how do you handle this ambiguity and lack of control? as a manager, how do you keep yourself from jumping in and answering tickets when more and more tickets flow into the queue?

at magoosh, we face this challenge — all the people and no control over when they work — but with any good challenge, a creative solution is waiting to be unearthed. instead of looking for a solution among other customer support teams, we adapted an idea popularized by uber and lyft: surge pricing!

over the past year, we experimented with increasing pay when we were inundated with questions as a way to nudge our test prep experts to jump in and answer questions. i’d like to share the results of this experiment with you. i hope you can learn from our experience. maybe it will inspire you to try something similar with your teams.

the background

“wait, kevin, why don’t you have control over when your agents work?” you might ask. “can’t you easily avoid this challenge?”

yes, we could avoid this scenario. we could hire a full-time staff, or even a larger part-time staff, and schedule their time to handle ticket levels. but that’s not how we’ve approached support at magoosh up to this point.

we hire teachers and tutors with expertise across multiple tests as independent contractors. our “customer support agents” work independently to answer questions about exams: from coordinate geometry on the gre, to critical reasoning on the gmat, to dual reading passages on the sat, to speaking strategies on the toefl. the people with this type of expertise tend to be phd students, classroom teachers, private tutors, or recent graduates, all of whom have fluctuating and dynamic schedules.

as independent contractors, they set their own schedules, finding time to answer questions in between their other commitments. this flexibility is great for them. they don’t have to tell us when they will work or notify us of changes — they just work when they can.

this is great for us too. we don’t have to keep a schedule or approve schedule changes. no one has to worry about shifts or coverage in the traditional sense. all our hires are experts and already know how to teach. we can hire the best people from across the country.

but it’s not all sugar plums and gumdrops. we’ve traded control for uncertainty, and as such, we’re left to experiment and find solutions to certain challenges — will all the questions get answered today?

hypothesis

surge pricing works for companies like uber and lyft, so we wanted to find out if we could make it work in customer support.

the process was straightforward enough: email everyone on the team at the beginning of the day and tell them that they’ll be paid 25% more for any work they do during a specific time period.

when we see that our demand (tickets) is rising and our supply (people who can answer questions) is decreasing, we’d send out an email to the team. a situation similar to this contrived example.

if surge pay worked, we’d see this happen:

our supply rushes to meet demand and our students begin to receive answers to their questions. demand begins to drop off as our tutors answer questions, and the incentive of surge pay is no longer needed.

how it worked

when we “turned on” surge pay, we sent an email to our team, letting them know that surge pay is in effect for a certain amount of time, usually the rest of the day.

here’s an example of an email sent to the team:

since june 2015, we’ve had surge pay 26 times. each of these surge pay experiments was different, but not by design. sometimes they were for a full day, sometimes they were across multiple days, and sometimes they would only last an afternoon.

this variation was not for pure experimental purposes. due to consistent high demand across multiple days, we’d have surge pay across multiple days. or sometimes we waited to see what the morning would be like, to see if people would jump in and answer questions, and then later, send out the surge pay email. other times we’d check the queue in the morning and know that we needed to flip the switch.

results

the graphs below show nearly all the surge pay days in 2015. each vertical line represents the day before surge pay. i’ve decided to mark these days because it gives a better picture of what we were looking at when we decided to start surge pay. to understand the results of surge pay, we need to look at what happened the day after the line.

let’s look at some of these days to evaluate the success of surge pay. on 6/23/2015, we had roughly 280 tickets created — our demand — but only around 200 tickets updated — our supply. on 6/24/2015, i emailed the team to begin surge pay, and by the end of the day, supply surged to around 300 tickets. in this case, we can tentatively say that surge pay worked. the steep increase in tickets updated from 6/23 to 6/24 would indicated that we were able to encourage people to jump in and answer questions.

now let’s look at another day. on 6/25/2015, demand was only slightly above our supply. on 6/26, i sent out the email to start surge pay, and both supply and demand dropped off with supply never overtaking demand. surge pay didn’t seem to change anything this time.

in august we saw more mixed results. for the first time, we had back-to-back surge pay days. if we look at 8/10 – 8/12, we see a big spike at the beginning, but then a drop off in our supply and demand. ticket updates dropped below new tickets created. this might indicate that surge pay is only effective in short bursts. perhaps after the third day of surge pay, the team was less motivated to jump in.

this brings up some points that we need to consider when looking at the results of surge pay. we can’t conclusively say that surge pay worked or not. at this stage, we can only have hunches and draw tentative conclusions because there is already so much variation in how much people work. there’s no way to know if surge pay influenced people to work or if those people already planned to work. take, for example, the steep increases in ticket updates on days without surge pay (6/15, 6/21, 6/27, 8/30, 9/8, 9/24, 9/26, and 9/27). when we look at a surge pay day, it’s hard to know for sure if this increase is similar to one of these days or due to an increase in pay. finally, we are implementing surge pay on days where demand is high. supply might naturally surge during these periods without us doing anything. ideally, we would a/b test surge pay and no surge pay at the same time, but that’s not fair to our test prep experts nor our students waiting for answers.

september offers us mixed results with surge pay. let’s look at the dates 9/9 – 9/13. on 9/9 there was definitely a gap in supply and demand before we sent out the email about surge pay. by the next day, supply overtook demand as we would expect.

over the next 3 days, both supply and demand fell, but supply stayed above demand, until 9/12 when supply dropped below demand again. it’s unclear why this happened. maybe the effects of surge pay are not effective over a long period of time. but if we look at the last day of surge pay (9/13) we see a spike in both supply and demand. during this time, supply does overtake demand.

what’s interesting is that we see a similar pattern when we look at the string of surge pays days later on from 9/17 – 9/20. supply overtakes demand, both drop off in the coming days, supply drops below demand towards the end, and on the final day, it surges. this is a fascinating pattern and we don’t have a good explanation to explain it.

learnings

at this point, we are not ready to draw any strong conclusions about surge pay. as you can see from the results, there are a lot of variables. the natural fluctuations in people working and ticket numbers makes it hard to draw clear correlations with surge pay.

even so, the preliminary results are positive enough for us to keep trying it. from the perspective of handling a backlog of tickets, surge pay has helped. it does bring down ticket numbers on days of high tickets. we are also expanding our definition of surge pay. it doesn’t have to be based on a percent increase in pay. we are now experimenting with rewards around number of tickets answered in a week, number of hours worked in a week, and first to answer 10 questions.

photo attributions:

1 – photo of uber app courtesy of gongto / shutterstock.com.

the post the uber of customer support appeared first on magoosh 2022年足球世界杯举办地.

this month we are highlighting one of the reasons students are so happy with magoosh: our test prep experts. our test prep experts are an amazing group of educators, on the front lines of helping magoosh students succeed on test day. the message above is emblematic of what they do everyday.

test prep experts help magoosh students. anytime a 30-60-90 triangle is hard to visualize inside a circle, or the word telling doesn’t seem to fit with the meaning of a sentence, or the difference between an integer and number is unclear, or the author’s opinion is neutral and not critical, or a student doesn’t know how to spend the next month studying, or it’s the last week before the test, magoosh test prep experts are there to help.

students can send their questions to help@www.catharsisit.com or click on the “help” tab when they’re logged in and one of our test prep experts will respond in less than 24 hours (usually less than that) with a detailed and personal answer. they diagnose student issues and respond with empathy and encouragement, putting students on the path to success.

everyday, i see messages like the one above. students return to emails from our test prep experts because they are so detailed and useful. our test prep experts answer hundreds of questions each week so that students can improve. in the end, students show up to the test with more knowledge and more confidence than they had before.

magoosh’s success is due, in no small part, to the wonderfully talented teachers who notice the particular nuances of each question from each student. for that, magoosh test prep experts stay blessed and stay happy! i hope you achieve whatever you desire in life.

the post student happiness report — december 2015 appeared first on magoosh 2022年足球世界杯举办地.

i love this message for two reasons.

first, this student is like many magoosh students. he’s a husband and a father. he’s working full-time, finding time to study for a test that will unlock his dream. he’s aspiring for more; more for himself and more for his family, and he knows that more education will help him achieve his dream. english is not even his native language, but that’s not stopping him.

the second reason and perhaps the best reason—this student never paid for magoosh. he was able to achieve all of this success, and stoke, because of the free material we produce. he was watching youtube videos and reading our toefl and gre blog—all free and all stellar. yes, it is stellar prep material that will benefit any student. before you pigeonhole me as a biased braggart, let me explain.

if you spent a week with our content creators, you’d be cornered into the same opinion. step into magoosh and you’ll see chris and mike eviscerate each other’s content with grins and smiles knowing they are going to end with something excellent. you’ll watch as kristin pours over our question pool, finding little gaps and inconsistencies that need correcting. stop by around 8pm on a tuesday and you’ll hear lucas recording video explanations.

spend a week with us and you’ll quickly learn that this group is wicked smart, and they care deeply about students. they are teachers. they are magooshers. they aren’t going to put anything into the world that is not excellent. the demands they place on quality are strict, and i am confident your arrive at the same conclusion as me—magoosh material, whether free or premium, is always stellar!

the post student happiness report — november 2015 appeared first on magoosh 2022年足球世界杯举办地.

work pain is a unique beast, though. usually, you can’t run off, banishing the pain from your observable universe. we have to face it. this recently became clear to me.

when magoosh was small, receiving around 500 questions per week, a few people were able to handle feedback from our students. students would find misspellings, misspeaks, errors, and mistakes in our lessons and questions. they’d let us know, and myself and a couple other people at magoosh would manually add the issues to asana where we track content errors and improvements.

when we grew, what we could do manually was now painful, nearing impossible to do. a year on, we had 1000+ questions per week and a team of remote test prep experts answering student questions and receiving content error emails. what had not changed was that i was still manually entering all this information into asana.

that was my pain. i needed to escape this pain. but how?

automate! that’s what you hear all the time. “oh, just automate that.” easy to hear, but hard to do, especially for me. i’d been teaching and tutoring for the past decade—not automating processes.

what people forget to say, though, is that automating is really just a form of problem solving. so my goal became problem solving, and even though automation was a tool that i used (poorly at times), i was able to make more progress by attacking the problem instead focusing automating.

what follows are the iterations of automating that i went through. i tried to include enough detail so that others could replicate what we did at magoosh.

zendesk emails and asana

my first attempt to automate our content improvement process started in zendesk, software we use to manage incoming student questions. i knew that i could forward a question in zendesk to an email address, and i knew that i could add a task in asana using an email address. so, i figured that’d be a great solution! let’s put the two together and see what happens.

creating an email from a ticket and sending it out is a two-part process: first, we have to setup an email target, and second, we have to use this target in a trigger. let’s start with adding the email target first:

manage (gear icon) > extensions > add target > email target

for the email address, go to the project in asana where the emails will be sent, and click on the down arrow next to the project name. there you will find “add tasks by email.”

copy the email address and drop it into the email address section and update the target. the first part is done.

now for the trigger. the goal of the trigger is to send off an email when a tag is added to a ticket and updated. for this case, i used the self-explanatory tag—content_improvement.

here are the conditions for my trigger:

i am using the content_improvement_sent tag to ensure that my trigger doesn’t fire more than once. if i didn’t add this tag, i’d have no way of controlling how many times an email is sent to asana from the same zendesk question.

now for the actual email. i want the body of the email to contain information from the zendesk questions, so i used the zendesk placeholder {{ticket.latest_comment_formatted}} to grab the last comment from the zendesk question. the hope was that when the remote tutor responds to the student, it would make it easier for the content team to know what to fix. i also added the url of the ticket so it would be easy to get back to the original message, which has links to the question or lesson that needs fixing.

(writing this now, i already know that this is not going to work. why would the last comment be useful for our content team? but i know more now than i knew then.)

with everything in place, i told our remote team to use the tag when they encountered a content error and waited for tasks to roll in.

here’s a sample of what i saw:

some of the tasks had relevant information, but we started to see information buried below a lot of back and forth conversations. or the information that was there, wasn’t enough for the content team to know what they needed to do. that lead to the content team digging through the zendesk to find the useful information.

this attempt did not work for a few reasons:

the information provided by the tutors was not always helpful or detailed enough to help our content team prioritize the issues or solve the problems.

1. i didn’t have enough control over how the the task was created in asana, which meant that there wasn’t enough consistency.
2. sometimes the ticket would have multiple back-and-forths, requiring the content team to spend a lot of time to understand the error.
3. and for some reason, it was repeating information in the task, such as the url to the zendesk question!

back to the drawing board.

hello zapier

even though the first attempt wasn’t a success, i knew what i could do to make it better: more control over how the tasks are created and create a better process for our remote team to follow.

with a little googling i found zapier—a tool for connecting different apps, such as asana and zendesk, without any coding. zapier gave me more control over the tasks created in asana, and i could use a lot more zendesk attributes, giving me more control over structuring the email, and thus the task, created in asana. sweet!

creating a zap is fairly easy. you need to link accounts, test that they are connected, and then you can start sending tickets from zendesk to asana.

zapier, for all the great control it does provide, i discovered two little crooked parts during the set up. i couldn’t just grab a ticket with a specific tag. zapier will only look at a specific view and grab tickets from that view, so i had to create a public view for tickets with the content_improvement tag. easy enough. i made a new view:

now i could choose the appropriate view in zapier.

and set up the message/task for asana:

the second crooked step was that i couldn’t get zapier to grab a private comment from the assignee (i guess not all zendesk attributes were available).the only solution i could find was to have zapier use the last body comment made on the ticket. that’s what i was doing before with the zendesk email, and i knew that the last comment wasn’t always helpful. to solve this problem, we needed a good process, an important part of making the automated content improvement process better.

creating a process

first, we had to structure the information that the remote team was sending. this is easy to solve with a macro. the macro will ensure that all the information our content team needs is right there, and our remote team doesn’t need to remember what to include. here is the text of the macro:

lesson/question title: [add lesson or question title here]

prompt id: [if it is a question, add the prompt id. if it is a lesson, delete all of this line]

author of lesson or question: [add the name of the author of the lesson/question. the lesson will have a picture of the instructor. the question author is listed under the admin section on the answer page

url: [url to question or lesson]

explanation of issue: [explain the error or issue]

using a macro provides other benefits besides structuring information. we can default the response to private since it would only confuse the student, and the macro will automatically add the tag. the goal of any good process is to make it easy to follow, especially in the flow of work. if the team knows about the macro, it will be very easy for them to be successful.

with the automation in place, tested, and successfully working, it was time to train the remote team. for any changes or updates like this, repetition of information is key. i sent out an email to explain the process and changes, and i wrote a doc with more detail and linked to it in the email. at the end of every month, we send out a newsletter, and so, i repeated the change there too. the hope is that if someone doesn’t see it the first time, they have an opportunity to see it again, and if they see it more than once then there’s a good chance that they will remember what to do.

here are the steps that we originally outlined for the process:

1. reply to the student, thanking them for pointing out the error and explaining that our content team will look at the error and prioritize fixing it. you can use a macro for part of your response: “content::thank you for your feedback”
2. update the ticket as open
3. return to the ticket.
4. use the macro: “content improvement / error in question or lesson” and fill out all the lines in the macro. make sure your comment is private. you should also see the content_improvement tag too.
5. update the ticket as solved

of course, nothing works perfectly. people forget. so i made sure to follow up with specific people to remind them about the new approach for the first week or so. i understand that it’s easy to forget a change like this. following up with people is part of the automation process.

soon enough, we had some success! the formatting made it easy to see the vital information. having the author makes it easy to assign the task out. links to the lesson or question, and a link to the ticket, means that the content team doesn’t need to search around for this information in the ticket. i can see who on the remote team filled out the information for easy follow up, and of course, a section that explains the error or issue.

iterate and make it better

at this point, we didn’t touch the process for a month or so. it worked well enough and was easy for our content team to prioritize tasks. but with time, we realized there was even more that we could do:

this extra little step was going to make the process even better. with it, we could leverage a feature in asana that identifies duplicates, thus making it much easier to see when something should become a high priority since it was affecting so many students.

for this change, we need to hop back to zapier and change a few things. we need to use “subject” to grab the title of the zendesk ticket, and we added “exam” as a custom ticket field recently, so we dropped that in the title too.

again, once the zap is in place, we have to update the remote team about the change in the process. this is a significant change too. they will need to actually change the title of the zendesk ticket! (i ran a test to make sure that changing the title in the zendesk ticket won’t do anything weird on the student’s side.) another round of emails, newsletters, and follow-ups so that everyone was on the same page about the new process:

1. reply to the student, thanking them for point out the error and explaining that our content team will look at the error and prioritize fixing it. you can use a macro for part of your response: “content::thank you for your feedback”
2. update the ticket as open
3. return to the ticket.
4. write a private comment (“internal note”) to the content team explaining the error. use the macro: “content improvement / error in question or lesson” and fill out all the lines in the macro. you should also see the content_improvement tag too.
5. change the title of the ticket to the lesson or question title (click on the title and you’ll be able to edit it).
6. update the ticket as solved

in closing

as with any solution, rarely (probably never) is the first solution the best one. the key is to continually iterate on the process. to constantly look for ways to refine what you have.

the iterations we looked at are the most relevant ones. i spared the smaller iterations. we didn’t originally default the macro to make the note private. we didn’t always include the author of the lesson or question. zapier now allows us to grab the last private comment from the assignee instead of the last comment, so i’ll be tweaking the process again soon. i also received feedback from someone on our remote team.

so i’ll be working on that soon.

our work is never done. it’s never perfect. all we can do is take small steps towards improving what we have. that’s what we do and that’s what we’ll continue to do at magoosh.

the post pain, automate, iterate: improving communication with remote and internal teams appeared first on magoosh 2022年足球世界杯举办地.

here at magoosh, we aim to cultivate student stoke, not dampen it, so we want all our messages to be useful and meaningful.

i recently spoke with a friend who signed up for both magoosh gre and some of our mobile apps. i asked her for feedback and she said that she received too many messages from us. yikes! i passed on this feedback to the rest of our team, and we sprang into action, and started auditing our messaging to make sure all the messages we send are full of purpose.

shortly after, we received messages from students that helped to calm our freak out, and we realized there are things we are doing right. we are still auditing all our messaging this next quarter, but it’s reassuring that we have students that benefit from, and are stoked to receive, our messages and emails.

even though my friend felt overwhelmed with emails, she still used magoosh to prepare for the gre and hit her target score. she had plenty of positive feelings for magoosh and even felt bad giving the feedback. but i was emphatic. her feedback was helpful and necessary for us to improve. and we are in the process of doing it right now.

i am sure we’ll find messages that we can scrap and ways to control how many messages we send to students when they sign up for multiple magoosh products. ideally, this will lead to more student stoke and more successful test scores.

the post student happiness report — october 2015 appeared first on magoosh 2022年足球世界杯举办地.

our students are also stoked because they learn from exceptional test prep experts. we have a team of teachers who know these tests, and the concepts on each test, like an elephant matriarch knows how to find the closest water in a 100 mile radius.

i’d like to take a moment and reflect on how stellar our test prep experts are, how they lay the foundation for our students and their success, and make our lives in student help that much easier.

in lieu of posting screenshots of all the amazing things that our students say about our content team, i’ve chosen just one for each expert.
chris lele was magoosh’s first test prep expert and one of the first employees. he’s been here from the beginning helping our students dominate test prep. the running joke in the office is that when he is out, our collective vocabulary knowledge drops by 80%.

the next expert at magoosh is mike mcgarry. he not only knows a whole lot about the gmat and every math fact, but also, he has an encyclopedic knowledge of world religions, classical music, and baseball. actually, he has encyclopedic knowledge of many other things too.

any time i have a question about grammar usage, lucas fink is definitely the man to consult. he makes short work of idiomatic phrases and esoteric syntax, which is great. i came to magoosh thinking i knew a lot about grammar and quickly realized i knew very little.

our newest test prep expert, and no slouch, is kristin fracchia. she joined magoosh to build out our act content and has done so with ease. she has the distinct honor of being the only magoosher with a phd and the only magoosher who’s completed a marathon.

our student’s happiness begins with our instructors. student help works hard to make sure students are stoked, but we wouldn’t be even close to successful without our great instructors.

be excellent to the universe until next time!

the post student happiness report – august 2015 appeared first on magoosh 2022年足球世界杯举办地.

magoosh had a productive beginning of the year. we launched an act product, redesigned www.catharsisit.com, and completed a massive re-recording project of all our math lesson videos.

in student help, we spent our time preparing for the busy season, looking for ways to get answers to students before they ask them, and hiring to fill needs.

but that’s not why you are here! you are here to learn all about magoosh’s student stoke!

stoke—by the numbers

we’ve done a swell job keeping our students happy over the course of the first 3 months of the year. can’t argue with these numbers.

now let’s see what sits behind the numbers and look at what the students are actually saying.

student stoke

if anything sums up what we strive for, it’s the sentiment in this tweet!

heaven is where support team of every company is like @magoosh @magooshgre #gre

— majid azimi (@majidazimi) february 6, 2015

what does it take to reach support team heaven?

a feeling of personal attention

anyone who knows customer support knows that there are two competing forces—answering questions quickly and efficiently versus providing a personalized experience for each person.

the first force pushes us towards fill-in-the-blank templates, articles on how to do something, and canned responses to common questions. the other force pushes us towards empathy—looking at what someone wrote (what was implied but not explicitly stated) and crafting a personal, thoughtful response that only that person would need.

the student help team strikes a balance between these two forces. we wish that we could have the staff and time to give each person a custom answer, but we aren’t that big—yet!

even though we struggle with this, it’s great to see that we are still able to stoke our students and provide them with a personal experience.

apparently magoosh rocks!

if you’ve been following magoosh for awhile, this is not a surprise—we rock!

bright futures ahead

our true passion is not test prep. it’s helping people achieve their dreams. we know everyone has incredible potential, and we want to help each one realize that potential.

that’s why these types of responses from our students are so wonderful. they remind us that magoosh is a means towards a great end. we help build the bridge to someone’s future!

everyone loves prompt responses

we value stoked students over all else. we know that our students are stoked when they receive in-depth, personal responses. and sometimes we can do that and respond quickly to their questions!

everyone’s telling their friends about us!

one clear sign of stoke is sharing it with friends. if our students feel compelled to tell their friends, then we know we are doing something right!

improved score stoke

we would not have gotten to this point if we couldn’t help students improve their score. it takes a lot of work from everyone at magoosh to make this happen—content, product, marketing, and student help. if we can’t help students improve then we are not delivering on our promise of delivering high quality materials.

love for mike

the quality of instruction at magoosh is a team effort. but one man shoulders a mountain of that load—mike mcgarry! we know it, and the students know it!

magoosh is the best test prep in town!

we like to think that our content is unparalleled. what we think doesn’t really matter, though. what matters is our students, so it’s great to hear from them that they think so highly of us.

motivating and inspiring students

let’s be honest! preparing for standardized tests can be dull! that’s why we make a point of having fun and making sure that we provide a friendly, encouraging response to all our students.

holy magoosh stoke!

i think nothing sums up our goals and what we aim to do than this review from a student! to be placed among such holy company is quite and honor! and to know that we are able to create content that mirrors what students see on the test means we are doing things right!

be excellent to the universe, good people! keep the happiness high and the stoke level at eleven.

the post student happiness report — q1 2015 appeared first on magoosh 2022年足球世界杯举办地.

we finished the year with a crescendo of stoke and happiness at magoosh! and we are ready for another stellar year! bring it on 2015!

stoke—by the numbers

a lot has changed since magoosh began helping students. each year, our seasonal ticket peaks in the fall have grown from the low 1,000s, to the low 2,000s, to this year, where we peaked near the mid 5,000s. stoked!

we were able to make it through the peaks with a strong satisfaction rating, but i know we could’ve done better. our wait times were higher than i would’ve liked, and higher than our students would’ve liked. i think that our drop to 97% satisfaction in october was connected to higher wait times.

we are looking at the change in our satisfaction to identify our ideal reply time. we’ve never actively kept track of our reply time. we considered satisfaction a better metric to focus on, but it is clear that how long a student waits matters and effects satisfaction (i know this probably seems obvious for all the customer service gurus out there). so we’ll actively track our reply time and use it as a leading indicator for satisfaction in the coming year.

student stoke

let’s just start with a simple formula that sums up magoosh and student stoke.

i couldn’t have put it better. at magoosh, we all have faith in our students success and their ability to achieve their goals. sometimes, believing in a student is all that is necessary for them to succeed and for them to be stoked!

awesome! inspired! confident!

if you asked someone to write down words that describe test preparation, none of them would write, “awesome,” “inspired,” “enjoying,” or “amazing.” unless they used magoosh, of course.

i like to think of this as the magoosh factor. test prep is usually drab, tiring, boring, and strenuous. sprinkle a little magoosh factor into the mix and soon you’ll be shedding tears of joy.

and i am not being hyperbolic. here’s the proof:

how are students so stoked? simple, we care!

when i first left the classroom and started with magoosh, i worried that by teaching online, i would loose my connection to students. i thought that teaching would become sterile and lack the human connection that i had grown to love. this turned out to not be an issue at all.

we are able to empathize and connect with our students in a very real way.

our test prep experts are awesome

impressed and humbled is the only way that i can describe how i feel about my colleagues. i am very lucky to work at a tech company that is truly committed to education. we are not a bunch of engineers trying to break into “edtech.” we are a collection of teachers and learners committed to helping students.

unequivocally, a large part of our success is due to our team of empathetic and dedicated teachers, tutors, and educators.

our students love our experts so much, they pin their pictures on pinterest!

we want students to learn—not just prepare for a test

our commitment to our students’ learning goes beyond standardized tests.

we don’t teach tricks. we teach skills that students can use beyond the test. we are agnostic toward material.

we like our content and are constantly improving it. but we know that we are not the only company in the game making great content. that’s why recommend other material from other companies. we want students to have the best material in front of them for their test and for their future.

the support i received from the magoosh support team is laudable; they not only cleared my doubt, but also elucidated the topic nicely.

— ↯気 (@shinigamiasuka) november 8, 2014

great resources make for stoked students

making great materials and resources is never over. there isn’t a single question that we’ve written that can’t be improved. we are always looking for ways to make our lessons better, our recommendations better, and our questions better.

staying stoked

we make lesson videos for all our products that start with basic concepts. we don’t assume anything about our students’ knowledge, so mike, chris, and lucas start with the fundamentals in the early lesson videos. more advanced students can skip these lessons, but some students who’ve been out of school for awhile, need to brush up on some concepts.

we record lesson videos with adults in mind. now with an sat product, we’ve had to shift our focus to high school students. we never thought, though, that our videos would be useful for a 10 year old. that assumption was joyously proved wrong with this comment:

luckily, we don’t have to try very hard to stay stoked at magoosh. no one has to wake up and wonder if we are making a difference or helping people. our goals and values are not vague. we have a clear purpose that makes everyone stride into work with a smile.

be excellent to the universe, good people! keep the happiness high and the stoke level at eleven.

the post magoosh student happiness report — q4 2014 appeared first on magoosh 2022年足球世界杯举办地.

august at magoosh was another impressive month. stoke and happiness prevailed for our students!

stoke — by the numbers

we just keep climbing the ticket ladder. in july, we had 4,500 tickets, and in august we saw over a thousand more. with grad school applications looming this fall, we expect to see the numbers continue to climb.

to handle this increase in numbers, we’ve been hiring new tutors, and more of us in the office have had to spend more time answering questions. we are currently looking for another student help associate to help with the busy season.

enough with the logistics, though. let’s get to the fun part.

student stoke

let’s see how our students felt in the month of august. did the stoke persist as much as past months? did we make new friends?

couldn’t have done it without you

our best interactions with students come after they’ve taken the test. i love the relationships we build with students over the course of their studies.

it’s truly amazing how hard our students work, and it’s so wonderful that they want to share their success with us.

strong apps + free resources + fun = stoked learners

magoosh thinks that high quality materials and resources should be widely accessible for all students. that’s why we provide a wealth of free, high-quality resources for all students to use.

oura free calculus product is now completely free for any one to use. we have a growing number of free apps that students can download on their android phones and iphones. not to mention, we have numerous gre, gmat, and sat ebooks for students that are completley free. and don’t get me started on our blogs—a cornucopia of strategies, practice problems, and study plans.

as you will see below, these are not fluffy, cotton candy apps and ebooks, empty of meaningful content. we are providing valuable resources to any student who needs help.

magoosh experts: purveyors of knowledge and stoke

i am very privileged and lucky to work alongside so many brilliant educators. magoosh is truly blessed to have committed and passionate teachers creating amazing content and answering student questions. so much of our success comes from our content team and our test prep experts. and our students noticed as well.

it’s not customer service—it’s student stoke

i love telling people that we don’t have customers—we have students! calling them students and saying that we are helping them changes the mindset of everyone involved. it reminds all of us that we are educators. in my opinion, the responsibility to a student is much greater than the responsibilty to a customer.

when we do this, we make friends. we provide a personal experience and empathize with their needs. we even bring them to tears sometimes.

having a blast studying

if you are having fun, you’ll learn something. this is so abundantly clear. how quickly do we learn games with intricate rules, various levels, and multiple variables? why is that? it’s because games are fun, and we enjoy the end result.

for a standardized test, it’s even more important to make things fun and have a sense of humor. the process is already tedious and exacting. it’s our job to make it less so. we need to make studying for the gre or gmat a fun endeavour. it’s nice to see when we succeed!

staying stoked

if, at the end of the day, students can call us a friend, we have succeed. what other metric could be more important than the one that says you made a friend today at work, who you’ve never met in person and who you’ve only interacted with over the internet? none that i can think of.

that’s what makes me stoked about magoosh.

be excellent to the universe, good people! keep the happiness high and the stoke level at eleven.

the post magoosh student happiness report — august 2014 appeared first on magoosh 2022年足球世界杯举办地.

after two months, not much has changed here at magoosh, except for maybe even more stoked students than before! as you can see in these responses, our students have maintained a steady level of super high stoke.

stoke — by the numbers

we’ve been busy. we are seeing more and more questions each month, and we are even expecting it to peak in october. (as i write this in mid-august we are already at 3,500 questions.)

june numbers

july numbers

even more exciting than the new tickets and solved ticket numbers, we passed a milestone recently! we’ve answered over 50,000 student questions. i couldn’t be more excited about this — and neither could the celebrities that hang around the office. (i think they love stoke as much as they love lamp.)

magoosh turned 5 this year, so it seems fitting that we cross the 50,000 mark this year.

student stoke

this was mind-numbingly hard to do this time. usually, i have a month of student happiness and stoke to choose from. i have to cull all the happiness down to smaller and smaller groups until there is a shortlist of stoke to share, which is hard enough already. but this time i had two months of stoke, which meant i had to make an even shorter shortlist for this post.

many, many great euphorions — that’s a unit of euphoria if you’re wondering — were left out this time, but hopefully that means we have a happiness report with the most concentrated levels of stoke ever seen!

couldn’t have done it without you

in going through all this happiness, i was struck by a common theme: many students said that they wouldn’t have been able to do so well on the test without magoosh.

it’s tempting to revel in such praise, but i always like to remember that we are only a small part of our students’ preparation. the students are the ones who puts in hours of preparation. so i always thank them for their kind words, but remind them that they did the hard stuff. we merely lent a hand along the way.

strong product + smart algorithms = stoke + score improvement

over the summer we released a free app for students who are looking for new ways to study vocabulary. the vocabulary builder has turned into quite an addictive app for students.

magoosh experts: purveyors of knowledge and stoke

one thing is clear after looking over two months of questions and answers. we have some smart people working at magoosh. and not only smart, but also fun, friendly, and awesome.

it’s not customer service—it’s student stoke

magoosh is successful for many reasons, but one of the main reasons is the sympathy and care that all magooshers put into listening and responding to students. we don’t really think about what we do as customer service, even though that’s what it would be traditionally called. we see it as helping students reach their goals. for that reason, we care more and develop closer connections with our students.

this first message is a perfect example: a student did really well on the test, and she wanted to tell amy about it because she knew amy cared and was interested in her success. we don’t do customer service—we do student help!

having a blast studying

let’s face it — studying for a standardized test is not fun. the test itself is not very fun, setting time aside to study is not fun, and paying for study materials is not fun either. magooshers know what students are dealing with so we work hard to make it fun. the more fun that we can have answering questions and making lesson videos, the more success students will have when they study.

one thing i learned as a teacher is that students naturally learn if they are having fun. magooshers know this, and we want our students to know this too.

staying stoked

most the time, i am talking about students and making them stoked. but often, we are stoked by our students. most of the time i find myself smiling when i interact with our students.

when reading about customer service around the web, you can’t help but wonder if there is ever a good, dare i say, great interaction with a customer. at magoosh, we are blessed to have these every hour. a lot of my time is spent hearing from happy, stoked students. it’s also not uncommon to hear magooshers giggling in the office as they work through questions.

i’d like to leave you with one of these gems, when we open up a student question and find this:

be excellent to the universe, good people! keep the happiness high and the stoke level at eleven.

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