Distance learning

Customer satisfaction is of paramount importance and Demand Vs Supply needs to be managed remotely. 

Krishnan Ganesh is the founder and Chairman of TutorVista (www.tutorvista.com), a personalised 24 hour online tutoring service. A seasoned entrepreneur, Ganesh is known for starting green field ventures and helping them develop into robust, successful market leaders. He was also the founder of Customer Asset which was later acquired by ICICI, he was instrumental in increasing the company's staff from Zero to 4,000. 

During Customer Asset Venture, he was instrumental in using the Indian resources for US businesses. In Nov 2005, when he started Tutor Vista, his main focus was on overcoming the challenges faced while running Customer Asset, hence a business which was virtual. Ganesh shares his experiences.....

Excerpts:

The three main Challenges faced by Customer Asset were Transportation, quality of Food and Huge Capital Expenditure.

In early 2000 when Customer Asset started they faced problems from the police, they could not understand the nature of a business which required young boys and girls to be picked up and dropped at 3 or 4 in the morning. The company actually had the Police commissioner and his senior team visit the BPO, to witness the working of a call centre. 

Quality of Food was the second major challenge, novelty of any caterer serving in the canteen lasts only for a week, and then the complaints keep pouring in.

We always find the large campuses of IT & IT services companies impressive, but the cost of setting up a campus with huge infrastructure requirement is capital intensive and most companies totter under the pressure.

So the solution for all these woes was to set up a Virtual Business, which did not require transportation nor food. Tutor Vista employs 600 plus highly qualified teachers, fulltime from 23 cities across India, and most above 45 years of age. Who in turn tutor 3000 odd students from all over UK and USA from the age group of 6 to 45 years of Age, from the comfort of their home, on as diverse subjects as Enlish, Math, Economics  !!

Now we had to overcome a new set of challenges!!

For starters there was the Recruiting, Training and certifying of 600 trainers with out actually seeing or meeting them. The entire process had to happen remotely. The solution was to use the same technology platform used for tutoring the students; by the time a tutor is trained she is very comfortable using the software.

The second challenge is to keep the employees engaged continuously in a Remote Distributed Workforce where no social interaction is available....here the tutor's passion and love for teaching keeps them going. Being "The coolest, tech savvy granny in the neighbourhood" could be another motivator and the attrition rate is less than 2%!!

Maintaining continuity was the third challenge in a virtual workspace. There are no alternative systems as in an office or if power goes off, Internet goes off or the tutor falls sick.  Informing the student is out of the question as a teacher can't make a international call, hense a mechanism of allocating a substitute teacher was developed and the system automatically pushes details of the student details to the substitute teacher, so she can take the training forward !

How to monitor quality control remotely - Ganesh explains that after each training session, the student is required to fill a feed back which contains, Thumbs up or down satisfaction score, Relevance of the content, Communication and the Pace of teaching. The rating will be on a scale of 1 to 5 and 75% of the students oblige. Tutor Vista evolved then ploughs back the feedback into the system.

Rate of renewal is also another indicator for a tutor's effectiveness, if 4 out of 5 contracts  are renewed, the trainer is rated good.

There is also an Elite tutor's panel, who monitor at least one session of each tutor on a random basis, where a tutor's communication, attitude towards students i.e. rewarding a student performance by praise or  encouraging students on their communication skill etc. are evaluated and the tutors are allocated more training or are recommended for refresher training. 

Thousands of simultaneous, real time, voice based sessions need to be conducted on the portal, apart from thousands of student session details, schedules, accounts and tutor details!! 

If the Amazon portal is of a complexity of 6 out of 10, Tutor vista had a complexity of 8 out of 10.  The portal had to be highly scalable, no ready to use standard software was available, and Tutor Vista developed its technology platform by investing 40 man hours, using Dot Net technology. It's a Voice over IP and a whiteboard (webex) technology that is integrated into the platform. Enhancements continue on a ongoing basis with 52 people working on the maintenance and improvement of the portal.

Customer satisfaction is of paramount importance and Demand Vs Supply needs to be managed remotely. So optimisation algorithms were developed to plan & schedule unforeseen glitches like excessive cancellations due to a weekend baseball game or excess requests for sessions, with shortages in tutors

A monthly fee of USD 100 entitles the student to unlimited training for a month, and even baby sitting is more expensive than that!! 

It's a continuously Evolving and improving business and Business Gyan wishes Ganesh Happy Remote Tutoring !!

Q. What happens if a tutor's system is not working or if internet is not connecting?

Some times a tutor in Trichy is unable to login or her computer has a problem. The tutor has to start the session at 1.30am IST, and logs in at 1.02 am, if she has not logged in at 1.03am, a e-mail & sms automatically reaches the tutor asking him to log in. At 1.05 am operation center, support staff actually calls the tutor to find out if everything is fine,

At 1.07 am if the tutor is still not online, the system automatically reassigns the session to a substitute tutor who is of the same grade with same skill sets. The details of the student,  of the previous session etc. are pushed to the substitute tutor. When the student comes online at 1.30 am, he is given a choice to reschedule the session - if he prefers to continue with his regular tutor or the substitute tutor suggests a test or a new session. 

Q. How did you acquire over 3000 clients?   What was your marketing spend ?

In virtual business reaching out to prospects is a challenge, we used online marketing, when someone searches for help in Math or tutoring, our advertisement pops up, when they click on that and visit our website, someone in India will chat with them. 

Getting the first customer is simple; it depends on the money you're willing to spend to acquire customers. Consumer marketing is expensive unlike in B2B sales, where you meet the prospect face to face and make a presentation. It takes a long time in any consumer business to break even. Acquiring customers is not difficult, acquiring customers profitably is difficult.

It's a unique concept and gets extensive PR.We also do some Affiliated marketing, on some popular web sites, if parents or students are visiting the site, we paste a link and the site gets about 10% commission on sales.

He was speaking at a Panel Discussion organized by Businessgyan and Tasmac on the topic ‘Virtual Businesses'.

Compiled by Ms. Mangal D. Karnad for Businessgyan 

Issue BG79 Oct07