 10 minutes per chat).
When we identified this problem, we decided to offer our students the option to book a long session with us with Gruveo. We integrated Gruveo with the TeamBooking WordPress plugin, which is quite similar to Calendly. Each time our students book a session with us, they will get an email with Gruveo link generated and have a call. This is especially great for us because we know it is an easy-to-use technology, even for our older customers.
"Our students can jump on a call with Gruveo immediately and start their video sessions with us.” - Manu, Founder of Italy Made Easy
How did you learn about Gruveo?
I cannot remember exactly but I think I was looking for an alternative to appear.in, for personal use!
How long have you been using the tool?
We have been using Gruveo for about a year now.
There are mainstream apps for video conferencing like Hangouts, Skype, FaceTime.What prompted you to look for an alternative?
Although TeamBooking integrates with Google Hangouts, we did not use it because it requires our students to login with an account and we needed a simple video solution. We also used to use appear.in for interviews but when it came to offer a premium service to our customers we opted for Gruveo. Besides providing a video chat service for our students, we also use Gruveo for 1:1 video calls with the team.
What kind of impact has Gruveo had on your business?
Gruveo enables us to offer a service that would we wouldn’t otherwise be able to offer. Not only does it meet our students’ requirements, this has helped improved our bottom line and grow our business.
On a scale of 1 to 10, how would you recommend Gruveo to other businesses in you industry?
Gruveo deserves a solid 9+, since it provides a very solid platform for easy to use video chatting. We realize it wasn’t created for our specific scenario, so it is missing some features that would improve our offering (for example a website widget for logged in users to quickly see when our team is online - similar to Facebook Messenger - and initiate their text or video chats).
Having said that, for anyone looking for a solid platform to deliver video chats, Gruveo is the one! Everything we need for our business in terms of video conferencing is available on Gruveo.
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