A majority of owners / directors of language schools are aware that one of the best forms of advertising is word-of-mouth, i.e. a satisfied course participant passes on information about his satisfaction and thus creates new satisfied course participants. The method is simple, universally known and extremely effective, but one significant aspect is frequently ignored here. We fail to ask ourselves the question whether this natural recommendation mechanism could work even better. What makes people recommend to others the products or services they purchased themselves or just heard about? Let’s find out!
Research shows that there are three major drivers contributing to this mechanism:
- social driver (e.g. the natural need to express own uniqueness and share this fact)
- emotional driver (e.g. the natural need to share own emotions and feelings)
- functional driver (e.g. the natural need to share information and help others)
How can we check what really works in our case?
Instead of relying on intuition and subjective feelings, we should regularly survey satisfaction of customers, i.e. course participants in our case. Results are usually a huge surprise and a genuine mine of exciting ideas. The practical result of such survey is comprised by the ability to prepare an offer best satisfying the needs of our customers; moreover this helps transfer our best efforts on the most effective methods in the case of our specific school. Such surveys let us also discover the least effective forms of promotion or teaching, which we can abandon and simply save money. By focusing on our strengths through constant “polishing” them we can attain the level of excellence not encountered among our rivals. The final effect is always better customer satisfaction; we can even arouse their positive emotions and feelings, which directly translates into better effectiveness of word-of-mouth. Performance of satisfaction audit will also help answer such questions as:
- How did course participants learn about our school?
- What guided their decision to choose our school?
- To what extent the school conforms to course participants’ notion of a perfect language school?
- What are the strengths and weaknesses of the offer? What are the course participants satisfied with and what they are not?
- How do course participants perceive our school against the background of the competition? What is our distinguishing feature according to them?
Satisfaction surveys can be performed with the use of quantitative methods (questionnaires or short interviews), or qualitative ones (group interviews focused on a specific part of our operations or longer IDIs). Let us also not forget in our surveys about the amazingly good and very practical method of Mystery Shopping.
Owing to the power of recommendations we should also consider whether it would be worthwhile to focus our activities only on local actions. They can be targeted e.g. to the area of a single city, but in the case of larger cities we can limit our operations to a district or a housing estate. Many schools function in such way thus becoming friends of local communities, e.g. by organising open days or participating in various local holidays and feasts. What is important, they are not closed to outsiders. Course participants can invite the family or friends. Here we combine the power of local allegiances and recommendations, but also build the brand awareness. Initially we can have an impression that restriction of the geographical scope of the operations may result in a decline of the number of potential course participants and reduction of revenues. But it turns out that owing to such choice and specialisation profitability improves a lot and development is more stable.