In our latest newsletter, The Password, CEO Emma Goodwin wrote about how listening to WCBS customers drives the direction of the company in its improvements of both service and products.
Our Marketing Department arranged a Q&A session with Emma to further explore the channels set up within the company to do this, and how in turn improvements are being made and long-term plans achieved.
Q. Communication and engagement was the first area you mentioned; what improvements and initiatives have the customers experienced so far?
We now have annual satisfaction surveys as well as transactional feedback on specific services, providing our customers the opportunity to give feedback, which helps us to continually improve. Plus, the introduction of voting on enhancements, and allocation of development time in each release for the most popular to be included, all means that our customers can readily see that we are acting on their feedback.
Our aftercare service has been improved to provide new users with a welcome email and guidance on the best way to obtain help and training on the particular products they are using.
We have added our new Customer Care feed into the product itself – this new channel for communicating with our customers is proving to be very powerful. We are using it to provide new feature tips, timely reminders of infrequently used features, topical help as well as communicating service issues and directing people to other important customer communication.
Q. You also mentioned a “next generation solution path”. What does this mean?
Supporting our customers with innovative solutions means we must have a strategy to keep our technology up to date and moving forward. We now have a clear plan to introduce the next generation of solutions for schools. This year we have introduced a cloud-based product for managing the whole admissions process for schools – this focuses not only on making the workload of the admissions staff more efficient, but it also provides an excellent technology-led experience for a prospective parent. Next year we plan to release new cloud products in both the finance and academic space.
Q. With a direction of travel in place, how do you see the company continually expanding third generation latest technology alongside on-premise products?
This is an important question – we need to make the transition path for schools as easy as possible to allow them to move at their own pace. Our customers will rely on us to support hybrid solutions allowing the piecemeal transition to the next generation solutions, with a variety of integrations to make it work.
Q. Previously WCBS has had partnerships with a number of associated businesses. How will this work moving forward?
We are working to expand our partner community. Whilst we will be providing a broad set of solutions to our clients there will be areas where a third party has created a much more functionally rich solution or is filling a more niche-functional gap. We want to be able to provide this to our schools and have varying levels of partner engagement available to make this happen.
Q. With new types of products being offered, what about training for them – how’s that going to be done?
This is an area we are working on for our next generation product set. Delivering training through multiple channels and increasing the availability and access, means that we are currently working on programmes to introduce more self-learning options and product videos, as well as regularly scheduled bitesize training courses.
- So what does this all mean to WCBS customers?
WCBS is committed to supporting schools in delivering outstanding education and we plan on doing this by continually evolving our solutions to bring our schools innovative and intuitive products. We want to delight you with technological support for your day job!
