Kaizen means continuous improvement. And that's a very good thing.

We met with one of our clients last week, a small liberal arts college. Their solution is up and running, and we started our monthly results review meetings. The purpose of these sessions is to review the results, isolate best practices thus far, and develop recommendations for things we can do differently so the results can continuously improve.  I love this process for a lot of reasons. Here are a few:

1)    It provides a forum for the team, consisting of both client and DIG staff, to talk strategically about what’s happening, what it means, and how it will help us accomplish the objective. We get to focus the members of the team who have lapsed into “just do it” mode on the reason we started this process in the first place.

2)    It gives the client a chance to tell us about things that are happening within their organization. In many cases, things that we can help with come up for the first time in these meetings.

3)    It helps the folks at DIG walk a mile in the shoes of the people they have to interact with on a daily basis. When pieces don’t come as fast as planned or edits take longer than expected, it’s good for us to understand that our client has a million other things to do, too, just like we do.

4)    Lastly, the cornerstone of our value proposition is RESULTS.  We’re not here to simply do tasks and get paid for work done. We’re here to get results for our clients.  These meetings refocus the team on the objective.

This was a particularly good call because our client has seen a 72% improvement in applications, a 27% improvement in the number of students accepted, and most importantly, a 71% increase in the number of deposits made over this time last year. They were all pretty happy. Despite their delight, I’m not ready to recline on a chaise lounge with some bon bons. There is something going on with people scheduling visits on-line that I want to dig into (no pun intended), and I want to turn around the messaging to get prospective students to visit faster than we’ve been doing. There is always room for improvement and because we have built tracking into the entire process, we get smarter with every step and achieve the holy grail of marketing—continuous improvement.

Everybody on the team has his or her marching orders as output from the meeting.  We’re refocused, re-invigorated, and re-committed.  We’re hot on the trail of engaged, prospective students who visit, apply, and enroll! Can’t wait until next month!