Don't Let Your Loudest Customer Set Your Priorities

Every couple of weeks we have a webinar at Open English to bring together our Management Team and our Study Advisors. We started doing this a few months back because we realized that there's nothing like hearing firsthand the experiences of our service department. After our first meeting we were floored by the valuable insights that had been brought to light. As a result, I immediately started rethinking priorities and our carefully crafted product road-map suddenly seemed obsolete. 

Nonetheless, one of our VPs remained unconvinced that we had identified the true needs of our student base. She suggested we put together a form that our Study Advisors had to fill out every time they received a complaint or feature request from one of our students. She built the form in a day using FormSite, an HTML form and survey builder. She also put together a quick survey that automatically pops up after our students finish a live session. For the ensuing weeks, our Study Advisors and students filled out the forms almost 3000 times. 

Finally and with great anticipation, the results were revealed at this week's service webinar. And oh the surprises...

For sure we thought, the audio quality of our virtual classrooms were going to top the list.

The data was clearly going to show how our teachers needed to do a better job correcting our students.

No doubt those nagging tech difficulties with our Academic Checkpoints were going to steal the spotlight. 

But none of that happened.

It turns out that 1774 student surveys rated the overall experience of our live sessions a 4.5 out of 5. When asked specifically about the audio quality of our virtual classrooms, only 63 surveys rated it a 1 or 2; while 1460 surveys rated it a 4 or 5 (4.3 average).

So imagine that, we were thinking of changing our live classroom provider because 4% of our students were having trouble with it. After seeing the results, we realized we needed to listen to the other 96% of our students that were perfectly satisfied with the audio quality of their live sessions. 

Now don't get me wrong, this doesn't mean that we shouldn't bend over backwards for the students that filled out those 63 surveys nor that our service team wasn't bringing valuable insights to the table. My point is that the data helped put the problem in perspective and hence, also helped us come up with a much more adequate solution. Instead of changing our virtual classroom provider which would have taken weeks of development time and staff retraining; we simply decided to call the students that were having audio quality difficulties to help them better configure their audio settings. 

We all learned this week that the views of our loudest users aren't always representative of the needs of our user-base.