Increase Your Enrollment with Customer Loyalty

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Category: Miscellaneous Articles

Written by Chris Cotter

Schools and teachers must listen carefully to students, and then articulately communicate or institute change. When feedback gets turned into action, the relationship between businesses and customers is strengthened. Unfortunately, despite the best intentions of companies, nearly half of all consumers don't believe businesses work towards retaining their loyalty, and this includes language schools too. So what should schools do to improve customer loyalty?

There are three reasons which cause the disconnect between customer experience and loyalty. First, businesses may fail to form the correct hypotheses for a problem, and as a result, pursue solutions that fail to resonate with customers.

For example, business professionals often enroll in professional development courses like language learning, and they must juggle both work and study commitments. A school might incorrectly hypothesize that such busy professionals need shorter, less demanding courses, in the hopes of attracting higher enrollment. However, if the prospectives instead needed self-study or online options in lieu of missed lessons, providing a shorter, easier course wouldn't result in an increased join rate.

Moving on to the second reason, businesses might collect or focus on the wrong data, perhaps examining how much or how often customers spend rather than some other, more important aspect.

Again, busy students might have a lower lifetime customer value compared to others because they cannot consistently balance work and study. As a result, they have poor attendance and drop the course. If only LTV were examined, then the business might offer discounts rather than correctly identify the real need: An alternative to missed lessons.

And lastly, with regards to the third reason, although customers' opinions are often sought, businesses may fail to take action or clearly demonstrate that the customers' voices have been heard. As a result, expectations for change and improvements initially result, with customers then more dissatisfied when no action gets taken. Similarly, if customers cannot clearly express their wants, dissatisfaction also results.

Many patrons remain loyal to a company, brand, or product / service. They may do so due to false loyalty, perhaps because it requires too much time, effort, or money to switch. Once other options are introduced, though, customers no longer prove loyal. Airlines with their rewards systems, as well as credit cards that partner with the airlines, serve as a good example of false loyalty because it costs too much in terms of lost benefits to switch airlines or cards.

However, continuing education courses also prove similar. Students enroll in course after course because it takes too much effort to seek out and research suitable alternatives. However, if another service pops into view, then the students may indeed switch.

So how can companies inspire loyalty? First, businesses must correctly identify the end user, looking at age, income, background, values, and other criterion. Furthermore, companies must listen to not only satisfied and loyal customers, but also dissatisfied customers in order to improve their product or service. They must also demonstrate that the feedback is very much valued by incorporating the right mix of ideas that aptly meet customer needs.

For example, a school might develop a website to track, motivate, and reward students to meet their educational goals, be it language focused or some other business skill like communication, project management, etc.