UnMarketing: Stop Marketing. Start Engaging, Revised and Updated

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Using Stop Start Continue

I HAD A client a while back, a private school in the Toronto area. One of its biggest issues was reenrollment. When parents decided not to send their children back the following school year, the school found out too late to deal with the issue(s) and possibly keep the student. Together, we implemented a survey system to test customer satisfaction. We e-mailed 120 families with children currently enrolled in the school. We started the conversation, engaged with the parents, and got them talking about their experience. We allowed them to choose to answer anonymously or to leave out their contact information.

Going back to the trust gap, we had already achieved the highest level of trust we could, because these parents trusted us with the well-being of their children. This makes it even more important for the experience gap to be nearly nonexistent. In a high level of trust relationship, you cannot afford gaps in either trust or experience, because you cannot usually gain it back once you have lost it.

Using an online service for the survey allowed us to create a quick database of all the results. The e-mail was sent out and we had a 95 percent response rate. Within 48 hours we sat down with the head of the school and the faculty with 45 pages of collected results—all feedback from current parents. Some of the information was pretty basic, like wanting more variety on the lunch menu. Some pointed to more serious issues for the children. There was also ...