Customer Service Rules for Supervisors from the President on Up

I and many others worked in a store when going to school. And in the backroom, there was a poster of sorts. It was usually hung above the time cards or schedule. It read as follows

Rule # 1 The customer is always right

Rule # 2 if there are any questions refer to rule # 1.

Well, we all knew that wasn’t true. There were plenty of times when the customer was wrong but what it meant was treat the customer correctly, as if they really mattered and you loved each and every one of them. Even when you didn’t. I will go into a longer discussion of how false rule #1 is in a later posting with an excerpt from The Power of Retention: More Customer Service for Higher Education.

Now I am putting down some rules for managers and administrators for modeling customer service behavior. It is the managerial and administrative people who can and should set the tone for employees in their areas or offices. If the director of an office, a supervisor and certainly a vice president and surely the president herself do not demonstrate appropriate customer service, how can they expect others to do so?

Yet, when I am asked to do a workshop or give a presentation it is almost always for front line personnel or a mix of them, some faculty and a few director level folks. The senior administrators and supervisors seem to stay away. Not good modeling. As a result, I guess I have also focused my postings too much on non-supervisory folks.

That ends tonight with this post. This starts a series on the ten rules for supervisors all the way down to the president. Here are the first three rules. I will comment on them more fully tomorrow since I have to get ready for a very early morning flight to Arkansas and it is getting late.

Rules 1-3 for Supervisors through Presidents and Everyone Else

             Rule 1 Students are our primary customers

             Rule 2 Our colleagues are our customers too

             Rule 3 Take care of our customers

These three are central to all the other rules. And to good academic customer service.

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