How Feedback is the Fuel that Drives Our Partners’ Successes

Claudia Reiners
October 14, 2020
Blog

How Feedback is the Fuel that Drives Our Partners’ Successes

4bf428ed6af9ff680b7ac8b24b046f3d?s=50&d=mm&r=g Claudia Reiners
Head of Strategy

Empowering our partners is what makes Candlefox different.

When we equip providers with the tools that they need to inspire strategic decisions and drive the most value to their business, that’s when we see the best results.

Our service is fuelled by our unique ability to offer solutions that combine data-driven insights with two-way feedback to foster long-term, mutually beneficial partnerships.

Our Growth Journey


At the very beginning, when we first started working with our providers back in 2009, there was so much untapped potential when it came down to understanding the real value that we were delivering as a service.

As a fresh startup, we knew there was a lot to learn about the industry, and the first place to start was with our partners. Talking to our providers is where the magic happens; it prompted us to pivot and take full advantage of our data symmetry and data-sharing initiatives.

Our partners wanted data-driven marketplace insights, and we were keen to supply it. We transformed our reporting capabilities to share detailed insights into lead quality and actionable insights based on marketplace data. This turning point helped us fully grasp the value and quality of our leads we were sending.

Candlefox was born out of innovation, and our confidence stems from this sounding board of feedback for the quality of our service. Keeping those communication channels open has helped us identify our strengths — we’re professional, responsive and flexible.

Our culture of experimentation flows through to these relationships, which is why we don’t refer to our partners as ‘customers’ or ‘clients’. They’re ‘mutually beneficial partnerships’.

Preserving Our Retention Rates


Quality of service is at our core. Consistency can be a difficult thing to get right when generating student enquiries via other digital channels — there’s no one silver bullet that you can just ‘set and forget’.

Our channel is simplistic and customised to our partners’ needs, which is crucial to getting quality right. Our provider onboarding process plays a big part in this. Whether you’re a university or a small family business, our strategic account management vision remains the same — to strive for partner advocacy by empowering our partnerships to achieve mutually profitable outcomes.

This framework allows us to identify custom opportunities influenced by the provider’s post enquiry sales techniques and lead management processes, to name a few. From this, we’re able to set performance expectations from the onset.

Off the back of this, we employ a consultative approach that includes plenty of feedback and advice, aimed at maximising results from our leads. When a provider comes on this journey with us, they know that they’re getting actionable, tailored guidance from industry experts.

What Sets Us Apart



  • Regular Account Reviews

    Account reviews with providers are rhythmic. During these monthly catch-ups, we request downstream feedback to establish what it is that’s working, what might need improving and where we can turn up the dial. What are competitors doing that we aren’t? Is there a way that we can do it better? By unpacking this commentary and supporting it with proprietary data, we continue to grow as a cutting-edge service.

  • Leading Products and Services

    Our Partnerships Team acts as a conduit between providers and the Product team — we’re always gathering ideas around new feature requests that get our partners excited. Facilitating a flawless customer experience is key, and our partners make this possible with student-centric product contributions.

  • Quarterly Partner Insights Surveys

    There is so much power in keeping your finger on the pulse. Through regular surveys, we’re able to assess partner sentiment around both our broader service offerings and feelings on the current climate. This activity gives us a better understanding of which significant projects to focus on and identify which have real provider interest. Our survey is what prompted Candlefox’s newest project, ‘Workforce Training’ — a product designed specifically for L&D student prospects and businesses looking to upskill their teams. When just about every provider says that they are keen to sign up, you know it’s a good one.

  • Course Administrative Team

    As soon as you become a Candlefox partner, you’re exposed to Course Administrators to set up your campaigns. We take the typical content management tasks out of our providers’ hands and offer a high touch personalised approach to the way we set up campaigns. Around the clock support is available to partners for listing optimisation, which includes geographic and delivery method considerations.

  • Enrolment Services Team

    On the back of our Enrolment Service that sees us managing our leads on behalf of many providers, our Partnerships team has gained an intimate understanding of the challenges providers face post-enquiry. By running a high performance, sophisticated sales team in-house, we have complete visibility over the end-to-end student acquisition journey. Our insights and understanding of the acquisition lifecycle feed nicely into our partners’ campaign review and broader operational strategies.

  • The Student Sentiment Index

    The Student Sentiment Index — an evolving collection of independent data designed to measure prospective student’s optimism or positivity towards the education sector — allows us to go beyond the insights we gain through our many partnerships and Enrolment Services. Developed in 2016, the Index acts as a leading indicator of prospective student enrolment behaviours. It has enabled us to address many critical themes such as student urgency, confidence, sensitivity to funding and motivation using real-time data. We have plans to package up this data so that the sector can consume it.

How We’ll be Even Better


Our service is continually evolving — we are data-driven and have plans to increase access to deeper marketplace insights. We’re working on projects to deliver insights to our providers via real-time dashboards. From competitive benchmarking to student sentiment, we can offer much greater value than just delivering leads. Our collection of marketplace data allows us to play an increasingly active role in helping shape our providers’ strategic decisions. By neatly packaging up our findings, we can provide a robust asset to guide strategic decisions and fuel partner success.

Why Choose Candlefox?


Quality underpins our existence — we wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for our lead quality. It’s our core service and the reason why partners stay with us. While it seems simple, we’ve made an art form of operating student-centric websites, and we’re proud of the role we play servicing the education sector. Our success has come off the back of a collection of great websites that attract high-intent student prospects that are ready to learn.

And implementation is so simple. Instead of having to set up and monitor your own Google Ads campaigns, posting on Facebook and blogging every day, on top of filtering through unqualified leads, we provide an uncomplicated alternative.

You put your courses on our websites, and we’ll send you qualified leads.

It all boils down to feedback. Through strategic account management that focuses on building long-term mutually beneficial partnerships, Candlefox closes the loop and delivers the best possible results to our providers.

Get in touch with the team today.


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Claudia Reiners
Head of Strategy
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