When it comes to developing new offers for your education services business, you'll want to make sure you're providing offers that your customers want. So, how do you differentiate between what your customers want and what your education organization thinks they want? At TSIA, we recently conducted an Education Services Offer Development Survey, which aimed to collect insight regarding how education services (ES) organizations are leveraging new offers to maximize revenues and increase customer adoption. Based on the results from this survey, we learned some interesting details about what customers want compared to what they're receiving from their education services provider, which I'd like to share with you.
Find Out What Your Customers Want by Collecting Feedback
To determine what your customers like and what they want more of, you'll want to collect customer feedback. There are three common ways to obtain this information:
- Course evaluation form
- Corporate customer satisfaction survey
- Company and/or education services (ES) website
Based on obtaining this feedback, survey respondents shared that the most common content requests they receive from their customers are in hierarchical order:
- More e-learning (requested almost twice as much as the next item on the list)
- Advanced topics
- Standalone virtual lab access
Based on our survey results, it's clear that e-learning is, by far, the most common request that education organizations received over the past year.
Are You Producing What Your Education Services Customers Want?
In order to learn more about how the education offers being produced compare to customer requests, we asked survey respondents to share the education offers or services their organization has launched in the past year. The results are in hierarchical order:
- Instructor-led training (classroom and/or virtual)
- E-learning/video snippets
Please note that while e-learning and video snippets are really a single category, they were called out separately in the survey to determine the extent to which video is being offered.
As you can see, there's a disparity between what is being created versus what customers are specifically asking for. Education services organizations continue to produce instructor-led training as the primary form of content. ES organizations take note: customers are not asking for more instructor-led training. It could be argued that advanced course content is best served via instructor-led training, but be that as it may, it is important for education organizations to consider producing offers that best meet the requests of customers.
From a strategy planning perspective, a good approach is to provide e-learning in conjunction with virtual lab access for basic, introductory-level training. Then, move to a blended model for intermediate-level topics, and consider classroom and/or virtual instructor-led training for advanced subject matter, such as product optimization best practices.
The main takeaway from these survey results is that education services organizations, across the industry, need to realign their content strategy with the wishes of their customers.
Learn How to Improve Your Education Services Offer Strategy in My Webinar
To learn more about the concepts introduced in this blog, watch my free On-Demand webinar, “Creating Diversified Offers that Your Customers Actually Want." In this 30-minute session, I share more findings from the Education Services Offer Development Survey and explain how you can effectively create diversified offers that are designed to close the gap between what your customers want and what you offer.