Clarity’s first year was incredibly successful and one of the primary reasons is the unique and exceptional support that we provide to both schools and families.
For schools, our client success team is staffed exclusively with individuals with significant experience in K-12 financial aid and admission, with each member of the team bringing at least a decade of experience. These client success managers act as an extension of the school’s financial aid team, leading the school through onboarding and helping throughout the year with everything from training and methodology to assistance with complex files.
Our family support team is composed of full-time, U.S. based employees that provide support via email, phone and chat in both English and Spanish. The commonality between all members of our support team is that they have empathy for the people whom they serve and care deeply about providing a seamless experience to families in need of assistance. In fact, our average response time to family inquiries across all channels is under 10 minutes.
With dozens of new schools joining Clarity every week, a question that we often receive is, “How do you plan to scale your support?” There are really two key aspects of scaling our support:
- Looking at quantitative data and anecdotal feedback from our team, schools and parents to determine the right ratio of support team members to schools/families.
- Hiring great people as we expand the number of schools we partner with to maintain the right ratio of support team members to schools/families.
While we are always looking at data and seeking feedback, we are very confident about staffing the right ratio of support team members to serve schools for the next year. We are also very fortunate to have a long list of qualified candidates interested in joining both our family support and client success teams.
In all transparency, our biggest challenge is that we don’t yet know how many schools will join Clarity for the upcoming season. The sooner schools sign on, the greater choice they will have in their onboarding time frame and the better we will be able to plan for accommodating all of our new school partners!
We expect that a lot of schools will join Clarity this upcoming season, as we have already almost doubled the number of schools from our first season. In many markets Clarity is reaching a tipping point – where it is the platform that the majority of schools are adopting. As this happens, many additional schools are continuing to join Clarity because they see the benefits of the platform and don’t want to be in the position of asking families to pay a second fee to fill out a more cumbersome application that the majority of schools in their market do not accept.
While we will continue to hire new team members as new schools join Clarity throughout the late summer and early fall, the sooner we know how many schools will be partnering with us, the easier it will be for us to plan accurately for our staffing. Given these realities, we are announcing a new tiered onboarding fee structure to encourage schools to finalize their decision to join Clarity as soon as possible:
- Schools signing now: $500
- Schools signing on or after July 1: $600
- Schools signing on or after August 1: $750
While we are absolutely committed to providing the same high level of service to all schools regardless of when they join Clarity, in the spirit of partnership, we ask that schools seek to finalize their decision as soon as possible. Doing so will make it easier for us to hire great new team members and manage the onboarding process as efficiently as possible.
We will continue to provide schools and families with a truly unique level of support because we view it as a fundamental aspect of our mission and will continue to invest in it as such. Clarity is not just a product, but a partner to every school and family that we serve as well as to the entire industry. This plan that we have created to scale our support represents our commitment to continuing that partnership.
To learn about how we make it easy to complete onboarding in just 5-7 hours of your time, check out this blog post from Jennifer Sheppard, one of our client success managers.
Sounds too good to be true? Watch this short video from The Dalton School in New York City about how they found onboarding “unexpectedly easy.”
