Customer journey map is a tool which will help you to learn about student’s feelings, motivation, the experience that your customer is having while interacting with your school, not only during lessons. By creating the Customer Journey Map you will better plan your strategy and certainly affect customers’ satisfaction to build long-term relationships with them.
Customer experience
Do you sometimes wonder how important customer experience is? Customer service, teachers behavior, even decorations in the rooms can affect your customers’ satisfaction. Today we can observe a rapidly growing language school market and not only unique marketing strategy can help you stand out of the crowd, but also taking care of student experience is a key to success.
Research confirms that a client is willing to pay more for a product if he is buying it in a shop where he previously had some good experience. If in the past he was treated improperly, the staff was rude or unhelpful, the chance to retain a customer is significantly lower. The same goes for language schools. Student’s experience is without any doubt very important from the very beginning of his adventure with a school. Next phases, the process of engagement and retention lead to a successful relationship with a client.
Mapping objectives
When you are creating your own journey map, you are creating a strategy for your customer relations. All this is to make them feel good and encourage them to stay for a longer period of time. Remember that if the customer is satisfied there is a big probability that your sales will rise as well.
The Map will help you to define the basic requirements that your customers usually have (teaching quality, pricing, new technologies, atmosphere). Remember to focus on areas that you consider worth improving and those which are important for students.
That’s why the main purpose of such a map is to discover the main factors that positively affect your student’s loyalty towards your school.
 |
Useful tip: Customer Journey Map can have different forms (stick-notes, drawings, phrases). The most important thing is to remember to involve the whole team. An educationalist and a teacher can have different point of views and opinions about the communication with a student. The main goal of all this is to understand better students’ problems and together find a way to solve them. |
How to create the Map?
First of all, prepare all the data about your customers that you have gathered until now. Usually, data comes from a web page activity analysis, social media reports, customer satisfaction surveys, opinions and complaints registered via the web page or in person.
To create the Customer Journey Map you need to remember about the following crucial 7 elements:
- Types of person: Identify different client categories (parent, child up to 10 years, teenager, CEO) that have different needs, feelings, opinions and expectations.
- Customer’s goals: Focus on the goals that your customers have on every stage of their education.
- Emotions: use different colors, styles, graphics, emoticons to describe customer’s feelings on every stage of the „journey” (think of abstract comparisons like „mountains and valleys”).
- Touchpoints: Make a list of all the places where you customers have contact with your school (through marketing activities, web page, phone or in person). Put on the list even those that you can’t or have problems to control.
- Moments of truth: Some of the interactions have more influence on the customers’ experience than the others (example: customer calls your office 3 times without success). Don’t be afraid to focus on the „critical points”.
- Promises: Analyze your promises and check if you are keeping them. Do you really have the best price? Does your method is really the fastest in town? Check if and how the promises you can’t keep affect customers’ satisfaction.
- Time: Measure the duration of customers’ experience. How long does it take to finish a conversation over the phone – 10 minutes or rather 30 seconds? How fast a customer makes a decision – within 20 minutes or a month?
|
Useful tip: Testimonies are a great addition to the map. Gather all the described experiences and analyze them. Also, try to create the journey map based on the customers that still haven’t decided to take the course or not. |
At the end, you should draw a map containing the most useful information, but remember to especially focus on the „moments of truth”. I know it can be unpleasant, but it’s the only way to look for the flaws in the system and to boost up your quality.
Summary
The Customer Journey Map is a great tool that will help you harmonize the way how you see and service your customers. It also gives knowledge to all of the staff members about the communication with students, so it will not only help to build better relations with the customer, but also will unify the efforts of the staff which will result in the better work atmosphere. They key of all this is to convince the whole team to improve their work quality and their approach to the customer!
Now is your turn to create the Map. If you want my help just let me know. Share your thoughts and opinions in the comment section or send them to marketing@langlion.com