Is Email Hindering Your School District's Progress?
Questions, suggestions, and concerns are pouring in from your community—and have been for months now.
Just take a look at your email inbox. If you’re like other school leaders, you have emails stacking up by the hundreds. Maybe even thousands.
Compounding the issue are the emails sent to individuals who can’t actually answer them, leading to an arduous process of forwarding messages, waiting for responses, and hoping something doesn’t slip through the cracks so that you can provide the customer with an accurate answer.
In many regards, an influx of incoming messages is a good problem to have. It means your community is engaging with you and, handled properly, it’s a prime opportunity to build trust and create positive customer experiences. Fumble it, and you risk confusion, frustration, and more—like exiting families and declining enrollment.
That’s why many school districts across the nation have turned to Let’s Talk!, an online customer service solution from K12 Insight. Accessible from your school and/or district website, Let’s Talk! gives parents, students, and employees an easy way to reach out while empowering (not bogging down) your internal team.
“Customer service is very important to our organization,” says Mary Lou Martinez, an administrative assistant in Isaac School District #5 (AZ)1. “[Let’s Talk!] provides more visibility on the emails the organization receives and makes sure the organization gets back to constituents in a timely manner.”
Below are 3 ways Let’s Talk! helps you power up and take community engagement to the next level.
1. Ensure every person gets a timely response
Don’t lose track of another incoming message.
Questions and comments submitted via Let’s Talk! are automatically routed to the team best suited to respond and can easily be tracked from submission to resolution—ensuring every person who reaches out gets a timely response. Additional features, such as the comparison dashboard, help increase internal accountability for delivering timely, accurate responses and high-quality customer experiences.
In Caddo Parish Public Schools (LA), district leaders turned to Let’s Talk! to help establish district-wide accountability for improving their customer service. As Mary Nash-Wood, Director of Communications and Strategic Initiatives at Caddo Parish Public Schools describes it: “We needed to make sure that, as a district, we have the same standard of holding ourselves accountable and having a true measurement to be able to say what we are doing well and what we need to be doing more of. With Let’s Talk!, that ownership and transparency is finally here.”
See how K12 Insight helps Caddo Parish Public Schools create excellent customer experiences. CHECK IT OUT.
2. Collaborate like never before
Forgo the hopeful forwarding of email threads and start collaborating in real time—within and across teams or departments.
Let’s Talk! enables your team to assign questions to the appropriate team member(s), see who is viewing or working on a dialogue in real-time, and loop in additional team members using internal comments. If a department receives a dialogue that’s better addressed by a different department or at the school-level (or vice versa), it can be easily reassigned on the backend without the customer seeing the handoff. These features are especially powerful when staff members are working in multiple buildings or at home.
“I love Let’s Talk! because it encourages our district and community members to talk to us. It opens the door as well as provides a safe and secure method of communicating concerns, recommendations, and kudos to our district,” says Dr. Tameka Bruce, Assistant Superintendent of Human Resources at Spring ISD (TX)1. “We are able to add pertinent parties to the dialogue to assist in resolutions and an added plus is that it is much easier to manage than my emails. The daily alerts are invaluable and remind me of any outstanding matters that I need to address or close.”
3. Unlock your community’s voice
Community input is invaluable. But is what’s landing in your email inbox an accurate and complete picture of your community’s concerns and needs? Are your colleagues getting incoming inquiries on the same topics or are they hearing something different?
The Let’s Talk! dashboard provides key data points—such as number of dialogues, average response time, and customer experience (Cx) score—and insights in real-time so you can quickly identify, understand, and measure short- and long-term trends to help improve the overall customer experience.
“One thing I love about Let’s Talk! is that it gives me the opportunity to track what’s trending in our district,” says Al. Radford, Director of Public Communications at Manassas City Public Schools (VA)1. “Better than email, I can see what areas (topics) had the most contacts by filtering. Not only that, but I can create reports directly in the software for sharing with upper management.”
Ready to level up and stop relying on email? Sign up for a free, no-obligation demo of Let’s Talk! and learn about our pilot opportunity.