It would be great if we could handle complaints effectively at our school. But this week we have had to deal with several complaints, and really neither of them was our fault.
The first was a boy who was always late for class, and we had arranged that he would be okay to come late. But the mother had the audacity to audit the bill she received and change (yes, change) the billing date on her paper-record account.
Obviously, we could have handled this cheeky action more diplomatically than we did, and it turns out the mother was embarrassed by this. Losing face like that isn’t good here. Our double mistake.
The second was a mother who has been ‘helping’ her kid do homework. Which would be very nice, if she wasn’t messing our work up. She’d take what we did with the kid, ask him to translate it word for word, and then wonder why he was getting bad grades at school and in our post-unit exams.
We don’t teach translation skills for beginners, it’s too difficult until you have enough command of English and your mother language to understand what language is, how one language kind of relates to another, and much more…
It’s hard to imagine how we as a company like Marcus Evans can adapt our complaints procedure to solve these issues. Most complaints can be handled simply by refunding or replacing the item purchased.
But service based business can’t really do either of these, especially when results aren’t guaranteed as in learning. Not every kid will go on to speak English fluently, not every kid will ace his or her exam.
So, it would be really helpful to attend Marcus Evans’ series of ‘effective strategies for dealing with complaints‘. It might help us to create new services that deal with those specific complaints, such as adding a homework class, parental teaching advice, …