When people think of customer experience in the commercial world, they tend to think of call centers. The K–12 market doesn’t have call centers — or even traditional customers — leading many to believe CX doesn’t matter in education.
However, in schools, the customers are the technology users: teachers, students and parents. And instead of relying on call centers, these stakeholders often need to communicate directly with one another. That presents a challenge for IT staff, who understand exactly how crucial these communication channels can be.
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IT departments must facilitate personalized communications in a way that makes things easier for users, not more burdensome. Teachers typically don’t want another task added to their plates, and parents don’t want to download yet another app or read a generic email.
The key for school districts is finding a balance for all parties. Three key technologies can help, facilitating smooth, seamless and personalized teacher-parent communication.
1. AI-Driven Tools Streamline Parent-Teacher Connections
Artificial intelligence is impacting the education landscape in profound ways. It’s helping teachers draft lesson plans and it’s streamlining technology operations to support overburdened IT departments. Among these many advancements, AI is poised to impact teacher-parent communications as well.
RELATED: Artificial intelligence helps teachers defeat burnout and boost productivity.
Emerging AI capabilities include the ability to translate communications between families and teachers. This can help teachers to overcome language barriers to connect with all parents and keep them informed of their children’s progress in class.
AI-driven tools can also automate routine communications through various learning management systems and other teaching and learning software. This empowers teachers to send parents progress reports or deadline reminders with minimal effort. It reduces teachers’ administrative burden by making it easier to schedule parent-teacher meetings.
IT teams can also look to AI-driven chatbots to help teachers field common questions from parents, getting families information they need with less time and effort.
2. Collaboration Platforms Centralize Contact Channels
Collaboration platforms bring together multiple modes of contact in a single interface. This may include voicemail, email, instant messaging, texting and videoconferencing.
Collaboration platforms open the options for teachers looking to connect with parents in a way that aligns with their existing workflows and doesn’t impose any additional requirements on the parents. With integrated communication tools, teachers have an easy means to send out updates, schedule meetings and engage in real-time conversations, all from a single platform.
Integration in collaboration platforms saves teachers time and effort because they do not need to switch between different apps as they interact with parents. They can share an email, for example, and follow up with a text or even a video call. With the ability to manage notifications from within the platform as well, teachers are empowered to keep open the channels of communication without taking on additional processes or tasks.
IT teams can eliminate the management of this technology on their end through relationships with Unified Communications as a Service providers. By delivering collaboration platforms as a cloud-based service, UCaaS providers make it easy for school districts to access these advanced communication tools without having to layer on new on-premises infrastructure. That cuts costs and builds in future scalability.
3. Learning Management Systems Feature Communication Abilities
A learning management system can do more than help teachers manage course materials. It can act as a communication hub, making it easy for teachers and parents to connect.
Teachers can use the LMS for centralized messaging. They can send out announcements and notifications and leverage the LMS as a discussion forum.
In Google Classroom, for example, teachers can invite parents to receive communications through the LMS. They can use the platform to send out regular emails about student progress or classroom activities. It’s an easy way to let parents know about upcoming work and help them track their students’ efforts.
DISCOVER: Google Workspace for Education digitally transforms K–12 environments.
By investing in technology tools, school leaders can solve a number of key challenges around communications. They can drive seamless teacher-parent contacts while minimizing effort on the part of teachers, without putting added burden on the parents.
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Source: EdTech Magazine: K-12
