Families occasionally call us who are unhappy with the private counselor they’ve hired and want to meet with us to see if we’d be a better fit. It’s important to help those families make a good decision while at the same time maintaining good professional decorum. So here’s what we do.
1. Express our regrets.
We genuinely feel bad for a family that’s unhappy with their current private counselor; so we tell them we’re sorry things haven’t gone well. The family is frustrated and that’s never a good thing for them or our profession, no matter who’s doing the counseling. And expressing our regret lets them know that we want things to get better for them, whether or not they decide to join us.
2. Do an anonymous autopsy.
We need to find out what’s gone wrong so the experience won’t repeat itself if the family joins Collegewise. So we usually say:
“I know you don’t want to have this problem again, so could you tell me more about why you’re unhappy with your counselor? I don’t need to know who it is.”
This does a couple of things. First, most families don’t want to badmouth another person, no matter how unhappy they might be. So we separate the counselor from the experience and let the family tell us what happened without naming names. They’ll usually be a lot more forthright about what they think went wrong, and we can tell them honestly if they can expect something different with us.
We also don’t necessarily know that this problem was entirely (or at all) their counselor’s fault. And we need to get a sense of that before we agree to work with them and promise things will be better. If a family tells us that the student hasn’t made any progress in his applications, we know from experience that we can’t do the work for our own students. So we’ll need to find out if the counselor didn’t guide them, or if the student just didn’t do the work. The former, we can fix at Collegewise. The latter, we can’t.
An anonymous autopsy lets the family be more open about what’s gone wrong. And it helps us evaluate if we can do a better job.
3. Don’t criticize the other counselor’s work.
No matter what a family tells us another counselor did or didn’t do, we won’t criticize it. We’ll tell the family we’re sorry, and we’ll be honest about whether or not we’ll do things differently. But criticizing another counselor is bad form. You’ll never look good doing it. It’s bad karma, too. We want to handle this situation the way we’d want it handled if the roles were reversed and one of our Collegewise families were unhappy with us. And finally, while being critical might feel like you’re supporting the family, you’re also emphasizing what they already know—that they made a decision that didn’t work. Making that even more apparent is only going to embarrass them.
Sometimes a family who's unhappy with one of our competitors can expect a different experience at Collegewise, but not always. We want to enroll families who are predisposed to be happy with what we do and how we do it. And handling these situations right lets us invite the right people in to our program, or refer them to someone else who can give them what they’re looking for.