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If your service business offers any type of individual lessons, or personal development, you may be torn on what to standardize in your policies and what to personalize to provide the best customer experience for private instruction. Here, we share the strategies and division that leads to the most success for you and your teaching-team.

A company offering private instruction in any discipline, or area, has a unique challenge amongst small business owners and the products entrepreneurs champion to earn revenue. Instruction of any kind is a service, and it’s a person-to-person business built on relationships.

In order to manage a team of professionals who provide instruction to a range of clients effectively, it is crucial to determine what processes should be standardized, or left to the instructor to personalize as part of the service. In many ways, these types of businesses actually serve two clients. The instructor, or provider, and the student, or client.

The balancing act for an owner is serving both sides of this equation while maintaining a standard of service as your “product”. Any business that does not have a reliable product will eventually fail. And yet, in order to provide effective instruction to a student, or group, a member of your teaching team must be elevated to a leadership position with their assigned clients to generate results. Some degree of autonomy is needed.

Given this challenge and internal balance needed, where does the line fall for providers of services and creating the best customer experience for private instruction?

The Importance of Teachers for Private Instruction Service Businesses

Private instruction includes many creative, athletic, and educational disciplines. For example, music, art, and dance are big ones. Different sports, which involve teamwork and group coordination require one-on-one teachers too, like golf and tennis instructors who help with technical development and specialized training. Private instruction includes life coaching and tutoring for all ages and subjects too – from language to academic subjects to test prep.

All these areas may seem quite different in scope, but they share a lot in common with business needs and challenges owners of service-based businesses face. How do you empower your team of instructors while creating a consistent experience across all your clients – and why is this even important?

Instruction as a product relies heavily on the ‘teacher’, or provider of the instruction. For all the services listed above, the fulfillment of a sale relies on a member of your team to give a learning experience at a set time to a client. Whatever the area of expertise, your instructor is a leader of their ‘students’, or the clients enrolled in the service.

To successfully work with a school, group, or agency framework, instructors need the flexibility to be dynamic and respond to the needs of their students in real time and have a reasonable sense of command in their lessons too. A bit of authority in the moment is needed to ask a single student, or a group, to respond to your guidance if you are leading a lesson.

Example:  a yoga teacher who specializes in on-location and one-on-one instruction through a mobile yoga studio would be unable to help her students as much as she does now if she did not have the ability to cancel a class on her end directly with a recurring client, or reschedule a lesson directly when needed.  She also needs the autonomy to adapt a workout routine for a student who is unable to complete the recommended routine due to an injury on the spot.  Too much command of these details disables the instructor from being able to fully manage their schedule and what is best for the student in the moment.

On a greater level, an instructor on your team who provides your service also needs the support YOU have to offer as the leader of the organization behind them. Though the instructor is giving a service to clients and passing on the special skill they possess, they are also working within a framework that – when done well – gives them the ability to focus on the quality of lessons they give, not the ins and outs of administrative details.

The Importance of a Company for Providers of Private Instruction

A contrast to the importance of instructors for service businesses and their role in leading clients and creating progress in their private instruction, the agency itself and what it provides is essential too and should benefit BOTH the instructor and client.

The role of a private instruction service company is to provide a foundation for conceptual work and guarantee all clients will receive the same experience across the entire program. All instructors are working under the same, set standards to consider their work complete, and everyone should benefit from the company’s good reputation. Different clients should have similar experiences with your product across different teachers, because everyone is following the same set policies and objectives.

Instructors should gain the advantage of protection from a service business’s policies and a figurative shield around their time to make sure it is protected.

For owners, standardizing these operational aspects of your service is what builds the shared base everyone stands on in your business. This area is where you should concentrate your efforts to create new policies and systems that all instructors follow and that help them succeed.

As a leader, you are literally building the terms for a conceptual product to ensure your instructors are properly compensated for their work and that this expectation is controlled. Clients are also assured that they will have specific work delivered according the expectation set at the start of the engagement and that their teacher is tailoring to them as an individual. Fulfilling these expectations on both sides leads to brand development, as well as trust that is grown with your entire base.

How to set up the best customer experience for private instruction

Based on this symbiosis between the providers of private instruction and the companies serving as their framework, we have laid out our go-to best practices around how to set expectations for private lessons and the areas that will make the best connection with your team.

For business owners, or leaders of an instructional team, keep your primary objectives in mind as a guidepost when you decide to standardize a process for your organization. Your goals are to…

Ensure the customer experience across all your clients is consistent and that everyone is receiving quality instruction
Ensure your instructional-staff feels supported and empowered, not micro-managed

Avoiding micro-management does not mean NO-management, and the two can be confused more and more in the recent years. Good leaders do not want to negatively impact their teams in any way, but not acting on a consistent issue and creating a resolution actually hurts everyone in the long-run. If you are putting thought into the suggestions you give your team and are observing trends, rather than nit-picking, chances are you are warranted in the change you’d like to implement. It’s all about HOW you bring about standardization within your company.

Before we dive into the specific “private instruction customer experience checklist” with areas we recommend standardizing vs. leaving to instructors to personalize, it’s even more important to go over best practices for giving operational updates (i.e. new policies) to your team.

I have personally found that explaining why a change is important to you, what benefit it will bring, and goal you have as a leader leads to the best results all around. This requires transparency and truly evaluating if a policy you would like to implement is best for your organization and those giving the lessons. But when you have reason to act, the end result is typically cooperation…but with a few who need extra attention on your team.

Remember, always be patient with those who need the extra encouragement, or help to make a change to their routine.  In an instruction-based business, treating your teachers as clients is the best way to keep a balanced offering on both sides.  Your entire product is dependent on your provider’s work, which makes the business relationship unique with your staff.

Areas to Standardize in a Private Instruction Service Business

Keeping operational policies strong and comprehensive in service-based businesses is the best way to build a foundation for lessons and instruction to stand on. These policies include things like arrival procedures, billing policies, cancellation policies, and any general rules of engagement that are important to your industry.

For example, when managing a music school, we never allowed minors to be at home alone for their lesson, or with no other adult on site, as it introduced both liability for our organization and extreme discomfort for teachers. This operational policy was helpful for maintaining a good working relationship and is an example of the type of comprehensive policies service businesses should implement.

The benefit to your staff is easy to explain with avoiding situations where children were home alone for a lesson, but with day to day items, like reporting policies, timing policies for arrival and starting sessions, a little more framing may be needed. Explaining why these policies help with the overall customer-experience and creating a successful teaching practice will help your instructors learn valuable skills for any future, independent clients too.

Here are the main areas to standardize in a private instruction business:

Cancellation Policies (sessions and overall enrollment)
Billing Policies
No-show policies
Arrival and end times
Welcome packets and End surveys
For teachers: how to start a new client
For teachers: how to disengage with a client if the instruction is not going well
Lesson reminders and confirmation emails

In addition to these operational areas, it is important to outline the scope of what will be learned, or achieved in a lesson, term, or for the long-run. You need to know how to set expectations for private lessons and teach your staff and clients what these are. All sides of your business should have the same goal and product in mind when starting the engagement.

If you are a ballet school, outlining what the Ballet II course entails and will develop for the student’s skill set will set the course-work expectation broadly, while also leaving room for the teacher to customize.

PRO-TIP: For service businesses providing ongoing instruction, we recommend basing billing on the amount of time scheduled, or a standing time reservation, rather than specific learning results. If the instructor is delivering the quality lessons promised within the scope of your program, the end results the student is able to garner from the experience is out of your control. What we can quantify is the amount of time invested by the instructor.

Areas to Personalize in a Private Instruction Service Business

For a company to provide the best customer experience for private instruction with a staff of teachers, personalizing the learning experience helps tremendously. By this, we mean allowing the individual instructors on your team to create their own approach for each client’s lessons, or each class / group’s sessions, so they can apply their own, unique voice to the lesson. The instructor should also be able to respond in the moment to any adaptations needed for their clients.

By making your instructor the topical authorities in your business, you empower them to lead their lessons with confidence and the ability to adapt. Your trade, or discipline, should be your teachers’ forte, essentially. If you are also a provider of instruction as an owner, you can serve a valuable role as a mentor to your staff and teaching best practices. We do not recommend enforcing closed creative approaches that are too detailed, as this is where your instructors can truly shine.

Here are the areas we recommend personalizing and leaving in the control of your instructors:

Exact teaching pace and methodology for each student (set best practices, not rules on this)
Approving additional sessions, or extra time requested by the client
Changing the scope of the lessons to a different focus
Pursuing outside events and opportunities – like extra tournaments, performances, or initiatives for a client.
Cancellations and scheduling – with recurring services, this can be worked out faster between client and your team member than calling the office to have a change approved.

By comparing the two lists of items to standardize and personalize for a private instruction business, you will notice that the core division is in the level of decision-making power we recommend you leave with your instructors. This is different than many industries where products are tangible, not based in personal development.

However, with person-to-person businesses, the true art is in setting up a framework that contains relationships effectively, while still allowing freedom for the teacher within the framework.

Ideally, you will be able to tell that this approach is working by how LITTLE you hear from your teaching staff in the way of complaints and administrative questions. Your goal, as an owner, is to make the business of the relationship seamless and easy. The instructor is then free to provide the best private lessons possible.

In Summary – the Private Instruction Customer Experience Checklist

If you run a service business that offers education, or instruction as your main offering, maintaining a strong relationship with your team of instructors is paramount in importance to your operation and future growth. Without this team, you have no product, so setting up conditions that empower your staff to get the best results on the business and education ends will lead to the most success.

To conclude, we have a very short checklist for owners that will help you create the best customer experience for private instruction within your organization:

Have you created operational polices for your clients and instructors defining how each lesson, or session works?
Have you created instructional guidance and how-tos for your teaching team?
Are the “must-haves” your business guarantees clients from your engagement clearly communicated to everyone?
Do you have a client welcome email prepared, as well as systems for lesson reminders and confirmation emails?

If these four points are set, your private instruction program is bound for success! We know every organization and team is nuanced – AstroCat creates custom plans and infrastructure solutions for a vast range of service businesses.

Contact us if you need help with optimizing your operations, or working with an instructional team! We achieve elegant and intuitive solutions for small businesses and would love to help you reach for the stars!