School of Rock Educates More of Tomorrow’s Musicians with DocuSign and NetSuite

As the world’s largest and most trusted multi-location music school, School of Rock calls itself  “the most revolutionary music education school in the world.” Since 1998, musicians of all ages, skill levels and aspirations have been enrolling in the organization’s classes—and now can attend these classes online or at one of the company’s 260 global locations. With its passionate, dedicated staff and consistently vibrant atmosphere, the organization makes it fun and rewarding for individuals to hone their musical talents, start a band, or become the best performer possible. As a result, School of Rock has grown to more than 30,000 students around the world.

But School of Rock’s expansion also introduced new challenges. From student and employee compliance forms to franchise agreements, the company was processing hundreds of documents each month. The company needed a way to streamline the signing, management and compliance of its forms across all of its locations—and one that could be managed centrally. Maintaining an on-site IT presence at every facility wasn’t feasible given the large number of locations.

School of Rock selected DocuSign eSignature to digitize its system of agreement and integrated it with NetSuite CRM to replace the company’s dependence on paper with automated processes. This transformation helped School of Rock minimize risk, increase visibility into document compliance, improve the customer experience and ultimately establish a scalable operational foundation to support rapid growth—all within a seamless School of Rock branded experience.

Transforming School of Rock’s E-commerce Platform 

By integrating DocuSign eSignature and PowerForms with the company’s existing NetSuite CRM and ERP systems, School of Rock created a new, customer-facing e-commerce platform for its website. No matter their location, customers can make purchases and complete all paperwork digitally on the platform. And with DocuSign’s robust APIs and guidance from the DocuSign professional services and support team, the integration process was easy and took only 10 days to complete. 

In the platform, every customer-facing form—such as consent agreements for the company’s day camp or overnight programs—is digitized and appears on the website as a School of Rock-branded DocuSign PowerForm. Each is integrated with the company’s NetSuite CRM system so fields are auto-populated with customers’ information to make filling them out even easier. Customers can then sign with DocuSign eSignature, which automatically sends forms back to the company’s NetSuite CRM to be filed and saved. 

“The DocuSign platform is so flexible that we didn’t need to change systems or business processes, making it easy to build DocuSign into our existing workflow with very little development effort,” explained Trent. 

And because School of Rock was able to maintain much of its existing infrastructure, the company’s customer and brand experience stayed the same. This was especially important to the company’s franchisees, given the strength of its brand: “Franchisees are very happy with the way we’ve integrated DocuSign and NetSuite, preserving the School of Rock brand experience,” said Trent. “Our franchise partners affiliate themselves with us, in part, because they want to benefit from our brand, and DocuSign helps us offer the best possible experience. We specifically wanted to avoid having our customers receive emails from a third party electronic signature application, or be presented with confusing emails or web pages that took them away from our brand specific online experience.”

All customer-facing DocuSign forms appear with the original School of Rock branding, and following any purchase, the automated e-commerce platform sends users a School of Rock-branded email containing their confirmation receipt and links to the company’s website. 

An E-Commerce Platform That’s Efficient and Compliant 

Prior to DocuSign, staff members had to manage large volumes of paperwork submitted by different stakeholders, including customers, franchises and employees. Now, however, via School of Rock’s integrated e-commerce platform, staff members no longer have to collect and organize all of these forms. Once completed, any paperwork is automatically sent to and saved in the platform. This not only improved the staff’s efficiency when dealing with paperwork, but helped the company mitigate risk as well: Staff can now remotely examine any document and review its audit trail at any time, from any location.

“We take compliance very seriously,” said Trent. “DocuSign helps us mitigate risk because we can audit our compliance at the individual school, region or company level.”

School of Rock Continues to Transform with DocuSign 

Since the launch of its integrated e-commerce platform, School of Rock has explored other opportunities to take advantage of the DocuSign and NetSuite integration, like the signing of franchise agreements—a process that used to require pen-and-paper. School of Rock has since digitized some onboarding processes as well, and uses DocuSign PowerForms for HR paperwork like the School of Rock Code of Conduct. As with the company’s customer-facing use of PowerForms, these documents are pre-populated with employee information and can be signed and sent back to the NetSuite CRM system via eSignature.