Text Request Talks
4 Tutoring Customer Satisfaction Tips with Sylvan’s Matthew Sullivan
Business texting can streamline communication at your tutoring center, which is key for your customers’ satisfaction.
We’ll show you four quick tips on how to use text messaging to nail your tutoring processes and increase revenue along the way.
This article takes insight from our Text Request Talks podcast with Matthew Sullivan and further distills it into advice specific to texting. Sullivan is the Chief Operations Officer and Owner at Sylvan Learning Centers of Abilene, Lubbock, and Fort Worth.
The following tips expand on how to meet the same goals Sylvan Learning does with text messaging.
Watch the full interview on YouTube.
1. Provide consistent communications with text templates.
One of Sullivan’s biggest ongoing goals is to provide a unified experience across all of his Sylvan locations. Identifying which processes work and consistently adhering to them contributes to customer satisfaction—which ultimately leads to more positive word-of-mouth marketing.
These are all things you want, too. So how can you develop concise communication processes and accountability to follow them, like Sullivan does?
Use text templates, so common communications become easy for your team to replicate. You create a template once, save it, and then your team can reuse it forever. These saved messages are useful for anything and everything, including:
Scheduling sessions and reminders
Frequently asked questions
Tutoring session details
Scripted sales or customer service follow-ups
Requests for online reviews
Templates not only keep communication consistent, they also save you a significant amount of time when your team isn’t typing out the same messages over and over again.
2. Text review requests to happy parents.
Real-life success stories make a difference when parents are considering whether or not they should use a tutoring center. That’s why Sullivan emphasizes creating great customer experiences, so the word-of-mouth marketing from his happy parents brings in more leads.
Your location can do the same by texting customers and asking them to leave online reviews. The more online reviews you have—and the more positive they are—the higher you’ll rank in potential customers’ searches.
Texting is one of the easiest ways to get your review link in front of current customers, especially when you use Text Request’s Review feature to:
Connect your Google Business page to Text Request
Insert custom reviews links into your texts asking parents for feedback
Monitor and respond to oncoming reviews from inside Text Request
Incorporating review requests into your tutors’ workflow is a must if you’re going to draw in new customers. Your amount of reviews is a key ranking factor in Google searches.
3. Coach teammates to take on communication tasks.
If your center is going to continue to grow, Sullivan says you've got to set team members up to take on some of your work.
Text Request enables your entire team to text from one dashboard—but with your supervision and support—so communications don’t get bogged down because only one person is handling everything. The shared dashboard makes it easy to jump in and see how your teammates are communicating with parents, so you can give them pointers on how to improve.
Ongoing coaching like this is what Sullivan attributes to his locations’ success. Teammates will be able to take on the communication tasks you need them to, but with your help and guidance.
4. Mass text customers monthly check-ins to keep them engaged.
Students will see the most success if you are continually encouraging them to keep making progress and checking in with parents along the way. That’s why Sullivan recommends checking in with students’ parents once a month to report progress and share potential next steps forward.
You can do the same by scheduling mass texts with a link for parents to schedule meetings with your tutors to review progress, suggest adjustments, or provide exercises outside of sessions.
These mass texts can include custom fields with each parent’s and child’s name, so your messages feel personalized at scale. Reach-outs like these are vital for proving that your center is committed to customer satisfaction.
How Else Can Texting Streamline Communication at Your Tutoring Center?
The above are just a few quick tips—but we have an entire in-depth tutor text messaging playbook for those who want to learn even more ways to implement SMS into your processes.
Our business texting software has helped hundreds of tutoring centers, and we’re ready to help yours next!
