The fastest way to lose a prospective parent is to treat them badly. In fact, over 70 percent of customers say they leave a company because of how they were treated. So it’s safe to say that using feedback to improve customer experience is important. But do you know how to get the most mileage out of the gold nuggets gained from customer feedback?
Here are some practical tips on how to improve your school marketing with parent feedback.
Share it with all staff
The first thing to do is share the feedback with staff. It’s common for the marketing department to seek customer feedback, then make the mistake of not sharing the insights with parent-facing staff. If you are fortunate enough to get useful customer feedback, make sure it doesn’t go to waste by filing it away. Present the information at department meetings so that the feedback can be shared across all areas.
Create a ‘top takeaways’ resource
Let’s face it, your staff are busy. Sharing parent feedback verbally in a one-off meeting won’t cut it when it comes to the school adopting new, long-term approaches. By creating a resource listing the top takeaways and making it readily available on the staff intranet, you increase the chances of staff taking it onboard. Go one step further by incorporating the same language into weekly emails and meetings, and you will start to see some real progress.
Update your customer personas
Assuming you already have your customer personas identified, it’s a good idea to update them using parent feedback. Don’t make the mistake of thinking you know your customers inside out, as people’s circumstances change all the time. Staying relevant to your school’s audience is key to survival. To do that, you must make a consistent effort to know who they are.
Adjust your content
Once you know who your customers are, don’t forget to adjust your content strategy to ‘speak’ more effectively to them. This should absolutely apply to new content created and, if you have the time and resources, it’s a great idea to go back and update existing evergreen content on your school’s website. This is a good practice to get into anyway, to make sure the content remains relevant and links are still active.
Communicate on the right platforms
There’s no point having great content if parents never see it. Use customer feedback to make sure you are distributing your content on the right channels. There may not be any point posting on Instagram if your customers don’t engage with you there. Similarly, email newsletters may need tweaking in terms of frequency, subject heading and content, based on what parents are clicking on.
We’re asked to complete so many questionnaires these days, that we have become prone to ‘survey fatigue’. If you are lucky enough to receive useful parent feedback, don’t miss the opportunity to boost your school’s marketing with the findings.
