Online education moves fast, but learner feedback is often stuck in silos. Penn Foster Group set out to change that by consolidating multichannel input and delivering organization-wide insights every month. With Tagado, they built a real-time Voice of the Customers report that reaches 700+ employees, informs strategic decisions, and transforms how the institution listens to its students.
“We started by sharing the report just with senior leadership, but now it goes out to all 700 employees every month. Tagado empowered us to bring it to life, and now it’s referenced in calls, follow-up questions, even board meetings.”
—Rebecca Koppie, Sr. Customer Insights Manager, Penn Foster Group
About Penn Foster Group
Penn Foster Group is a fully online education provider serving high school, college, and career-focused customers across the U.S., empowering students on their journey to succeed on their own terms- academically, professionally, and personally.
- Headquarters: Chandler, Arizona Learners Served: 300,000+ active customers
- Staff: 700+
- Feedback Sources: Gong calls, Ada chatbot transcripts, Five9 live chat transcripts, Alchemer and Pendo Surveys, Reddit community
- Tagado Go-Live: May 2024
Impact at a glance
- 700+ employees receive monthly Voice of the Customer reports
- All major feedback channels consolidated in one platform
- First report launched just two months post-implementation
- Insights surfaced in real time to reduce repeat support calls
- 2-year renewal signed following strong org-wide adoption
The challenge: building a true Voice of the Customer system
Penn Foster Group set an ambitious target: double the number of completions. To achieve this, the Customer Insights team quickly understood they had to listen more carefully to what their customers were saying, and turn scattered feedback into a consistent, trusted, and actionable input for decision-making across the company.
With hundreds of thousands of customers and input flowing in surveys, live chat, social media, and calls, there was no single place to extract or understand the full learner experience. Even when teams had access to data, it was typically high-level and limited—percentages of calls by topic, rather than real insights into what customers were saying or feeling.
Why Tagado
After a year-long evaluation of 11 platforms, only Tagado met Penn Foster Group’s requirements:
- Consolidation across a wide range of feedback sources
- AI-powered analysis of tens of thousands of monthly interactions
- Role-specific filtering (e.g. by program type or learner segment)
- Enterprise-grade privacy protections
- Tagado had built their platform with unique custom integration capabilities that supported Penn Foster Group’s entire stack, including Five9.
Implementation: fast, focused, and team-led
Penn Foster Group signed with Tagado in May. By July, the first Voice of the Customer report had launched.
The Customer Insights team became daily users of the platform and took a deliberate approach to adoption. They trained stakeholders across marketing, product, support, and communications—allowing teams to self-serve and reducing the bottleneck on Insights.
The Voice of the Customer report: from pilot to company staple
What began as a leadership-only update quickly became one of the company’s most widely referenced tools. Today, the Voice of the Customer report is sent monthly to all 700 employees and drives visibility, action, and cross-team engagement.
Executives request updates for board meetings. Functional teams raise follow-up questions. Departments that had never used learner feedback are now building plans around it.
“The report, powered by Tagado’s data consolidation and depth of analysis, creates awareness. Teams we’d never worked with before now reach out to use the insights. It’s changing how the organization listens and acts.”
—Rebecca Koppie
Impact spotlight: solving support call spikes with transparency
A major spike in support calls led Penn Foster Group to investigate. The surface-level view showed topic tags—but didn’t reveal why customers were calling repeatedly.
With help from Tagado, the Insights team connected call tags to analysis of actual conversations. One core issue emerged: a lack of transparency in the academic transcript evaluation process. Customers didn’t know if their prior credits were accepted, and many were stalling or calling repeatedly to find out.
“Tagado lets us match high-volume call tags with actual conversations. That insight wouldn’t have been visible otherwise. And it’s already changing how we handle transcript processing.”
—Rebecca Koppie
As a result, the operations team is now redesigning the process to be clearer and more automated, boosting both learner experience and operational efficiency.
What’s next: growing the feedback loop, expanding use cases
Following a successful first year, Penn Foster Group signed a two-year renewal with Tagado. Looking ahead, they’re planning to:
- Explore feedback from new channels like live chat, admissions calls, tickets, emails, and AI voice agents
- Support the marketing team with deeper insights from top-of-funnel conversations
- Increase accountability by driving focused stakeholder discussions on report themes
From feedback collection to culture shift
Tagado helped Penn Foster Group do more than launch a report. It helped embed feedback into the way the organization works. What started as a tooling initiative became a cultural transformation—with customers gaining a voice at every level.
“My personal goal is that our learners have a seat at the table in every decision we make. With Tagado, that’s becoming a reality.”
—Rebecca Koppie
Ready to make feedback your most valuable strategic asset? Book a demo to see how Tagado can power your Voice of the Customer.
