With the reign of everything-digital still strengthening its grip on today’s world, we are continuing to see key changes and transformations in different sectors and industries that make use of technology in order to enhance the customer experience. As Head of Teleperformance’s Customer Experience Lab (CX Lab) and an advocate of lifelong learning, I have seen how brands and businesses across industries have adapted to the evolving needs of customers, as well as evolve with time and various challenges.
At a time when people have had a lot of time in their hands because of the lockdown and travel restrictions, the urge to take up different hobbies or online courses to learn new things clearly became evident. In my case, it’s learning a new language. Given this, I quickly thought about the online education sector, which we have covered at the CX Lab for many years now. Fast forward to today, it’s amazing how the sector’s relevance and adoption is now completely different than when we started the CX Lab seven years ago.
Forbes discusses the rise of online learning, mentioning how Research and Markets forecasted the online education sector to reach a size of $350 billion by 2025 (sidenote: this forecast was made even before the pandemic, and it won’t be a surprise if updated data would show bigger numbers after analyzing the impact and demand of online learning in a COVID-19 environment.)
Back on the field, the CX Lab team analyzed the online education sector in our latest Global CX Lab Survey and we ultimately uncovered interesting results, stated below:
One, we saw how customers in all age groups (32% on average) of this sector were more willing to use chatbots in reaching customer service compared to other industries covered.
Two, consumers have stated that the effort to handle CX issues is very high. There is room for improvement when it comes to customer service, as this sector is below average compared to other industries. A worrisome result? This sector has the lowest loyalty out of 18 sectors that we cover at the CX Lab. An even more worrying result—the online education sector had the highest occurrence of fraud in the last 12 months.
Three, the sector has by far the highest number of consumers contacting customer service, with 83% of users stating that they reached out for support at least once.
Four, when we look at chosen brands for consumers surveyed in our pre-COVID-19 edition, most brands mentioned were focused on language learning as these were early adopters of paid online education. Noticeably absent were other educational institutions, and we are now seeing a rise of colleges and universities embracing this change.
Five, Millennials and Gen Z were already 60% of the users of online education companies within our survey last year. It will be curious to see how this has changed post-COVID-19 in our upcoming Global Survey edition.
Six, consumers have strongly adopted online language platforms such as Babbel, Duolingo, EF, and Open English, among countless others.
Anytime, anywhere—Babbel is one of the many apps one can download to learn a new language (Photo Credit: Babbel.com)
Finally, the online education sector has a very high mobile app usage (41%) compared to the average of other industries covered (33%). Certain countries like China already see 70% of users within this sector adopting mobile apps.
Next time, I’ll share more key points that are based on personal observations regarding the online education sector. Stay tuned! For now, why don’t you dabble in some online learning yourself through the CX Lab’s range of white papers and insights available for you to download for free? See you next time!
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