In Hong Kong, the society’s high emphasis on education has brought about a boom in the tutoring industry. Tutoring agencies offer working parents a way to keep track of their children’s learning progress. This is why nearly 70% of students in Hong Kong attend tutoring classes.
Education centers are also facing more inquiries and customer service issues as tutoring continues to expand to accommodate more students. However, due to the limited staff in customer service, there is no spare time for online promotion. Furthermore, the instructors at the tuition center are overwhelmed by the volume of inquiries.
It is challenging to operate an education center business in a highly competitive environment. Due to this, Elite Learning Centre chose VIMOS’ WhatsApp Business API tool to alleviate the burden on customer service. They also intend to develop new marketing channels in order to reach a large number of parents and students. Read along to learn how the Elite Learning Center uses VIMOS O2O Chat Automation for Sales to its full potential!
Elite Learning Centre is located in Cheung Sha Wan. Its services are designed for students in secondary, primary, kindergarten, and preschool education. Elite Learning Centre provides students with the following services:
Claudia Chu, the founder, was a former teacher at Diocesan Preparatory School and prepared students for the Internal Examinations for the purpose of Secondary School Places Allocation (SSPA). For over 20 years, she has taught English and worked on curriculum development in full-time schools. Claudia has facilitated interview classes for over 1,000 students. In 2020, she received the Best Education Center Startup Award at the Hong Kong StartupAward. She also had the opportunity to teach at many prestigious schools, including Yinghua Secondary School, Kowloon Wah Yan College, and others.
Despite having a competent team, the Elite Learning Centre was short-staffed for customer service and business promotion during the pandemic. Administrative personnel can only be in charge of course inquiries and other related matters. Therefore, using WhatsApp to actively advertise and make good use of promotion channels is difficult.
Managing a large number of conversations with varying scopes in a unified manner is already a challenging task. If a company only uses the free version of WhatsApp Business, which does not support multi-person login, the workload doubles. Previously, Elite Learning Centre would open WhatsApp groups on a regular basis to send course information or promotions. However, when parents inquire in the group, the education staff must take the initiative to respond to them individually. When the parents in the group start communicating, the information becomes jumbled. The organization of the messages in the group makes it difficult for the education centre to make a follow-up.
Due to a high volume of parent inquiries, employees may not have the time to provide personalized responses during peak times.
Therefore, due to the team’s lack of technical notions, advertising relied primarily on email marketing or WhatsApp group promotion. However, the effect was not statistically significant, and the open rate was around 20%.
When promoting activities or courses through emails or groups, it is hard to tell whether parents are interested. This is usually the case when they do not respond to the center’s messages. Furthermore, determining which parents are more interested in courses is challenging. Remarketing to increase conversions will thus be tough as well.
Aside from the large volume of inquiries, it is hard to rely on just one person to answer all questions daily. Since the inquiry will cover a variety of topics, only one person responding makes tracking the customer’s status difficult. Furthermore, the staff may be unable to provide the most satisfactory answer to the customer in a timely manner.
Elite Learning Centre chose to upgrade to VIMOS’ WhatsApp Business API platform to handle increased inquiries and boost business growth.
Further reading: 3 Ways WhatsApp Chatbot Makes Marketing and Customer Service Easier
Elite Learning Centre has improved its handling of day-to-day customer inquiries since implementing VIMOS. Automating replies to deal with frequently asked questions based on our team’s recommendations, reduced the workload of its staff!
When a parent initiates an inquiry, the chatbot will send a welcome message to the parent. eCommerce can include up to three Quick Reply buttons when setting up automated responses via Chatbot. Parents can further trigger the chatbot’s automatic response by clicking the button corresponding to the course of the inquiry. The chatbot will then collect data on the courses that parents are interested in. Furthermore, it allows the customer service team to obtain detailed information and directly provide parents with the most relevant content.
Active parent inquiries can be automatically responded to, saving a lot of labor costs.
Using chatbots to collect and answer parent inquiries not only saves the customer service team’s time and effort. It also allows them to handle inquiries more accurately, which greatly improves customer satisfaction.
Further reading: 6 WhatsApp Business API Features brands can’t miss out on!
Multi-person logins: Unlike the free versions of WhatsApp Business and Personal, WhatsApp API allows multiple employees to log in simultaneously to handle inquiries. Education center staff no longer have to rely on a single person to handle inquiries, thanks to this feature. At the same time, tutors can log in and chat with the students they are keeping a close eye on. This, therefore, increases tutor-student interaction outside of the classroom.
Label Function: Employees can even use tags to categorize students and parents based on their grades, and courses of interest. The label function allows tutors to easily follow up and send reminders to specific customer groups.
Staff members have been using the label function for classification since June of this year. The conversations of over 500 parents have been assigned to corresponding employees and tutors for processing using multiple logins and auto-replies. This significantly improves the team’s work distribution and process, resulting in more efficient customer service.
WhatsApp API serves as a new marketing and promotion channel for many online businesses. In terms of marketing and promotion, Gifted Education also shared how they advertise using VIMOS’s functions.
Elite Learning Centre initially communicated information about Primary Admissions via WhatsApp broadcast. Broadcast is used to entice a large number of contacts to respond, particularly interested parents. This enables targeted and personalized promotional messages to various customer groups in the future.
For instance, if recipients of the broadcast message reply that they are interested, they can be tagged as “P1_Parent”. This tag indicates that the contact person is a parent of a student who is going to enter Primary One.
Furthermore, the education center can take the initiative to learn about the parents’ backgrounds, other courses of interest, etc. They can add tags after the other party responds in order to send targeted messages.
To encourage parents to enroll their children in advanced courses, a promotional message can be sent to them. However, this will only be effective if the center understands the existing parents’ interest in the course. Labeling and categorizing parents prior to this initiative may be extremely beneficial. These procedures allow Elite Learning Centre to provide the audience with more personalized and effective broadcasts.
Since May, Elite Learning Centre has actively sent 1,743 broadcast messages using VIMOS. Furthermore, their WhatsApp messages have been opened 1,311 times, with a 75.2% open rate. Which is triple the open rate of email marketing (Around 20%)!
Further reading: Tips to Increase Customer Engagement via WhatsApp Broadcast
“Besides the functional aspect, I think the most impressive thing about VIMOS is the customer service. As a novice, who just start using the WhatsApp API, you will definitely encounter many technical difficulties or inconveniences. And the VIMOS customer service team can answer our questions immediately, and also patiently taught us the features of the WhatsApp API step by step.” said Elite Learning Centre’s Founder, Claudia Chu.
Closely monitoring the student’s progress and needs is essential for an education center’s business to thrive. Furthermore, it is critical to provide students and their parents with the best support possible.
Are you in the education industry and feeling overwhelmed by student and parent inquiries? VIMOS will warmly accommodate and develop the best marketing strategy for your business. Book a 15-minute 1-to-1 online consultation now and reap substantial benefits later!
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