Child Development Schools is a national education business comprised of three early childhood education brands. They operate in 11 states with 260 education centers and 30,000 students between the ages of six weeks and 12 years old. “Our job is to give every single child the very best start in life,” said Jessica Van Hoose, Executive Vice President and Chief Revenue Officer at Child Development Schools.
While the company is sprawling, it’s based in Austin, Texas, which posed the challenge of uniting its teams of educators and administrators and capturing customer sentiment instead of making assumptions about it.
“Customer experience challenges before partnering with AskNicely stemmed from a lack of data. We were consistently looking at lagging indicators, and so it wasn't until we were getting complaints or saw things popping up on social media that we were able to really take a look and fix those problems,” Jessica said.
They were working in a reactive capacity instead of a proactive one, and they were looking to change that. After implementing AskNicely, they were able to get their teams on board with the platform and see big changes in less than a year. One of the goals in bringing in AskNicely was to have an easy-to-use tool that teams could easily adopt and use to bring benefits to CDS, explained Barbara Lamere, Director of Customer Relationship Management.
Their teams have adopted it more quickly than tools they’ve used before, too, enabling quick action and improvements. “The adoption of AskNicely has been very different than a lot of the adoptions we’ve seen internally,” Barbara said.
Implementing AskNicely’s dynamic and straightforward surveys helped the teams at CDS gather better feedback than ever before. “The surveys are intuitive, easy to use, and make the experience better. Every time we’ve sent any batch of surveys, we’ve gotten good responses,” Barbara said.
That healthy response rate resulted in some real numbers. CDS saw an increase in net promoter scores as a result of improved family satisfaction. But they’ve also been able to use AskNicely to identify areas for improvement.
“It’s great that we have a lot more promoters than we have detractors, which makes me extremely proud of who I think we are at our core. But it also just really highlights for me the areas that we do need to focus on,” said Jessica.
They’ve started using AskNicely’s Focus Areas feature to identify where to spend their energy, and potentially train their teams to work toward collective improvements. One of those focus areas for one district was professionalism, and once it was identified, they were able to have a clear path forward.
“I could create an action plan within the district, all the way down to the individual director, on the expectations that I was going to set within my district so we could see a change in that professionalism and increase our scores coming back,” said Debbi Jack, a Child Development Schools district manager.
They’ve also leveraged the tools around sharing praise with their teams to encourage positive behaviors, and implemented dynamic surveys to help them gather even more valuable insights from those high-response surveys they send. All resulting in increased NPS scores, high response rates, and increased engagement and awareness within their business.
Creating change wasn’t enough for CDS; they wanted to communicate those changes to their employees, as well as to the parents of their students.
“Our families as well as our employees want to hear more from us about how we’re making decisions, why we’re making decisions, know that we’re listening to them, and we’re adjusting,” Jessica Van Hoose said. They’ve leveraged AskNicely’s Shoutouts feature to highlight and recognize what’s going well while building morale.
“One of the biggest impacts that I've seen is just the alignment of our whole organization on what really matters, which is the experience that our children are facing every day,” said Amanda Blakely, Vice President of Operations at Child Development Schools.
