It’s more than “user feedback,” service should be your highest priority, and serving educators will pay exceptional dividends. Since launch, our team has worked directly with nearly all of our instructors listening to how we’ve made their job easier, overcoming their occasional problems, and implementing their ideas to make GradeHub better.
“Because at GradeHub, we measure our success on what we give rather than what we get.”
Your intent matters! Sure you can conduct a survey or interview customers, but your objective in a study is “getting user feedback.” Instead of looking to get something, offer to help. And, it is also more than “intent,” you need to be intentional about giving your time to help customers. In fact, be a cheerful giver, and you will reap far more than you had sown.
“People are more willing to share when they know you care.”
To get started, you first need to check your ego at the door. The last thing you need to be is knowledgeable and outspoken. In other words, be humble. If your focus is on listening, you’ll be amazed at how much educators will share.
Working directly with faculty and instructors, who teach large sections, has been, pardon the pun, an education. Sure, there has been the occasional, “UGH – I can’t believe a student really did that.” The key is to always be ready to help. More often than not, the occasional concern brought up by an educator has helped us to quickly resolve their issue and to improve our service to others.
Serving a given instructor can let you understand how your “offering” helps other educators. While assisting teachers, we learned how valuable our reports are in identifying students who missed an exam or informative they are in catching errors in an answer key. We also saw how educators had greater confidence in our mark recognition over traditional approaches. We, in turn, refined our marketing outreach to inform educators how we can help them.
Educators have excellent ideas. Afterall, how foolish would it be not to listen when we have the opportunity to meet with Ph.D.’s almost on a daily basis.
In one meeting where we were helping a professor grade exams, we noticed she was entering the exam’s answer keys for multiple class sections and several test versions. Wow, that was a lot of work, and prone to manual error. She mentioned, “sure would be nice if I could download the then re-upload the key to different sections.” And, we responded, “we could do that.” In a straightforward feature, we save her 10-20 minutes per exam.
In all, we have had over a dozen such stories where instructors stopped and said it would be great if….and those discussions led to new ways to help others. All because we were first willing to serve.
Mark Espinola
GradeHub
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