IELTS for ILAC
Optimising the customer journey for English language learners and IELTS test takers through marketing, content & design initiatives.
As Customer Experience & Marketing Coordinator at ILAC's exam centre, I focused on identifying opportunities to optimise the customer journey experience, fostering brand growth across digital and in-person touchpoints.
My Role
Customer Experience & Marketing Coordinator in the ILAC IELTS Testing Centre.
Product
IELTS (International English Language Testing System) exams for immigration, visa, or work. Occasionally supported Course Advisors with IELTS course promotion.
Target Audience
Primarily newcomers to Canada, refugees seeking permanent status and international students.
Contents
Help Centre
opportunity discovery
The Emerging Need for a Help Centre
During the COVID-19 pandemic, while ILAC remained one of the few operational testing centres in Canada, sales were initially subdued due to the pandemic's impact and the exclusion of a significant portion of our student customer base.
This landscape dramatically shifted with the Canadian Government's introduction of numerous new immigration pathways, triggering a massive surge in demand for IELTS tests. Almost instantly, tests became fully booked, our website server experienced crashes, and customer support channels were overwhelmed with over 1000 daily enquiries. This volume represented more than 2000% of our typical daily contact and over 1000% of our pre-COVID enquiry levels.
With hundreds of daily enquiries hitting just one support person, our small team was quickly overwhelmed as they rushed to pitch in. Paying customers, particularly those facing stressful visa deadlines, were left feeling underserved and slow response times became a significant pain point. This intense, two-week surge highlighted the urgent need for a solution to manage future demand spikes and protect our customer satisfaction reputation, especially given more anticipated immigration pathway announcements.
idea generation
Why a Help Centre?
I quickly identified two main groups:
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Potential customers with questions related to the recent increase in demand. These enquiries were temporary and unique, like "Are you putting on more tests in [city name]?"
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Existing paid customers needing booking or results support. These enquiries were common and ongoing, like "I don't understand how to send my results to my organisation."
With a stretched team, we strategically prioritised streamlining support for common enquiries (paid customers) to free up resources for unique issues (potential customers). This offered a scalable, long-term solution for customer satisfaction. The requirements were clear: quick launch, easy scaling, seamless integration with post-booking emails, and genuinely helpful, detailed support that upheld our brand. I considered a few options:
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Automated email and voice message FAQs were quickly dismissed as they'd be unscalable, too impersonal for our brand values and only able to address a few common queries with success.
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Expanding our existing FAQ page seemed like a possibility, but it was just a long, awkward dropdown. It wouldn't have worked well for the detailed guides with pictures we needed, and as we added more articles, it would have become a confusing mess without categories.
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An AI chatbot for our live chat, however, the software (Tawk.to) at the time didn't have its current AI capabilities, and we lacked the time and budget for a new tool. Basic auto-responses also offered the same limitations as other ideas, likely escalating customers to live agents anyway.
The Help Centre, an untapped feature of our live chat, quickly became the ideal solution. Its built-in tools allowed for detailed, well-formatted, and categorised articles – effectively replicating live agent support with step-by-step guides. Its unique URLs enabled seamless integration into existing communications, empowering customer self-service and providing a scalable, long-term solution that minimised team strain while efficiently addressing common enquiries.
content curation
Identifying the Biggest, Most Frequent Pain Points
To launch a high-impact starter Help Centre quickly, I focused on the most frequent customer pain points. By merging years of support insights with an analysis of both current and historical enquiry volumes (separating typical high-volume issues from temporary ones), I identified the essential topics for our first articles.
Information architecture
Sitemap, Categories & Article Titles
Drawing on insights from the pain point mapping, my approach to building the Help Centre prioritized accessible language and comprehensive FAQ coverage. For instance, rather than creating separate articles for each variation of a common question like test changes or cancellations, the article titled "Can I change or cancel my test?" was intentionally designed to consolidate all related scenarios and clearly outline the applicable policies for each situation.
Recognizing that over 90% of our customers were ESL speakers, a clear and intuitive structure was crucial. Instead of a single overwhelming list, I opted for a manageable number of top-level categories, drawing inspiration from the natural stages of the test process: Booking, Booking Management, Test Day, etc. The titles of the articles within these categories used the everyday language our customers used in their emails and would likely use in searches, such as "change" and "remark," instead of more formal terms like "Transfer" and "Enquiry on Results." Crucially, these formal terms were still included within the article content to ensure comprehensive searchability. To further enhance discoverability, some articles relevant to multiple topics (like instructions for under-18s, applicable to both pre-test preparation and test day information) were tagged to appear within both relevant categories.
Initially, the top-level structure didn't differentiate between our computer-based and paper-based tests. However, within the first week of the Help Centre's launch, it became clear that the distinct advantages of the computer-based test (faster results, single-section retakes) were causing confusion and dissatisfaction among paper-based test takers. Consequently, a decision was made to introduce a clear separation at the highest level, creating distinct top-level categories for Computer-based Tests and Paper-based Tests. This structural change aimed to minimize confusion and ensure customers accessing information relevant to their specific test format.
implementation
Fast Integration & Initial Promotion
The newly launched Help Centre was swiftly integrated into our digital ecosystem. Prominent links were added to the main website menu, relevant FAQs, and booking/reminder emails to proactively address common queries (e.g., test day details, cancellations) and empower customer self-service, thereby reducing the need to contact support. We also proactively notified recent bookers and promoted the Help Centre across social media and other platforms to maximize visibility.
Results
Short Term Impact on Customer Support
Initially, measuring the Help Centre's impact was tough due to the volatile pandemic and repeated immigration pathway announcements causing high demand. This made direct comparison to pre-launch data difficult with fluctuating enquiry numbers.
However, a key metric was complaints from our post-booked customers (i.e. the group we had targeted with the introduction of the Help Centre in the first place). During the first major surge, this group experienced neglect, leading to 24 complaints in the first week expressing dissatisfaction with the level of support received. Encouragingly, after the second surge, these specific complaints significantly dropped to just 3, and then to zero after the third comparable surge. This sharp decrease in dissatisfaction from our post-booked customers is notable given rising sales and overall customer numbers, showing a clear improvement in providing adequate support to this previously underserved segment even during high demand.
Results
Long-Term Impact on Customer Support
As the initial intensity of the immigration pathway announcements subsided and other testing centres gradually resumed operations, our inquiry and sales volumes began to stabilize, settling at a level slightly higher than pre-COVID. With the Help Centre having been live for several months, we were then able to gain a clearer measure of its sustained impact. Analysis of this more stable period revealed a significant 40% reduction in customer enquiries originating from our existing, post-booking customers – the primary target audience for the self-service resources – while our sales continued to show positive growth. This demonstrates the Help Centre's effectiveness in streamlining support, empowering our customers, and contributing to overall efficiency.
flyer handout
IELTS Course Promotion
ILAC's Course Advisor needed a flyer to promote IELTS courses to current students requiring the test for visa, work, or immigration. The brief was to showcase course overviews, pricing, schedules, and contact details. With extensive information for two courses, the challenge was to distill the key details into a single, easily scannable page, clearly differentiating the offerings without overwhelming the reader. Adhering to official IELTS branding, I tackled this in an afternoon, using Figma for layout exploration and Adobe InDesign for the final design.
poster
Test Centre Promotion
ILAC's new on-campus IELTS test centre in Vancouver had a visibility issue: students were unaware of its existence and registering elsewhere. To quickly and cost-effectively address this, we implemented campus-wide posters.
To streamline the booking process, a QR code was included. Instead of linking directly to our on-campus dates (which could be limited), the QR code directed students to the main IELTS search page. This strategic choice allowed students facing tight deadlines or residing in nearby cities to easily find available test dates and locations that suited their needs, increasing the likelihood of them booking through ILAC.
Social Media & Ads
Informative Posts & Shareable Reels
ads
Promoting Off-Campus Venues
To better serve potential test takers in underserved communities across Canada, we implemented a cost-effective ad strategy targeting our offsite tests at university and college campuses. By making testing more convenient and reducing the financial and logistical burden of travelling to major cities, this significantly enhanced the customer experience, while also reinforcing our brand's commitment to these communities.
Our social media ad strategy effectively drove interest in our Canadian IELTS test locations. A typical campaign looked like this:
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Ad Formats: Simple, no-noise ads in square, story, and landscape formats designed for quick attention.
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Targeting: 50-mile radius from test locations (plus wider targeting for travel cities), interests in immigration to Canada and English language learning.
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Performance: Facebook (1.5% CTR), Instagram (1.0% CTR), $0.20-0.25 CAD CPC, $150 CAD monthly budget, 10-15k reach and 38-42k impressions per campaign.
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Conversion tracking: Booking completion rate was unable to be tracked due to an external booking platform. Instead, conversions that gauged genuine interest and intent to book were tracked, like contact form submissions, email link clicks, and website page navigation.
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Impact: Word of mouth quickly took hold once ad viewers spread the news that IELTS tests were being held in their remote town.
