Aldar Academies. Education Customer Experience (CX) Journeys and Escalation Strategy

Context, Approach & Methodology

To enhance customer experience at Aldar Academies, we conducted a thorough assessment of existing processes and identified areas for improvement. Our focus was on understanding the complete customer journey for students and parents, allowing us to develop effective strategies to address pain points and enhance overall satisfaction.

Groundwork

Mapping the As-Is Customer Journey
We began by mapping the existing customer journey for Aldar Academies. This included stages such as discovery, selection, application, waiting, acceptance, payment, onboarding, school experience, and departure. This mapping helped us identify all the stages students and parents go through and the associated pain points.

Conducting Mystery Shopping and Communication Audits
We conducted extensive mystery shopping activities to evaluate the current customer experience. This involved assessing calls for aspects like accuracy and availability of information, greeting, resolution, tone of voice, consistency, and expectation management. Additionally, we audited outgoing customer communications, reviewing social media, EDMs, and email letters based on structure and grammar, stylistics and storytelling, and experience and tone of voice. We summarized our findings and provided best practices to improve communications.

Creating a Future Customer Journey
After identifying pain points that students and parents faced during each stage, we designed a future customer journey with clear opportunities and enhancements. This new journey aimed to improve the overall customer experience by addressing specific issues at each stage.

Developing an Escalation Strategy
We developed a detailed escalation strategy to handle potential issues effectively. This included defining case collection, processing, and escalation procedures, specifying multiple channels and stages to ensure quick resolutions, and identifying specific triggers and points of escalation. We established an eight-level priority system (P1 to P8), with P1 being the most urgent, and assigned cases to the relevant teams within Aldar. An escalation matrix was created to include all potential cases, the responsible team, priority level, and resolution SLA times.

Creating an Implementation Plan
We established a clear CX vision: "At Aldar Education, we lead the way with agile & innovative solutions that win customers’ loyalty and elevate their experience with us." The future journey identified 76 steps and 135 pain points. Our action plan included an overview of the current situation, a roadmap of future goals, a detailed guide on how to achieve desired outcomes, clear roles and responsibilities (RASCI), and metrics for evaluating success across each stage of the journey.

Result

The implementation of these strategies provided Aldar Academies with a approach to enhancing customer experience during a challenging period. The future customer journey, combined with a robust escalation strategy and detailed implementation plan, ensured that Aldar could respond effectively to customer needs, maintain high satisfaction levels, and build trust even during the uncertainty of the pandemic.