Customer Experience Strategy

GoStudent, a managed marketplace for Tutors and Students, identified a rise in inactive Tutors. In response, the Global Strategy team launched a company-wide initiative to assess the Tutor journey, address key pain points, and ultimately boost retention and reactivate Tutors. 

The objective was to create a comprehensive tutor engagement and retention strategy consolidating several sub-projects, each targeting different aspects of the tutor journey. These included optimizing CRM use, enhancing CSM-Tutor interactions, redesigning the rewards & recognition and learning & development processes, improving customer issue resolution systems, and more. 

The engagement strategy was developed through continuous agile scrum collaboration with the Data, Tutor Community, and Customer Success Teams. Key project elements included:

• Tutor Engagement Mapping: Collaborating with the Tutor Community and Customer Success Teams to map tutor engagements across the lifecycle, covering emails, calls, community events, tutoring sessions, upskilling, and feedback sessions.
• Data Dashboard Creation: Developing an automated Tableau dashboard for detailed assessment of tutor performance.
• Pain Point Assessment: Analyzing qualitative and quantitative data to identify stages with inactivity, high drop-off rates, low engagement, and company-side issues like redundancies, manual interventions, and process inefficiencies.
• Tutor Clustering: Using the data dashboard to categorize tutors into Active, Sleeper, and Inactive groups, each with strategic priorities.
• Data & Map Analysis: Leveraging both the data dashboard and engagement map to pinpoint critical stages of inactivity and dormant behavior.
• Strategy Development & Implementation: Prioritizing clusters and developing projects to address trends in Sleeper and Inactive tutors. 

My responsibilities spanned several sub-tasks:

• Tutor Clustering & Engagement Mapping: Participating in cross-functional sprints to identify tutor clusters and map engagement across activities and lifecycle stages.
• Data Dashboard Creation: Creating variables and drafting dashboards aligned with strategic goals, collaborating with the Data Team on the final dashboard.
• Data Analysis: Preparing executive materials to highlight critical stages of the tutor lifecycle.
• Strategy Development & Implementation: Leading one sub-project and supporting two others across departments and markets as part of the new customer engagement strategy. 

The final strategy consolidated multiple initiatives into a company-wide Engagement Strategy, which included:

A comprehensive Reward Scheme integrated throughout the tutor journey, featuring:

• A positive feedback system, including emails, calls with CSM representatives, and tangible rewards.
• A new bonus scheme that incentivized tutors to meet minimum requirements and maintain consistent session counts for increased hourly payments.

A Proactive & Reactive Communication Plan embedded within the CRM system, strategically addressing critical lifecycle stages throughout the tutor journey.

The implementation of the communication plan alone significantly reduced the number of Sleeper and Inactive tutors, decreasing Sleeper tutors from 17% to 8% and Inactive tutors from 9% to 3% within two quarters among tutors with a minimum 6-month tutoring lifetime.

The implemented strategy positively impacted the NPS score, with 6% of tutors moving from the 'passives' to the 'promoters' category. This shift was attributed to increased CSM engagement, more community events, and additional rewards. The introduction of the Rewards Scheme helped the team achieve its objective of minimizing ‘Sleeper’ tutors to a maximum of 5% and eliminating ‘Inactive’ tutors among those with at least a six-month tutoring lifetime.