Customer Experience in Education: what it is and how to implement it

In the education sector, service is the basis for building a solid relationship with students and parents. However, since there is no sector that does not escape current social and technological transformations, the tendency to implement a culture of Customer Experience in education, it has been crucial to conquer and delight an increasingly specific target audience.

After all, regardless of your market, offering a good shopping experience is essential for the survival of any company. Students/guardians, like any client, want a personalized contact that meets their needs and exceeds their expectations.

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Have you ever heard of Customer Experience (CX) or customer experience? Do you know exactly what this is about? This concept has been much discussed in recent years, especially after the pandemic.

According to Global Customer Experience Trends Report 2021, Close to 76% of Brazilians Consider focusing on Customer Experience today more important than 2019, showing the clear change in consumer behavior and the hidden opportunities for educational institutions.

Today, customers are more demanding and more sophisticated and do not have time for establishments that still operate through extremely tiring and bureaucratic processes. Therefore, in this article you will understand what it is Customer Experience, what is its importance for the educational sector and tips for implementing it in your Educational Institution.

After all, what is Customer Experience?

Broadly speaking, Customer Experience or customer experience (CX), is the impression that your customers have of your brand as a whole in every aspect of the buying journey.

The purpose of this type of strategy is to provide the consumer with a more qualified and personalized experience with your company, product or service. In other words, it means being concerned about the path your customer takes from the first contact with your brand.

Have you ever wondered what effect your school has on your students and guardians?

A good CX, for example, is concerned with the cognitive, affective, sensory, and behavioral responses of its audience, as well as with the security of the use that your business makes of its data (remember that we are in a period of validity of LGPD in education).

Thus, Educational Institutions need to be prepared to be participatory and active in this relationship (direct and indirect) to delight their clients and stand out in the market.

Why focus on the customer experience at your school?

In the education sector, a well-structured CX sector allows the retention rate of its students to rise. Thus, investing in this area means making sure that the experience offered is in tune with your brand to the point of becoming memorable (whether online or offline).

According to a study by CS Academy with Cortex, conducted to show how the customer experience is perceived in Brazil, 69% of consumers said that offering a good experience is important, and of that number, 28% consider it extremely significant in the hiring process.

If, on the one hand, it has been a great challenge for Educational Institutions to achieve a high number of recruitment and retention of their students, on the other, it is necessary for organizations to have a more exclusive relationship with their clients, a relationship in which trust, partnership and satisfaction prevail.

Want a tip to further improve the way your school is viewed by your audience? Here are three:

1. Turn pain points into strengths

If the data collected by the satisfaction survey shows that your educational management and communication is failing on some points and which are reasons why families leave their school, try to find ways to transform that feedback into a positive customer experience moment.

For example, you can connect internal management communication with external management, presenting regular updates in video format on your social media channels or even through newsletters to your clients.

The approach and interaction of students, guardians, coordinators, and teachers will help to reduce misunderstandings and to satisfy them.

2. Identify opportunities that resonate with your community

Do more robust research on your customers and understand their points of attention. These data can be demographic and include family characteristics so that, with this, your institution better understands the pain of your students and so that the solution can be done more efficiently.

For example, through this data, you can reach an audience where the family is composed of a single guardian and, thus, understand their behavior and participation in the classroom. This person in charge may never appear at the meetings because he is not available... and it is precisely here that you can bring customized solutions for each specific reality.

3. Learn from your competitors

Paying attention to the competition is always a good idea, as they make up your Benchmarking and helps you understand various types of needs of your audience.

Once you realize the needs of your customers, it's easier to look for solutions that suit them.

To have a good CX sector, analyze moments of experience with your clients and compare with clients from other schools. This helps the perception of errors, bottlenecks, and improvements.

By collecting this database and making the necessary adjustments, you can ensure that there is a lasting good impression on your potential clients as they search for differentials between institutions.

7 ways to improve customer service in schools

According to the study by CS Academy and Cortex, already mentioned in this article, the main reason why customers don't do business with companies is the absence of good service.

Thus, you may have already realized that offering a good experience is fundamental to having credibility in the market and building a stronger relationship with your customer. So here are the 7 tips so you can implement a culture of Customer Experience immediately at your institution:

1. Build a strong academic community

Building an active community is hard work, but it's an essential tool for building rapprochement with your audience.

The sense of belonging makes students feel safe and secure at their school and those responsible know that they can trust their institution. To this relationship, this brings a unique sense of participating in something bigger than themselves.

If students feel comfortable in their environment, they will perform better and become more involved in the learning process. And that's exactly what you need to increase your overall satisfaction rate and improve customer retention.

2. Adopt a customer service mindset with your team

You need to understand that parents, guardians, and students are your clients and, thus, they are the ones who make your institution's financial flow move.

Adopting a high-level service mindset is important to put clients first at every level of this process: the awareness stage, the first interaction, the ongoing classes, or the parent-teacher meetings.

Therefore, delivering a quality service to your audience is the first step in keeping your institution up and running.

You might be wondering where to start. So, how about starting with an audit of your institution's current situation? And so that you can do that in practice, here are some questions that can guide you:

• How easy is it to navigate your site (it's literally your face in the online world)?
• Can parents find any necessary information about their school instantly?
• How easy is it for 'customers' to contact you?
• How fast are you with the answers?
• How complex is the enrollment process?

Once you have the answers to those questions, work on them and train your team so that the information reaches everyone in the same way. After all, poor service would affect the pockets of all of you.

3. Ensure a self-help option on your site

This self-help channel option may be an aspect of your institution's website. A space for students and their guardians to find any information they are looking for without any physical effort from their team. To be more specific, this feature provides answers to the most frequently asked questions. In addition, an FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions) can help you increase your school's online visibility, increase student enrollment, and improve the overall customer experience.

4. Use the benefits of a live chat widget for school

Do you know what a live chat is? It's something very similar to a messaging app that we use on a daily basis. Anyone can enter their question there and send it to you immediately and your institution receives the notification on a desktop or mobile app.

To implement this type of feature, you need to understand that the response time needs to be short, about 2 minutes. Therefore, you need to have a trained team that understands the importance of this response time and is ready for it.

5. Be present on social networks

With today's great technological access, social media has become a Must-have for schools that aim to increase customer satisfaction.

Currently, we no longer read printed brochures, but online. That would be no different in the education sector.

The convenience of having complete information available at any time attracts its audience, since it is often faster to visit the school using hashtags, the location of Google Maps and the feed than to go to it in person.

Generally, there are three main objectives of using social media in education:

• Marketing: to win new students.
• Informational: Update current students and their parents on upcoming changes.
• Connectivity: to bring the community closer together.

Analyze the purpose of using online communication for your institution and choose the way in which you will approach your audience.

6. Provide a simplified enrollment and re-enrollment experience for parents and students

Bringing a personalized experience to your institution for your clients means having a flexible and personalized approach for each interested party.

During the enrollment period, there is nothing better than allowing contracts to be signed remotely.

At Clicksign, for example, you have several tools and solutions that make it possible for enrollments to be available to your customer 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

7. Ask for feedback

Feedback provides valuable information about your strategy and is the best way to find out if your students and guardians are happy with the experience you're providing them. And if not, what exactly makes them feel uncomfortable.

Make surveys a part of your monthly or quarterly routine. That way, you'll know if something goes wrong and you can take immediate action.

Taking into account the feedback of your audience allows you to make improvements, build loyalty and stand out more and more in the market.

In this article, you learned about customer experience and how this tool is important for the growth of the education sector. The most important motto in the post-pandemic market is “valuing the customer experience” and that's why you need to implement this culture in your institution.

In addition to the use of tools that ensure that decisions are made in order to put loyalty and customer experience first, these are also the indicators that demonstrate whether your methodology is in fact generating results.

A satisfied customer never becomes a detractor and that is the main advantage for institutions. In this market where customers endlessly share their satisfactions and complaints, the implementation of Customer Experience is fundamental and vital for all organizations.

Finally, if you want to learn more about how Clicksign solutions can be a game-changer in your institution and contribute to the Customer Experience in education, accelerating the growth of your business and revolutionizing your processes, click here and talk to an expert now.