Taitotalo is a private educational institution founded in 1922. It operates nationwide and offers education in the industrial and technological field. Taitotalo completes about 70 000 study days yearly, in three offices and with the help of about 140 employees. The durations of the educations vary from short seminars to educations leading to professional competence.
Sanna Taavila, Sales and Marketing Manager at Taitotalo, told us about the importance of the website and the online interaction as a part of Taitotalo’s business.
Website is the most important place for visibility and trading
“For us, the website is the most important place for visibility. We have attempted to have all the information the customer needs found on the website – and easily. This is important especially because all of our course registrations are done only through our website.”, says Taavila. “ We are developing the website user-friendliness all the time.”
Outsourcing the online customer service reduced the stress of our staff without compromising the service quality
“We started the online customer service on Taitotalo’s website in 2015. We didn’t have time to serve the customers through chat, so at the end of the last year we ended up piloting the outsourcing. During the pilot, we found the quality of both the outsourced customer service and its reporting convincing, so we decided to continue with Smilee”, tells Taavila.
Sanna Taavila, Sales and Marketing Manager at Taitotalo.
Feedback contributes to development
“Chat and online customer service have an important role for us as a support function. Through chat, we get feedback from out customers and get some development ideas for our website. No website is perfect, and it is not always easy to present things easily found and understood. We get important information from the chat conversations on how we should present information on our website”, illustrates Taavila the role of the online customer services on developing the websites.
“Online customer service increases our presence online and creates one contact point more between us and the customers. This is absolutely a good thing because after all the most important activity is to interact with the customers.”
Sanna Taavila
Sales and Marketing Manager at Taitotalo
More presence, conversations and conversion – a recommendation also for others
“I think that when going through the results of online customer service, we often focus too much on how much chat reduces extra contacts from customers as the reachability gets easier through it. At least I think that more essential for us, is the increased amount of conversations with the customers which we get through the chat-application. Online customer service increases our presence online and creates one contact point more between us and the customers. This is absolutely a good thing because after all, the most important activity is to interact with the customers. Even though the customer could find the answer from our websites after searching it for a while, it is important that we also join the process”, says Taavila. “This has also made the customers conversion quicker on our websites.”
“I recommend online customer service also for other educational institutions, for example because the information that we share is often complicatedly expressed as a result of public regulation. Chat makes customer service quicker and improves the customer experience”, sums Taavila up.
The most essential benefits which have been achieved by means of online customer service:
- More conversations with the customers
- Quicker decisions for registrations
- To get feedback and ideas for development easily
- A positive effect on customer experience
