There is a profound stress that comes from hearing a tutor has missed an assignment or no-showed.
What usually follows is a conversation with the parents during which you must determine how much to explain, defend, or concede in order to make things right for the parents.
Sometimes it is even worse: the tutoring appointment was missed and the tutor has become unresponsive. Then you need to worry about the tutor’s future sessions and, in a worst-case scenario, how they are to be staffed.
Adverse situations happen to all businesses but tutoring relies so heavily on referrals that the potential downside to a client service miss such as a tutor no-show is especially problematic.
Having said that, there are some best practices which, when deliberately planned, can help one manage the follow-up to a service miss such as this.
The steps for this type of contingency planning are not complex and the things that come to mind are probably already being done in one way or another at the local level. Things like:
- Having a clear policy to describe what happens if a tutor misses his appointed time with a student.
- Having an enrollment agreement.
- Having clear ownership of who does what and when in terms of client follow-up.
- Adding an additional layer of personalized service such as having the the owner, Director, or tutor check in with the client after tutoring resumes.
Assuming these things make sense, the next challenge is to ensure that the the “no show” process you develop is fully understood by everyone and that the execution of that process occurs without fail, like clockwork.
