The importance of student reviews: delighting your customers

Reviews and recommendations have always been important for education providers and businesses alike, in today's connected world, there is more focus on reviews - and ultimately delighting your customers than ever.

Student experience has always been crucial to an organisation's success in education, but our connected culture means that these days providers need more than just a nicely designed, informative prospectus to showcase the value that they bring.

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As demonstrated with the marketing flywheel, delighting students (and their families) is key to generating future leads, it is the force that drives traffic to your site and students to your door.

Think of the steps you take in your buying journey these days. Long before you interact with a business you do many Google searches, looked at various forums and reviews, and asked your friends for their thoughts.

Here are some pointers for schools and colleges wanting to convert reviews into more enrolments:

Ask your current students for their feedback
Starting with an obvious one, but nevertheless one that is often overlooked. By gathering feedback you can build a bank of quotes/testimonials for use across your literature and website.
Ask for feedback on specific channels
Google reviews are a good way to raise your profile online, social media reviews will help you to reach more of your target audience, and of course there are lots of education review sites too.
Gather feedback throughout the customer journey
There are lots of opportunities to get feedback as students move through your admissions funnel. For example, if a student attends an Open Day, follow up with an email asking for a rating on how well you did (and optional extra comments). If you are using a tool like HubSpot Service Hub, this can be automated - resulting in a 5-star experience for your customers and no extra work for your team.
Set-up ongoing feedback>review>improve processes
The most important thing about gathering feedback is to act on it and show your students that their opinions matter. Sharing content that shows that you are listening makes your students feel valued and that will resonate with your prospective students too. Set up an automated feedback survey that goes out every year to keep track of satisfaction over time.
Report on multiple metrics
Automated feedback surveys should be brief and not spammy for your audiences, keep surveys brief and report on simple metrics such as your Net Promoter Score and one-answer opinion polls.
Keep your goals in mind
Reviewing and reporting with no end-goal will result in gathering data that you don't have the time or inclination to use. When creating or planning a feedback survey or request keep the basics in mind: Who is it aimed at? What are you measuring? When is the most effective time for it to be shared? Where will your results/responses be seen? Why are you interested in this feedback? How are you going to use this feedback to improve?