The Quest for Convenience
The introduction of the Internet into our culture introduced a new quest—the quest for convenience. We certainly experienced a new level of convenience during COVID with Amazon, Grubhub, and Uber Eats. The whole idea is that we live in a world now where we don’t go out to buy our products. Our products come to us.
It can be helpful to ask ourselves, how this impacts the world of music education. We provide a service that can be brought to the home, in the in-home music school model, and certainly a curious model.
We’re limited in our ability to deliver to provide convenience the way that Amazon can and the way that Grubhub can, but today’s consumer expects and is use to extreme convenience.
The Unique Music School Experience
There are certainly benefits to the in-home lesson business model, but there will always be a desire for the in-school experience. I think it’s important that music school hunters take into consideration how consumers have changed since COVID.
Beyond the In-Home Lesson
What music schools provide is the opportunity for an experience as well as a music lesson, and that experience is décor of your school the way things smell, the colors, the pictures on the wall. Do things look fresh and bright or does your school look worn down and tired? Do the colors, artwork, and patterns in your music school all seem to be working together or are they more random?
The personality traits of your staff are also a part of this landscape. Does the person at the front desk greet your students and their parents by name? Do they smile when they come in? Does person greeting your students remember a milestones and important events in a student’s life.
Perhaps the student missed their lesson last Thursday because he played in his hockey game. Does the person behind that desk ask him about it. That is something that probably requires attention more than ever. People don’t get out of the house the way they used to. The world has changed. We became isolated during COVID. We got used to it. That’s what our kids grew up with. It was normal. Going nowhere became normal, and it’s gonna take us time to get back to our old ways.
Providing Convenience in Your Music School
If we even ever do get back to our old ways, maybe it’ll be a modified version. Our home entertainment systems now in our big screen TVs and our access to any show or movie in the world at the click of a button makes the movie theater experience less magical. We hunkered down during COVID, and we enhanced our environment at home to make our home more livable and more enjoyable since we were in hibernation for over a year.
Our culture has changed. Our culture expects convenience, and wherever there’s an opportunity for us to create or provide convenience; we should seize upon it. The families in your music school might not even consciously notice how can easy and convenient you make things, how easy and convenient the enrollment process was, and how easy and convenient it was for them to navigate through your website and not have to sift through menu items and webpages to find the page they were looking for.
