Talking to Tutors
When my co-founder Mike and I launched the first Wyzant website from our living room in Reston, VA in 2005, we’d just graduated from college. Neither of us had any idea what Wyzant would become.
We recently celebrated Wyzant’s 14th birthday. It’s amazing how quickly the time has gone!
Back then, I was a full-time math tutor, crisscrossing northern Virginia in my car to help struggling high school students get back on track. As Wyzant grew, so did my sense of purpose and passion for bringing 1-to-1 tutoring to more people. Since then, Wyzant has been my only job. I think of it as a wonderful journey, certainly with ups and downs, but always accompanied by incredible colleagues, tutors and students. Simply put, Wyzant is my life’s work. I love this business and its mission, team, and users.
Over the last three months, I spoke personally to over 100 tutors on the phone. It was a tremendous experience that really brought me back to my time as a tutor and the reason I started Wyzant. Our conversations were wide-ranging. You had tons of valuable insights and ideas. You asked tough questions. It was clear from my first call that, just like me, you all care deeply about tutoring, and Wyzant too. Listening to your stories, critiques, victories, and disappointments taught me so much more than I could possibly relate in a few hundred words in a blog post. Below are my top four takeaways:
The most important value Wyzant provides you is a steady stream of high-quality tutoring opportunities.
One of the ironies of being a tutor is that when you’re successful, you often work yourself right out of a job by helping to make your students self-sufficient. This means that as tutors, you constantly need to refill your client list, and you rely on Wyzant for this in varying degrees.
Many tutors expressed a sense of confusion and frustration with the process of acquiring new students. These chats have made it clear to me that I haven’t done a good job explaining how we go about getting new students to Wyzant, and how you can better manage the process on your end.
In many ways, Wyzant is the digital marketing department of your business: you pay Wyzant, in the form of the platform fee, to provide you with valuable student leads. If we don’t generate business for you, you don’t pay us. This is important because, to put it plainly, marketing is difficult, expensive, and time-consuming…even more so for independent tutors. Most tutors I know would rather spend their time tutoring than learning and managing complex marketing tactics.
Marketing to new students is the biggest single investment we make at Wyzant. We spend millions of dollars on it, and the majority of our in-house teams are focused on driving new students into the marketplace. Overall, Wyzant is doing a decent job at our digital marketing duties. We generate thousands of new tutoring opportunities daily, and that number continues to increase. Unfortunately, it can be hard to predict and manage the volume of new opportunities you receive. And the reality is not all tutors get the same number of opportunities (I suggest you read this article in which I explain more about how Wyzant’s search algorithms work, and how to rank higher).
Some of the specific feedback I heard pointed to very clear areas for improvement on the part of Wyzant. For instance, we’ve had a problem in recent years with spam sneaking through our filters, which is frustrating and a waste of your time. Additionally, our jobs board isn’t working as efficiently as it could. (I encourage you to revisit this blog post to make sure you’re maximizing your job applications.) And, for analytically inclined tutors, there isn’t a lot of data available about your tutoring business, such as your profile and messages, which would help you better manage and control the amount of new business you receive.
There is clearly room for improvement in the area of generating and managing new students. Please know these things are on our radar. As we begin on our 2020 planning process, we will be investigating ways to address the above feedback with technology and product solutions, as well as improved user experience and communication.
You spend A LOT of time on Wyzant, so details matter.
I am really proud of our platform and believe it’s the best in the market. This includes our web and mobile apps, customer support, payment processing, profile management, scheduling and messaging tools, online learning tool, educational content resources, and everything else Wyzant offers. We have invested heavily in it over the years, and it works well.
The platform, however, is not perfect. No platform is. Frankly, Wyzant may never be, but I believe we should always be working to make it as exceptional as possible. The reality is that over the last few years, we’ve focused so much time and resources on generating more student leads that there hasn’t been as much time as we’d have liked to continuously better the various aspects of the Wyzant platform. I heard an impressive amount of consistent feedback about improving the following areas:
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Online learning tool reliability and functionality
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Messaging and scheduling enhancements
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Mobile app improvements
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More controls for your profile and account
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Jobs board experience and functionality
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Referral process bugs
In addition to these, there’s plenty of other potential advancements that could be made to Wyzant. I’d be lying if I said we were going to be able to do them all anytime soon, but I can tell you that we’re investing in the platform more in 2020 than we have in the past few years. Since we can’t do everything that is important to everyone, we’ll have to make tough trade-offs. In order to prioritize the most important initiatives, we will weigh a) how many users are affected, b) how much value can be created for you and Wyzant, and c) development and maintenance costs.
You want more communication from us about updates, insights, and a sense of what to expect.
For many of you, Wyzant is a big part of your livelihood. You’re heavily invested, having accrued hundreds or even thousands of hours by using the platform. For others, you’re working hard to build up your tutoring business. What all tutors share is your vested interest in Wyzant. It therefore makes sense to keep you in the know about changes that may affect you - large and small - and give you more information about what we’re working on, and why.
I’m happy to tell you that we’re stepping up the frequency and transparency of our communications. While it’s not practical for me to speak to tutors on a 1:1 basis regularly, I can certainly help remove some of the mystery by writing more blog posts like this and even conducting webinars from time to time to share my perspective and relevant information. Additionally, teams at Wyzant including Customer Support, Product, and Technology will all contribute key information to future blog articles and emails. A recent example is our Term 3 Wyzant Insights.
I haven’t forgotten about the students, either. The better we communicate with them, the easier your job becomes. For instance, I heard from a number of you that:
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Many students are initially confused about whether they are contacting a tutor for in-person or online tutoring
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Students sometimes don’t realize they need to put payment information on file to continue the process of scheduling lessons
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Some students struggle with understanding how to access and use the online platform
To be clear, there are already many explanations about processes, policies, and other info in the Wyzant help center, and we send dozens of contextual emails designed specifically to explain various aspects of the platform for tutors and students. We also have informative blog posts and an excellent Customer Support team standing by to help. Even so, I know there is more we can do to improve our communication, and we’ve already begun. I look forward to being in closer touch.
The most-established tutors listed on Wyzant were unhappy about the 75% platform fee change.
As I listened to tutors explain how this change made them feel, it struck me that I may have not adequately articulated the reasons behind the change. Yes, part of why we made the change was to enable new tutors to gain traction on Wyzant. But the main reason for the change was to create a more predictable, stable fee structure so that we can invest more aggressively and effectively in generating new student tutoring opportunities. As I mentioned in my first point above, we see this as the biggest value Wyzant adds to your business.
What also came across (loud and clear!) was that this change caused the most established tutors listed on Wyzant to feel unappreciated. This is definitely not how we feel. I assure you that you are extremely appreciated and valuable to our business.
The most established tutors often have higher conversion (percentage of leads that turn into actual students) and retention (longevity of student relationships) rates. They also receive better ratings from students on average. Wyzant’s algorithms accounts for all these statistics favorably, and these tutors therefore tend to enjoy more visibility and with it, more tutoring opportunities. The old 80/20 rule applies to Wyzant too, with the minority of tutors contributing the majority of the tutoring volume. For all the reasons above, as a business, this population of tutors is highly important to our business.
On the other hand, tutors who were previously at the 30% fee level or above are highly motivated by the new 25% rate. They realize they still need to put in the work to build their ratings, and that until that happens, they may have to offer a lower or more flexible rate than more established tutors. We have to keep in mind that many tutors on Wyzant are still struggling to get their first few students.
In closing, I want to reiterate my sincere gratitude for all the wonderful tutors on Wyzant. Our goal is for Wyzant to be a valuable service to you and your students. In exchange, you are providing a tremendous amount of value to both students and Wyzant’s business. I’m committed to holding up our end of the bargain, and I look forward to being in closer communication with you all. Stay tuned for another article from me in the coming weeks.
With Appreciation,
Andrew Geant
Wyzant CEO