Designed by Katherine Engel
It’s official! The results of our 2020 Customer Satisfaction Survey are in. We know this year has been busier than ever for districts and schools, which is why we were blown away by the 2,800+ educators who sent in their answers to our annual survey—thank you for taking the time to provide us with your honest feedback.
Each year, we use customer survey feedback to drive key decisions within our company, gauge whether we’re on the right path (or need to forge a new one) and prioritize future product and process improvements.
We thoroughly reviewed and analyzed the customer satisfaction survey, and we’d like to share our findings with you. Let’s take a look.
Who Filled Out the Survey?
More than half of our survey respondents were teachers, followed by school, district and parent administrators. Participants who did not categorize themselves made up the remaining 1%.
How Satisfied Were Our Customers?
We are pleased to report an NPS of 45! NPS measures customer satisfaction and is calculated by asking our users, “How likely are you to recommend ParentSquare?” on a scale from 1 to 10.
We feel this year’s NPS is a positive reflection of our hard work to provide a quality experience to our customers amid the pandemic and something to be very proud of within the edtech industry.
The Features Most People Requested & Loved
Here is a highlight of our most popular features and some memorable customer comments.
Alerts & Emergency Notifications
Our “Smart Alert” feature delivers alerts to all of your contacts in case of an emergency or important update. Districts and schools can preload and access alerts from the ParentSquare app and send alerts with three taps on your phone (or with Siri on an iPhone).
Emergency alerts & notices cannot be disabled since they are of utmost importance, but parents can personalize how and when they receive general district/school announcements and messages, opting for a daily digest or immediate notifications, and selecting email, text, and/or app notifications. In this age of pandemic message fatigue, this feature puts the control in parents’ hands to determine how and when they receive school comms, so they stay in the loop without being overwhelmed.
Classroom Communications by Teachers
We’re so glad teachers continue to love communicating with parents through ParentSquare. With so many different learning scenarios this past year, teachers increased the need to share important information with parents more frequently than usual. We have seen teachers engage with families in new and exciting ways through the platform.
You can post to an entire class or grade with photos, attachments, newsletters, sign-ups, volunteer requests, payments, and more. Our direct messaging capability also provides a secure place for private one-on-one messaging or group chats—with instant translation and administrative oversight to protect all platform users.
Forms & Permission Slips
With so many students in remote learning scenarios, it’s nearly impossible to hand out physical paper, plus making eco-friendly choices is a big priority for districts and schools across the country. With our Forms & Permission Slips feature, districts and schools can say goodbye to paper flyers once and for all. Using digitized forms and permission slips is not only better for our environment, but it also eases the burden of staff printing, collating, labeling and distributing (or in today’s case, mailing) wasteful paper announcements.
Parents can conveniently fill out forms on a computer or phone, and districts can even create templated forms for individual school sites to ensure district consistency. One of the best things about this feature is the ability to pull a report of who has or has not signed a form or permission slip and send a follow-up reminder with just a few clicks.
Parent/Teacher Conference Sign-Ups
Last year, most schools were not able to provide in-person parent-teacher conferences. We were so happy to help teachers schedule remote conferences instead, through Conference Sign-Ups in ParentSquare. Teachers can easily set up conference time slots (allowing for a buffer between each meeting, if needed). Parents can conveniently book a parent-teacher conference on their mobile device.
Due to the pandemic, we saw new use cases for this feature, including schools and districts using Conference Sign-Ups to schedule on-campus pick-ups and drop-offs safely. This feature allows for an easy way to book parents in for curbside technology pick-ups, library book drop-offs, course material pick-ups, etc. Utilizing this feature helps make sure you don’t have long waiting lines, so you can keep the number of people on-campus low. It also helps staff more easily manage distribution processes!
Social & Web Sharing
It’s been exciting and encouraging to see so many districts and schools share their stories and showcase their successes with our Social and Web share feature. But more than that, last year, we saw this feature used to post about critical resources such as free meal programs, mental health services, and activities to promote community engagement and SEL.
While the ParentSquare platform is private to districts and schools, those who enable the social and web share option can quickly and easily share posts to Facebook, Twitter, or school websites.
Secure Document Delivery
Secure Document Delivery was again a popular feature, thanks in part to supporting district and school’s green initiatives, helping save time, and reducing costs related to printing and mailing physical documents to families.
Schools can electronically deliver secure documents such as report cards and progress reports directly to parents—eliminating the time-consuming tasks associated with snail mail. With Secure Document Delivery, schools can create their templates, attach pre-written or customized messages to documents that can be translated into 100+ languages, alert parents via preferred modality of communication, and more.
Health Screening Forms and Workflows
The August 2020 launch of our health screening form delivered an easy-to-use solution for schools to enable student and staff daily health screenings.
This feature allows parents, staff, and high school students to electronically submit a health screening form indicating if they are exhibiting symptoms of COVID-19. They immediately receive clearance to go to school or instructions to stay home, matching school or district policies. For school bus or on-campus health screening scenarios, teachers and staff can easily use ParentSquare to record students’ results.
All identifying information about the student or staff member is pre-populated from data the school already has to the ParentSquare platform, so it’s always secure and private.
The health form results are immediately available in ParentSquare’s dashboard for the student’s homeroom teacher, authorized staff, or on-site health screeners—with a clear indication of missing responses or if anyone is exhibiting symptoms. To date, we have surpassed 6 million health screenings, and this feature continues to be a great success in helping mitigate COVID-19 transmission on school campuses.
ParentSquare Support Satisfaction
Each year we ask customers to rate us on various aspects of our support. Here is how you rated us!
Where We Are Making Improvements & Things To Look Forward To
We are always grateful to our detractors who spent the time to provide us with detailed feedback and suggestions, so we have a better understanding of where we need to improve. We will continue to expand on our Help pages, and training modules, and introduce ‘micro’ training and tips over email.
Here are some existing areas where we have prioritized improvements, as well as some things to look forward to in 2021:
- Improvement Priorities: Direct Messaging, Forms & Permission Slips (translations & payment integrations), Conference Sign Ups, and Secure Docs.
- Things To Look Forward To: More Support for Community Members & Website Integrations for Community Groups, and More Partnerships & Integrations.
- Introducing Pure Contact: We know we need to improve upon parent contactability, so we launched our most ambitious project to date: Pure Contact. This is a comprehensive solution to bad parent/guardian contact data, which directly affects contactability rates. Our new contact data management feature keeps data in sync with your SIS at all times and performs contact verification to ensure confidence in data.
We look forward to making many exciting improvements to our platform offerings to address the on-going communications needs of districts and schools nationwide.
Our Sincerest Thanks To Everyone Who Filled Out Our Customer Satisfaction Survey!
If you’re an existing ParentSquare customer and have questions about any of the features mentioned above, or if you would like to turn on a particular feature to help your school further optimize its communications, please login to your account to contact our support team!
Not a customer? Learn how our unified school-home communications platform can help your district or school.