Posted: February 15, 2022
#7: You value customer support
Unlike many organizations, real people answer phone calls and e-mails at Better Kid Care (BKC). BKC is not a big, multi-department company. It is a team of fourteen dedicated employees. Four of those employees compose the customer service team. They answer around 400 calls a month. In the first month of the COVID-19 pandemic those calls quadrupled as child care facilities closed and educators used that time to complete required professional learning. One staff person smiled as she explained that sometimes people call the 800# for things that are really out of the boundaries of BKC work. "They want us to walk them through the entire process of opening a child care center in their state. They call us because we are the only ones that answer our phones."
BKC is constantly making system improvements based on feedback from our customers and customer service team. Most recently, the team is particularly excited about new system functionality that nearly eliminates learners creating multiple accounts. In the past, identifying and combining multiple accounts held by the same person was a time-consuming job. This improvement frees up the staff to do other tasks in support of the BKC courses like checking that they display properly on Safari, Firefox, Chrome, and several other browsers. Once a course is ready to go, the team then submits the course for approval in seventeen state registries. While our courses are approved in 49 out of 50 states and are completed by people in many locations around the globe, including military installations, some states require this extra step of approval of content.
In 2015, BKC reported to three states. It now reports to sixteen. Six states accept an uploaded roster of completions, but ten other states require that completions be entered manually, one completion at a time. This is a tremendous amount of work considering that in 2021 BKC issued a total of 303,700 certificates. Of those, 145,722 were reported to the user's state registry. On average, BKC issues over 25,000 certificates each month. One staff person spends 95 percent of her time reporting to states. Certain times of the year are busier than others for PD completions. Typical surges happen in April and May, September and October, and December.
This is all part of the effort that BKC puts forth every day to make sure that the resources that reach the ECE/OST educator are practical and meaningful, and that they meet the needs of the learners in the field.
We want to do our very best, so you can do YOUR very best.
