The Parent Experience (PX) at your school
has the potential to be the greatest contributor to retention, ambassadorship
and enrolment success. That’s why schools should be giving some serious thought
what their PX prescription will be.
An e-book that I collaborated on withBlackbaud K12 explains the Parent Experience concept and design process in
detail. In the past couple of months I’ve been taking the PX from words on a
page and slides in a webinar to real-life school environments. The insights from
that could be helpful to anyone thinking about PX in their schools.
For some context, here’s a quick Parent Experience primer.
Increasingly companies are finding that their most effective competitive advantage
is not the products they sell but rather the experience that their customers
have using them and even shopping for them.
Why is that? Because,
as the people at Bain & Company say, “If people love doing business with you, they
become promoters. They sing your praises to friends, colleagues, and complete
strangers over social networks, in online reviews, through blogs, and in every
conceivable channel.”
To me, that
sounds like the description of current parent ambassadors that every school
would love to have. And that’s why the Parent Experience is so critical to
schools.
In fact, as
independent schools find themselves competing with not only public schools but
charter schools, online schools and for-profit schools, experience becomes a
critical differentiator and competitive advantage.
The Parent Experience is the sum of all experiences at various touch
points a parent has with a school over the duration of their relationship with
that school. This includes their first online contact to watching their
youngest child graduate and everything in between.
To be more than
just positive, Parent Experience must be the product of a reverse engineering
project. Schools need to understand what memories and
feelings they want their parents to have at the end of their journey with them.
Once they’ve determined that destination, they can work backward to design the
experience that will produce the desired results.
In other words, to be truly effective and
to completely differentiate a school, the Parent Experience must align with a
school’s brand. Schools must answer the question, “What do we want the parent
experience at our school to be?”
Now, with that background, here are some
practical Parent Experience insights.
The Parent Experience exists whether you
design it or not. Make no mistake. Parents are having an experience at your
school. They are interacting with school staff, lay people and other parents
all the time. The quality of that experience is up to you. You have the
opportunity to not only make that experience positive but one that truly
reflects what is unique about your school.
Parent Experience is more than just good
customer service. The best illustration of this comes from a school at which I
was leading a parent experience workshop. Support staff said they were always
friendly and respectful with parents, often going above and beyond to help.
That’s good customer service. However, one staff member said that she noticed
that when the answer to a question was tailored to the cultural background of
the parent, communication was more effective and the parent was more satisfied.
In a school that truly celebrates diversity, the actions of that staff member
are helping to build a positive parent experience that is unique to that
school.
The Parent Experience brings your brand to
life. Brand is a representation of the relationship that parents have with your
school. If every interaction that parents have with your school is
brand-aligned, PX is an opportunity for your parents to literally live the
brand.
Developing the Parent Experience is an
exercise in design thinking. It’s a painstaking process involving dozens of
people and thousands of interactions. But with a clear goal in mind it’s an
opportunity to incorporate all of the design thinking elements of empathizing,
designing, ideating, prototyping and testing.
Heads of School are critical to the Parent
Experience. There are three reasons for this. The head is the only person in a
school with the authority and credibility to align disparate sectors – from
faculty and educational leaders to the business office to the board of
trustees. Given the symbiotic relationship between brand and PX, heads, as
primary keepers of the brand, must be involved. Finally, PX is by definition
future-focused. Its ten-year journey will be interwoven with your school’s
vision – as articulated and driven by the head.
Faculty is essential to the Parent
Experience PX – but be patient. The
strongest link in the school-parent relationship is teachers and therefore
developing an effective Parent Experience requires their cooperation and active
participation. Teachers are very focused on the classroom and see student
achievement as their primary success metric. However, there is growing
appreciation of parent engagement and communication as critical elements in the
educational process – which, in turn, is all about the parent experience.
As independent schools face increasing
competition in an economic environment that is, at minimum, circumspect, it is
essential to differentiate and find competitive advantages. Focusing on the
Parent Experience may be the perfect prescription for doing just that.
Download your copy of Tailoring the Parent Experience
