Advice for K-12 Administrators
Trust between parents and teachers is the foundation for student success. Earning trust, however, is a challenge every educator has struggled with in some way.
The key is for schools to build trust with parents using a customer service approach to parent communication. In the business world, customer service is the support offered to users both before and after they purchase a product. Customer service means providing relevant data, instructions, and advice when necessary. It's the promise a business offers to its customers. But above all, customer service is about listening.
While parents aren't customers in the traditional sense, school districts will build trust by prioritizing proactive, attentive, and upbeat service to parents with robust two-way communication.
[See Also: Teacher Uses Picture Messaging for Classroom Behavior Improvement]
Building Trust for Meeting Strategic Goals
Businesses build trust by engaging with their communities and listening to customers. Your school can take a page from this book by proactively reaching out to parents and listening to their concerns.
Once trust is established with parents, meeting strategic goals is a group effort.
For example, parents support academic goals at home when they feel like they are welcome into the conversation around goals and challenges with their child’s teachers.
They may also better support their child’s attendance when they understand what can be missed in a single day.
Setting and Surpassing Parent Service Standards
Below are a few ways you can improve your customer service with parents:
- Bring the most recent data into each parent-teacher conference. Show parents the trends you have seen and work together to help the student.
- Listen to parents when they express concerns and let them know what you will do to address those concerns.
- Walk parents through the decision-making process. Sometimes understanding the “why” behind a decision can help parents understand what happened.
- Get them on the phone. Person-to-person conversations help parents know that the school cares about their children.
- Track professional development to ensure your faculty and staff use best practices.
- Leave he-said-she-said situations in the past. Automatically recorded conversations help administrators know exactly what was said.
If you want to provide excellent customer service and build trust among your community, contact SchoolStatus today. Our technology can give you the data and tools you need to build better relationships with parents.
__________
SchoolStatus is the district-wide communication tool that integrates key student data in order to increase communication among educators, district administrators, and student families. The company’s solution aggregates individual student data, such as state assessments, attendance, and grades in an easy-to-visualize format and offers the option to communicate with student families via call, text, or email. Through SchoolStatus, millions of communications have occurred on the classroom, campus, and district level. For more information about SchoolStatus, visit www.schoolstatus.com.
