In late 2021, we started an ongoing partnership with Japanese for Moockies, one of LATAM's largest Japanese learning communities.
This partnership involved branding, service design, and brand strategy. With considerable impact in brand perception, internal processes and sales, this is one of our most successful partnerships to date.
Our client is an online Japanese school that provides short and immersive language courses. In less than two years, our client has built a large community of Latin American students, passionate about Japanese culture.
One of the founders approached us with the need to improve internal processes, build a scalable workflow, and optimize the customer experience.
According to the client:
- Most students relied on customer support to finish their sign-up process.
- The sales team was unpredictable, and performance varied widely across representatives.
- There were knowledge silos, which forced the founders to step in and do the sales team’s work for them.
The Challenges
Internal & Workflow-Related
- To decentralize those client-facing tasks that used to constantly fall on the founders’ shoulders.
- To improve internal communication by implementing new workflows and task automation.
Customer Journey-Related
- To optimize the customer journey to make it more convenient, immersive, and agile.
- To eliminate friction.
- To enhance the CX through a stronger sense of community. In marketing terms, to “build customer loyalty” by “constantly providing value”.
Sales-Related
- To increase conversions & facilitate upsells.
Our Solution
During this project, a CX-oriented brand consultant and the creative director collaborated with the client, and three key departments: Design, UX & Sales.
Our team studied the e-Learning industry, as well as different tools to optimize the customer journey, and how to customize it to offer a memorable and unique experience to both new and old students.
Momentum
In just a month, we managed to achieve all of our goals.
And in the meantime, new ones arrived. We thought of these challenges as the pieces of a domino: solving the first problem would lead us to solve the rest consecutively.
We focused on building an intuitive and scalable workflow using the platform our client was already used to working on (if it isn’t broken, don’t fix it). We held various meetings with each internal team and discussed everything thoroughly with the intention of developing a multidisciplinary approach where every member of every team felt that their work mattered.
Some of the concrete changes we made included:
Internal & Workflow-Related
- Creating a common knowledge base that could serve all teams.
- Implementing no-code tools, to shift the developers’ focus from automation to more impactful tasks.
- Crafting automated responses and clear communication guidelines for the sales & customer support teams.
Customer Journey-Related
- Creating content that would minimize the need for customer support representatives, by putting relevant product information in front of the right users as soon as possible.
- Optimizing the school’s sign-up forms.
- Defining brand voice principles.
The First Results
The first campaign that fully implemented the new changes had amazing results. A few days after it ended, our client’s sales department sent us a report, which showed:
- A total campaign ROI of 77.8%
- A growth rate of 15.3% on their strongest social media channel (Instagram), which reached 1.5M accounts, increasing the engagement rate by 67.9%
- 50.2% increase in monthly revenue.
Branding & Naming
Another key obstacle the client was facing had to do with branding. Basically, since the school started as a side-gig, its naming, visuals and other aspects of its brand weren’t fitting for a large language learning community with aspirations to diversify. The brand’s assets had been DIY’d for most of its history, and the brand’s name was very similar to a popular product in another niche. These shortcomings had to very clear effects:
- Lack of trust from certain key demographics.
- They exposed the brand to potential liabilities.
Collaborating with external advisors and internal teams alike, we designed a new name, not only for the Japanese language school, but also for its parent brand, which presented the same problems.
We renamed the parent brand as “Moocks”, a mispelling of the acronym for “Massive Open Online Course.” The community around the academy was nicknamed “Moockies”, and the Schools within the larger academy were named “[Subject] for Moockies”, putting the community at the forefront.
This renaming was welcomed by the community.Additionally, we reimagined the Japanese school’s logo & visual language.
The Future
We’re still working with Moocks, helping develop new products and community-driven initiatives. As of this writing, there’s an ongoing community contest to name two original characters that will represent the brand and its community. These characters were designed by Andrés Toledo-Margalef, the same illustrator that reimagined the Japanese for Moockies logo.