Technology companies use human-machine interaction approaches and occasionally forget that customer experience goes beyond the product, and it encompasses all areas of the business. Many Edtech companies fail to follow customer experience practices that are fundamentals to engage teachers and students.
Customer experience is all interactions a customer, former customers, and prospective customers have with your company. It is not only about customer service, user experience, or marketing; it is end-users, influencers and decision-makers, those using your services, and those that left because they were unsatisfied—understanding the customer experience as an ecosystem is fundamental. Hence, customer experience is all interactions that a human has with your brand. It is not a project; it is a continuous improvement program.
As an Edtech leader or individual contributor understanding the best practices is a great way to engage with your target audience and make your voice heard. One mistake we commonly make when trying to excel in customer experience is to explain complex issues with many details, thinking that it will be easier to understand when it is actually more difficult to retain and digest.
Here are some customer experience best practices that leaders in Edtech can follow, trying to keep it simple:
1. Benchmark your customer experience, understand your organization’s maturity level, create a clear vision for customer experience, a customer charter, define its strategy, and understand teachers’ and students’ actual needs and perceived needs.
2. Provide choices based on your customer preferences. Maintain an agile customer journey mapping to add emotions and humanize your brand and technology.
3. See customer experience as an investment, collect data by talking to teachers and students, leverage your customers’ voices, employees, and market, use the feedback to create action plans, and measure the results to demonstrate value.
4. Create a culture of make it easy for customers to do business with you, reduce red tape, break down silos, and drop old fashion practices that add costs and pain.
5. Be responsive, balance self-service options with real human interactions, and have a crisis management plan ready to go—a task force to tackle market changes.
6. Use technology to deliver human experiences, balancing the right amount of automation, and assessing the impact on people, processes, and technology. Keep that personal touchpoint open. Not everyone is an early adopter.
Remember, sometimes, customers need to win, and the ultimate goal should be to generate good profits. Customer experience is beyond deploying surveys; it is a combination of all interactions within the customer journey. Don’t forget about incorporating the human voices into your brand promise and technology.
By following these six-customer experience best practices, you will never lose sight of your customers. You will hit the right balance between people, processes, and technology, saving your business money and generating an evergreen process that will bring referrals and positive word of mouth.
Let’s connect and talk about customer experience.
Customer Experience Consulting 