Amazon. Walmart. Netflix. What do these companies have in common? They’ve all built dominating empires by mastering the customer journey. They’re the best in their industries at understanding their customers and their customers’ experience with a product or service. Amazon remembers what you browse for so you don’t forget what you might want. Walmart keeps the right products on the shelf so you can always buy what you’re looking for.
Netflix proposes shows that align with your individual preferences using its “because you watched” feature.
How did these companies become so knowledgeable about the people interacting with their service? By collecting massive amounts of data and analyzing it to understand their customers’ preferences, tendencies, and behaviors. They’re all data driven companies that succeed in delivering the best products and services to their customers thanks to obsessive data analysis.
Can This Approach Work For Schools?
Amazon, Walmart, and Netflix have set the bar for elite customer experience, and in this digital age, almost every business is trying to follow in their footsteps by utilizing data to enhance their product. That includes the education sector, where schools are beginning to uncover telling insights about their customers’ experiences, namely, students and their academic journeys, by gathering and analyzing student data.
Using the capabilities of mobile devices, schools are gathering data from their brick and mortar classrooms to gain a deeper understanding of their daily operations and derive relevant insights about a student’s experience in their programs.
Insight Into Instructors’ Operations
One example of the insights schools have gained by collecting data is understanding their instructors’ behaviors in relation to their school policies. How instructors administer class is a huge part of a student’s experience and greatly impacts how much students learn. Through analyzing attendance data that records time down to the second, schools can clearly see when instructors are starting and ending class, whether an instructor is late to class (and if that’s a trend), and if instructors handle tardy students in accordance with school policy. If instructors are consistently starting class late, even if it’s just 5 minutes each day, they’re taking away a significant chunk of time from a student’s education in the long run. Students need the full amount of time to learn and practice skills that are necessary in their future careers. By analyzing attendance data, schools can understand where improvements can be made to improve the student experience, which could include anything from sending out a campus-wide reminder to instructors about starting class on time to updating school policies.
Identifying Best Practices
Analyzing data also empowers schools to refine their students’ academic journeys by helping identify which processes yield the best results. Results include different metrics such as graduation rates, placement rates, higher grades, retention rates, and more. By having a better understanding of which methods generate the best learning outcomes for students, schools can make changes to standardize those processes. Once standard processes are implemented, schools can uncover more granular insights to understand what further steps they can take to boost grades, graduation rates, placement rates, etc. Over time, the cycle of implementing changes and analyzing how results are affected will help schools iron out the kinks and operate using refined best practices.
Where to Start
The first step to mastering the customer journey is understanding how customers interact with your product. For schools across the country, that means examining how students are progressing through their programs and analyzing factors such as timely graduation, which classes students struggle with, how quickly students are placed into relevant jobs, and more. The fastest and most effective way to gather student data is through digital solutions, which are becoming commonplace in modern learning environments. As schools continue to implement new technologies, the amount of data available for analysis about the student journey will increase dramatically. That customer data will be integral to how schools build the best possible customer experience for their students moving forward.
CourseKey has been helping institutions gain deeper insights into school operations, even across multiple campuses, all through its mobile attendance tracking platform. Are you interested in learning how CourseKey helps your school extract data from your brick and mortar learning environments? Schedule a free demo with a member of the CourseKey team below!
