Tuesday, May 29, 2012

Creating Hospitality and Academic Customer Service to Increase Student Satisfaction and Excellence on Campus

A serious misunderstanding that exists on campuses is that customer service and treating students with hospitality are somehow evil things. That they somehow are antithetical to academic quality.  They are not. They are (or should be) simply part of daily life on campus and in fact they are even if done poorly. Colleges and universities provide customer service and hospitality every day in the classroom, in offices, across the campus and even the campus facilities themselves. These are the services we provide to make sure that the basic needs of students are met. An obvious example is the cafeteria where we actually do serve and provide food services. Even the classroom is also a cafeteria of sorts with a defined menu of knowledge and set of portions of information and training that must be presented in an intellectually tasty manner. The major activity in a classroom is instruction and that is a service after all.

There is no way around the fact that a college is a collection services though there are certainly ways to do them better. That is not so say we do I well as can be seen by the almost 50% of students who do not stay in a college to graduate.

And these are all required services that must be provided to the customers, our students, in the best way possible. We must make sure that whatever we do we do well. We need to provide students with a strong customer service excellence or they will leave the school. Whether that excellence be in an office when a worker stops what he or she is doing to welcome a student and help solve an issue.  Or a faculty member who makes certain that she is the last one out of the classroom so she can check with every student to make sure he understood the lesson for the day and make arrangements to help those that may be a bit confused. Or an administrator who interrupts her work to meet with a student and try and see what she needs to make her stay better and keep her in school through graduation. Or even the all-important maintenance crew that makes certain the campus is neat, attractive and all bathrooms are clean and functioning. Everyone on campus is responsible for providing these and other basic services to our customers, hence – customer services.

There is also the allied issue of hospitality; of making a student feel as if he or she is welcome on the campus, in the cafeteria, dorm, classroom and everywhere on campus. Hospitality is the way we make certain that our customers feel appreciated and valued yet we often do not perform even the smallest act of hospitality. Employees march across campus ignoring the students. We do not make students feel as if we care about them. We do not show any welcome that says “you are important to us”. In fact, we too often act in opposition to being hospitable and go out of our way to show students that we don’t care and in fact display an attitude that says “you are lucky to be here so you should thank me for doing anything for you.” This is done by the way we show a disrespect for our customers by not interrupting what we are doing to help them, by not showing concern for their learning or not in the classroom and many other smaller ways such as not saying hello to them as we pass them on campus.

We do provide services and we should strive to make them as excellent as is possible for our students, our clients after all who do have many choices in where to go to spend their educational money nowadays. One way you can check to see if you are providing good services is just to ask the students.. Or you can hire a professional to audit the services and see what needs to make them better. This is something that should be done since poor service and another word/concept we will be discussing in a later paragraph account for 76% of all attrition on a campus and that means a major revenue loss too.

Why Students Leave Your school – Weak Service and Hospitality
The 76% figure comes from the latest 2012 study of why students leave a school. The most significant reason why students left a school was again that they felt the school did not care about them They felt often that the college worked hard to recruit and enroll them but once they were there the college just assumed they would stay and did little to show that it cared about them being there. A full twenty-five percent felt the school let them down in the school’s caring about them and their success.
Poor service accounted for 23% of the reasons why students left. This is of course an allied response to the college does not care about me since the service was obtained, or not, by students who then interpreted the poor service often as the college does not care about me. These two categories together account for 47% of responses. These are both academic customer service and hospitality issues.

The percentages of the reasons why students left are as follows:
College Doesn’t Care 25%
Poor Service 23%
Not worth it 18%
Finances 13%
Schedule 10%
Personal 8%
Grades 2%   
Educational Quality 1%

That would mean that the total for customer service shifted down to 76% from 84% as leaving for finances and scheduling conflicts went up as reasons for leaving the school.

There were two areas that did increase in their significance – finances and schedule.  Simply put many students are simply not being able to pay for the ever-increasing costs of college. Students also felt that the increase in tuition and fees plus all allied costs simply did not make college as worth it as the thought it would be especially since the estimates say that almost 50% of all college graduates were not able to find a full time job.

As schools are trying to cut their costs they are cutting sections. The schools usually decide to cut a section they feel is not fully enough enrolled to warrant offering it. This is not always true by the way but colleges usually have some go-no go number like ten students in a section for it to be allowed to be offered. What the schools do is to create some horrid customer service by cancelling the class in the last week or two. When a class is cancelled in the last weeks just before a start of the semester for example that totally disrupts the student’s life. She has planned her whole life around the schedule she thought he had. She has made arrangement for her hours at work not to conflict with her classes. If a mother, has set up babysitting arrangements around the class schedule. Then in the last moment the college cancels the class and her life is turned upside down when she can’t get another class at the same time as the cancelled on.  Moreover, if she can’t get another class that fits her schedule and major she may be a section short on being a full time student and that will affect financial aid. She might not be able to afford to go to school as a result of the cancelled class.

Canceling sections can be simply horrible customer service that can tip a student into giving up or at least stopping put maybe not to ever return to the school.

It is important to realize that the percentages are not fully exact since one category often flows into another. Poor service can make a student feel as if he or she is not cared for by the school. The changing of schedules at the last moment can do the same. These are all allied academic customer service issues that colleges and universities need to address to increase retention through focusing on academic customer service and hospitality.

Academic Hospitality
There are no excuses for weak service. If people cannot provide good service they need to be retrained or moved. We hire the most knowledgeable faculty we can to try and assure that they will be able to provide good educational service in the classroom but again that is only part of what we need to consider.  It is not just expertise and training that will get people to be hospitable. It is an attitude that needs to be developed and trained for.

What we are of the really talking about is academic hospitality. Just as at a restaurant if the food is great but the service is sloppy, indifferent, even hostile the food is just not going to taste as good. A waiter who just takes orders is not giving good, enthusiastic service. Note how each starts usually be giving his or her name and tries to engage the guest in conversation before the orders are taken if he or she is a good hospitable waiter.  Yes it increases tips and may really be perfunctory but it does work as a hospitable gesture. As a good waiter wants to be hospitable to customers to increase the experience and the tip, the goal of good customer service and hospitality on campus is to increase retention and graduation rates after all. Why else is the college there?

A great researcher does not always make a great teacher. A fully competent financial person does not always wait on students well in a bursar’s office. An excellent administrator who can get things done does not always work well with students. An advisor who may be one of the few who knows her stuff but does not make hours to meet with students is not being hospitable to them. Or not having enough advisors to meet with students though they are required to see an advisor is not good service. Students expect and crave basic hospitality as shown in the 2012 results above and will turn against the school if it is not there

It is hospitality on campus that we are often really concerned with even though this is lumped into customer service. How often do people stop and just talk with students to see how they are doing or feel about the place? Does the school evaluate people to see how hospitable they are to students and helping them? Does the school even have a code of service excellence or the sort that states what is expected of each member of the college? Does it say things like “say hello to every student you meet or pass on the campus” and when possible do give a name-get a name to establish closer ties and more hospitable attitudes. Does the campus promote the idea of the student as if he or she were some sort of guest that can decide to leave this educational hotel and got to another?

I am not saying coddle students at all. We must demand from them too because that is what they expect if they are to learn and succeed. What I am suggesting is that we need to check to make sure that all our services are excellent and meet students needed. And be sure our campus is hospitable to our students. Do we make them feel welcome? Do we give them decent parking locations or do we save that for ourselves? Do we make sure that faculty keep office hours when they say they will and make them at times that students can actually come by? (Service excellence audits find that this is often rarely the case). Do administrators have an open door policy to students so they can meet with them and hear the complaints or solve problems? Are employees trusted to make decisions to help students?

·         Are students made to feel as if they are really important?
·         Are they said hello to as they walk across campus?
·         If they look confused does someone stop to help them out?
·         Do people in offices treat them as important clients and not just as an imposition?
·         Are students made to feel as if someone cares about them and their welfare?
·         Do you ask students how the service has been in an office?
·         Is there communication in which students are asked how are things going?
·         Are they made to feel this is a hospitable campus after all that is the goal along with providing excellent services which are what must be done every day?
·         Is your campus and the people in it warm and welcoming to students?
·         Are they open to students and their needs?
·         Do people seek out students who may need help?
·         Does everyone act as if the students are guests who can switch academic hotels at any time?
·         Simply put, is the campus friendly to students and one another?

Are the employees treated with respect and warmth too? They are customers also after all and if they aren’t treated with hospitality they will not pass that on to your students.

Hospitality is a Dialogue
It is not just customer service though that is extremely important and must be checked on to make sure it is really happening as you think it may be. Or as customer service rule number 1 says “Make your campus into Cheers University” providing academic hospitality in which “everyone knows your name and everyone’s glad you came.”

Some schools do a good job of delivering services in the classroom and in the offices but they do not always do so with hospitality. Danny Meyers in his book Setting the Table  refers to service as a monologue in which the restaurant decides what and how it will deliver the technical services such as the menu, preparing the meals and even serving them to the table. But he says that hospitality is a dialogue that includes the customer. “Hospitality on the other hand, is a dialogue. To be on the guest’s side requires listening to that person with every sense and following up with a gracious, appropriate response.”

Schools focus so very much on the service side that they often forget about their need to be hospitable as well. They forget to listen to their clients and hear what they need to be able to provide hospitality. This is in part because schools do not focus on the difference between being service providers and being hospitable to their students. They perceive what they think is a problem but do not check with the students to see how to solve it if they even see the problem in service delivery at all. They go about readjusting the service without regard to whether or not the solution is one that the clients feel will work or even with the input of the client students. They leave out the hospitality part. They leave out customer input which is a real mistake.

An example. We recently completed a campus service excellence audit for a large university during which we checked every aspect of service and hospitality on campus which included talking with hundreds of students. We discovered that the school felt it had a problem with its billing process. Students had to wait in long lines to make payments and they were none too happy about it. So the school decided to change its service in a way that really backfired. They closed the office and made all students do their bill paying on line.

Theoretically this could have improved the service but the school did not talk to the students to see how closing the office would change the feeling of hospitality that the students would feel with the closure. The students were quite upset at not being able to see a person on such an important matter as making sure their bills were processed correctly. The students hated the closing of the office. Even if the service could have been made better and with no lines by payments on line, they did not like losing the person to person contact in such an important activity. They felt they were closed out of the office rather than being helped with what was intended to be improved service. They felt as if their needs were not being met and the new service was anything but hospitable especially since the door was blocked with a large wooden drop off box where they were to leave paper checks if they did not want to do on line bill pay.

When the school made the decision to improve the service they did not talk with the students at all and the result was not good.  Here is an excerpt from our executive summary from our customer excellence audit and report that further explains the misjudgment in service that led to a real feeling of a loss of hospitality too.

The Treasurer’s Office (which is the current name for the Bursar’s Office) elicited many negative comments from students. They uniformly do not like the fact that the entrance to the office has been shut off to them by a unit in which they are asked to just drop off payments by check. They do not like having to just drop off a payment with no way of verifying that the check has been received and no receipt provided. They want to be able to get a receipt for their payments since there have also been problems with the posting of payments in time to avoid late fees. They also want to be able to interact with someone when they have to discuss payments and late fees which they feel are excessive and set up in a manner to cause extra payments to the University as a result of late fees which they believe are caused by the University’s approaches to billing and some bill paying issues online.

“They want to interact with someone.” That is the essence of hospitality. The ability to have that dialogue even when doing a mundane activity as paying a bill is a simple act of hospitality and not just a delivery of a service. Hospitality is a two-way street and the students need to have that two way communication if they are to feel as if the college cares about them and their needs. Simple delivery of a service is not enough.

Another example is in the classroom. The teacher may deliver the information and get through the material and thus provide a service to the students. In fact this is one of the most important services as school provides. But if the students do not feel as if they have an opportunity to have a dialogue about the material and to be recognized as people and not just numbers in a classroom, hospitality is not exercised. In fact, when we provide customer excellence and hospitality seminars for faculty we go over the issue and provide the following scenario to start a class to improve in-class hospitality.

·         The professor greets the students
·         Asks how they are and listens for response
·         Reviews past class highlights and asks if there is any need to clarify any
·         Asks for questions or issues from the last class
·         Introduces the topics for the day and
·         After the class ends is the last one out the door to make sure that if any students have
·         questions or look confused she can help them right then and now.
·         We also teach the faculty how to get the students’ names since hospitality does call on developing a name to name rapport with the students. They are not just “whatshisname:” after all.
·         Finally we assure that office hours are actually being met. That is where the dialogues from the classroom really take place and if the office hours are not met, hospitality between faculty and student is lost.

Hospitality Includes Talking and Listening to Students
But key to all of developing hospitality is actually entering into a dialogue with students and listening to their issues and concerns. Very few schools so this. They just go ahead and focus on services and forget that hospitality is the key to developing a long range engagement and relationship with their students. It is important to listen to students; to encourage them to enter into that dialogue on what makes them feel wanted on campus and what does not.  This is what we do as part of the campus service audits we perform for schools but it is something you can do also. To not just provide services but real hospitality.

You cannot make something better until you know that it is not its very best yet. You need to understand the situation and the way service and hospitality are being delivered on campus to be able to make them better. This is what is discovered when a campus service audit is completed but there is also a simple way for you and everyone else on the campus to start learning what works and what doesn’t.

In the book The Power of Retention Dean Bill Schaar of Lansing Community College in Michigan was discussed and his way of saying hello to everyone he met. He would walk the campus every morning saying “good morning young man/lady” to every student he walked by. This made their day since a man in a suit and tie said hello to me. We added to this hello by asking students how they are and listening to their response.  They will most often tell you. That provides an opportunity for any less than positive responses to be explored. This is a good way to start to gauge how students are doing and what they are feeling about the school.

Add to that with another suggestion that will start to unveil hidden issues that students are bothered by.

Get out of your office and walk the campus. As you walk the campus do say hello to every student you see and ask them how they are doing as has been suggested earlier. But now I want you to just go up to random students and ask a simple question.

Introduce yourself with the give a name get a name technique as has been discussed earlier. But then tell the student that you are interested in asking a question about his or her experience on campus. You would like to be able to help make the student experience even better. Then ask this simple question and then listen for the answer. “If you could change one thing starting tomorrow to make your experience at the college better and more enjoyable what would that be?”

The secret now is being patient. This is an issue that many students have thought about but have not really voiced so it may take a minute for them to put words to their issue or concern. So just listen. They also may simply say that they cannot think of anything. This may be because they may not have anything they would like made better though this is doubtful. Or it may be because they are not sure you really want to hear from them. So if they have nothing to tell you at the moment give them your email address and tell them to feel free to email you if they think of anything. You may well be surprised at the number of emails you will get.

If they do tell you something make sure you let them know you will pass on their concern and even get their email so you can let them know if any changes are to be made to maker the issue better.

Using this simple method of talking and listening to students you will start to build up a long list of issues that can be addressed to make both service and hospitality better. In turn you will make the students feel more appreciated and increase retention though to graduation as you make the school better and stay in touch with students.


Hiring the Right People
One simple error that many schools make when it comes to service excellence is they hire the wrong people. They hire people who don’t care or are even antithetical to the idea of customer service. Yet then they want these same service agnostics to be able to provide good customer service.  This is a sure way to assure that there will be service issues at the school.

It is important that when hiring people a college realizes that the ability to perform a set of tasks is relatively easy to get in a person. People can learn the technical aspects of a job readily. People can be taught how to answer the phone though we must say that the audits and training we have been doing lately make me wonder if anyone cares about phone service lately. But still a person can be taught how to pick up a phone and provide a positive answer. A person can be taught how paperwork goes from one stack to another. People can be taught most any task even teaching if that is the goal of the school. And faculty who know the subject matter are readily available but faculty who care about customer service, not as readily there.

But having a pleasant personality and a caring concern for the students and the college’s other customers requires more than technical skills. It requires people who have a service-oriented makeup at the very least. It calls for hiring people who care about other people first and foremost. The sort of person who would even perhaps take an extra step or three to make sure that someone is served and treated well. The sort of person who puts others’ needs before one’s own. The sort of person who cares about customers and service to and for them.

So how does one find that sort of person for say an office position? During the interviews. Normally interviews are spent on the technical aspects of a person’s background or ability. But more time should be spent on non-tangible issues and questions of customer service and retention are important to a school. A simple question that one can actually ask is how they view students – as customers or as something different than customers. And then follow that up with a question about what does that mean the student as customer? Can you provide me an example when you went out of your way to help a student or colleague?

You can propose a situation and ask for responses. “Let’s say a student comes to you and he or she is upset at being sent from office to office trying to find something out or accomplish some action he has just come into your office and displays some anger toward you as a result of being shuffled from office to office? How do you handle that? Then you can add to it and even say that he has used some inappropriate language perhaps. What do you do?

Then listen closely to the response. The person should put the student above self in these situations and even show some understanding for the inappropriate language if the student has been given the old campus shuffle. He should be able to discuss how he would make certain that the student would get the service he or she needs to accomplish his goal. One thing to listen for is if the person takes steps to make certain that the student will get a finally satisfying outcome.

For example, the interviewee could start with an example of give and name get a name as a beginning point for creating a personalized relationship with the student. If he or she is not willing to at least share names, then service is not going to be a real concern for the employee. Next he should make sure he really understands the problem and get it clearly written down. Then he would find out who to give the issue to do making phone calls or by getting the student’s name and telephone number so he can have someone get back to the student rather than send him off  on another set of shuffles around campus.  The employee might say he would get the problem to the correct person and have someone call the student back at a time convenient to the student. These would be good indicators of a person who sees service as valuable and students as the central customers. It is not the only correct response but it is one of the things to listen for to hire the correct people.

Customer service and hospitality are quite easy to provide yet too many schools have not caught on to the relationship between service excellence and retention. They cling to an old incorrect notion that students are not customers with choices to leave the school and go somewhere else. To increase retention and completion rates colleges and universities need to extend more academic hospitality and service to their customers – their students..

If this article made sense to you, you may want to contact N.Raisman & Associates to see how you can improve academic customer service and hospitality to increase student satisfaction and retention.

UMass Dartmouth invited Dr. Neal Raisman to campus to present on "Service Excellence in Higher Ed"  as a catalyst event used to kick off a service excellence program.  Dr. Neal Raisman presents a very powerful but simple message about the impact that customer service can have on retention and the overall success of the university.  Participants embraced his philosophy as was noted with heads nods and hallway conversations after the session.  Not only did he have data to back up what he was saying, but Dr. Raisman spoke of specific examples based on his own personal experience working at a college as  Dean and President.  Our Leadership Team welcomed the "8 Rules of Customer Service", showing their eagerness to go to the next step in rolling Raisman's message out.  We could not have been more pleased with his eye-opening presentation.    Sheila Whitaker UMass-Dartmouth

If you want more information on NRaisman & Associates or to learn more about what you can do to improve academic customer service excellence on campus, get in touch with us or get a copy of our best selling book The Power of Retention. 



Monday, May 21, 2012

Why Students Leave College 2012 Study Results


The numbers have shifted a bit since the last study of why students leave college but the categories are still the same and in the same general taxonomy. We have contacted 1254 students who have left a college at least six months prior to our interviews to determine why they left the college. The names and contact information came from some of our client schools. 

The passage of six months to a year as well as our non-affiliation with any particular college or university provided the students the distance and anonymity for more open discussion on actual attrition causes. The students were randomly selected. They were often at their new college, one where we had been hired to perform an audit or present training. The above chart is a compilation of that research on why students really leave a school.

What we discovered is not what former students might tell a school official. Students leaving a school will generally play to the interviewer during their meetings. Students will often tell the interviewer one or another vague reason for leaving the college. The most common reason students give a school official falls under the category of a personal issue or problem which is actually not the real reason or excuse the student has for leaving the school. Research has found that students correctly assume that the interviewer will either not dig into their personal lives or will buy the vague soap opera they spin. We do love a good story, even if it may not be true or the real reason the student is leaving.

Keep in mind that the student is trying to leave the school and she realizes that the job of the exit interviewer is not just to learn why the student is leaving.

Students know that the interviewer wants to discover why the student wants to leave and then find some way to either fix the problem or talk the student into staying. But that is in direct opposition to the student‘s goal of getting the-----out of here. So when the enrollment counselor asks why she wants to leave, the student goes with the easiest escape route. I‘m leaving for personal reasons that I‘d rather not go into.”
Students know they if they claim personal reasons for having to leave college, most officials are happy to accept that for two main reasons. First, most institutions accept that a personal reason is a valid basis to leave school. There is a box on some form that can be checked for accounting purposes. Second, if students leave for personal reasons, neither the college nor the individual are really accountable for some failure in the department, school or our so-called systems. After all, we can't be held responsible for their personal problems, can we? A student leaving for as personal reason is not dropping due to any fault of the school after all. Neither the college nor the enrollment management team has to take a negative check against its reputation if a student has to leave due to some personal issue.

But when N.Raisman & Associates personnel dug a bit, it was discovered that the personal problems reported fell into a few major categories which indicate that departing students do have a sort of personal issue—a customer service issue—with the school.

The most significant reason why students left a school was again that they felt the school did not care about them They felt often that the college worked hard to recruit and enroll them but once they were there the college just assumed they would stay and did little to show that it cared about them being there. A full twenty-five percent felt this way.

Poor service accounted for 23% of the reasons why students left. This is of course an allied response to the college does not care about me since the service was obtained, or not, by students who then interpreted the poor service often as the college does not care about me. These two categories together account for 47% of responses.

The percentages of the reasons why students left are as follows:
College Doesn’t Care 25%
Poor Service 23%
Not worth it 18%
Finances 13%
Schedule 10%
Personal 8%
Grades 2%
Educational Quality 1%


That would mean that the total for customer service shifted down to 76% from 84% as leaving for finances and personal reasons went up.

There were two areas that did increase in their significance – finances and schedule.  Simply put many students are simply not being able to pay for the ever-increasing costs of college. Students also felt that the increase in tuition and fees plus all allied costs simply did not make college as worth it as the thought it would be especially since the estimates say that almost 50% of all college graduates were not able to find a full time job.


As schools are trying to cut their costs they are cutting sections. The schools usually decide to cut a section they feel is not fully enough enrolled to warrant offering it. This is not always true by the way but colleges usually have some go-no go number like ten students in a section for it to be allowed to be offered. What the schools do is to create some horrid customer service by cancelling the class in the last week or two. When a class is cancelled in the last weeks just before a start of the semester for example that totally disrupts the student’s life. She has planned her whole life around the schedule she thought he had. She has made arrangement for her hours at work not to conflict with her classes. If a mother, has set up babysitting arrangements around the class schedule. Then in the last moment the college cancels the class and her life is turned upside down when she can’t get another class at the same time as the cancelled on.  Moreover, if she can’t get another class that fits her schedule and major she may be a section short on being a full time student and that will affect financial aid. She might not be able to afford to go to school as a result of the cancelled class.

Canceling sections can be simply horrible customer service that can tip a student into giving up or at least stopping put maybe not to ever return to the school.

It is important to realize that the percentages are not fully exact since one category often glows into another. Poor service can make a student feel as if he or she is not cared for by the school. The changing of schedules at the last moment can do the same. These are all allied academic customer service issues that colleges and universities need to address to increase retention through focusing on academic customer service and hospitality.

IF THIS ARTICLE MAKES SENSE TO YOU, YOU WILL WANT TO OBTAIN A COPY OF THE BEST-SELLING NEW BOOK ON RETENTION AND ACADEMIC CUSTOMER SERVICE THE POWER OF RETENTION: MORE CUSTOMER SERVICE IN HIGHER EDUCATION  by clicking here
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Wednesday, May 16, 2012

Academic Customer Service will Increase Revenue and Budgets


The New York Times had an article recently on how colleges are trying to cope with increasing costs of operation and the need to shift the cost burden from increasing tuition al the time. It discussed how the costs of operation and the decreasing amounts of revenue coming in are creating a crisis for the colleges and universities They need to find ways to decrease costs and increase revenues. Not one of the potential solutions focused on the most immediate problem and the solution to the problem – retention.

Much of the article focused on Ohio State University which may create some of its own problem in paying the President Gordon Gee over $2 million a year. Yes he does a great job and deserves our praise as a college president.  And he raises tons of money but $2 million a year is too much to help balance the budget and keep tuition from rising. Keep in mind that though Gee is a fund raising machine most of that money does nothing to offset the basic annual budget problems. But that $2 million is small change compared to what could be brought into the college if it focused more on its retention rate.

OSU by the way does a good job in retaining students but could do better. It has a six-year graduation rate of 78.1%. That does place it high in the chart of retention but that means that almost 22% percent of its 41,348 students do not graduate in six years and most all of them leave the University. It also means that the school has an attrition rate of around 22% for each cohort that begins the University. That is 9096 students who leave.

At its tuition rate of $8,679 for instate students that means that it loses $78,944,184 per each cohort that starts. And since students leave every year of their college careers it can be safely assumed that this is an annualized loss of all the cohorts that are at the school as they move from freshman to super seniors and beyond. That is on an average year, the school loses over $78 millions dollars from attrition.

If it increased its overall attrition rate by 5% to retain another 455 students each year that would bring in additional revenue of $3,948,945. Increasing retention to 10% more a year or 909 more students retained would add $7,897,890 to the budget.

The economics of retention are clear and get stronger when we realize that every year that it loses 9096 students it has to replace them with new students. Considering that the costs of attracting and processing new freshman runs around $5,460 per student that means that OSU spends an additional $49,664,160 attracting and processing the replacements for the students who have left. That is a considerable sum that could be cut by paying greater attention to retention.

The total cost to the University due to attrition each year runs around $128.6 million. Now that is large sum of money that makes President Gee’s salary look quite small in comparison. An increase in retention of 10% would yield a savings and revenue increase to the University of around $12.6 million dollars in added tuition and saved attraction and processing costs. Actually even more since the figures look only at tuition and leave out fees and other costs to students which would add significant dollars also.

Could OSU increase its retention and save money? Absolutely. One certain way to do this would be to improve academic customer service on the main campus and make it as good as the service one receives in the Wexner Medical Center and its allied facilities. The OSU medical center and its facilities throughout the community provide a great deal of money to the University. It does so for two reasons. It provides excellent medical service as well as great customer service.

The OSU medical center makes sure that patients are treated well and with great service even in its clinics and offsite facilities. An example, the Morehouse Clinic has simple services like good signage everywhere you go so you can’t get lost easily, receptionists who act as if they are glad to see you and always greet you with smile and they guide you to where you are going and many other basic customer service facets that include an online email and phone communication system for the doctors and patients called OSUmychart. This lets doctors and patients communicate easily. Most importantly, most all of the doctors actually do return emails and phone calls within 24 hours.

Another example of good service is that parking on the main campus or on some of the outlying facilities could be problematic for some patients or who do not want to go looking for a space so the medical center provides valet parking at the main campus and one or two of its other facilities. At a newly opened facility, they have a receptionist who does nothing but walk patients to where they need to go to so they do not get lost just as the very best hotels do.

Equally important is that the doctors and nurses appear to all have been trained in good customer service. They greet patients and treat them with a smile and excellence in service. An example, my wife had to go to the Morehouse Clinic the other day. She was shown to an examining room fairly promptly but seemed to be kept waiting beyond her appointment time. It turned out that her doctor found a medical problem in another patient that had to be treated immediately. That was slowing her down since she was going to be sure to provide great service to the patient. This is not a 15 minute and out approach to medicine that one finds elsewhere.

As my wife waited, people would come into the examining room to provide her with updates on the situation and make sure she was a comfortable as possible. When her physician, Dr, Grever who is an excellent and conscientious physician finally came to her she did not rush her to try and make up time. She took her time and made sure my wife was given all the attention and care she needed.  As a result of the attention and service my wife, though a bit later than she planned, left the Morehouse Center feeling well served and pleased; not upset and ready to find another doctor.

Compare that to the service one find on the main campus where there is very poor signage to guide students across a huge campus; where receptionists seem to seldom smile and welcome students who approach them, where phone calls are not answered quite often; voice mails not returned and emails not answered among other service problems.

Among other poor service are core services provided by faculty that can be weak in that they appear to not always hold office hours, do not always  open themselves up to help students who may be having and problem and most often do not respond to emails or phone calls. This level of weak customer service adds to the attrition rate.

Our studies show that 34% of students leave college as a result of poor or weak customer service making them feel as if they don’t matter or are not important as customers paying for the University. 34%!  All the academic customer service problems account for 84% of the reasons why students leave but the most important overall is from the students being made to feel they are unimportant.

One could posit that the University could raise its retention by attending to its main campus academic customer service issues and emulate what goes on in the medical facilities more. If OSU were to do that and provide some additional training in academic customer service, it would increase retention and in so doing increase its revenue and budget. If Dr. Gee were to take on this training for the main campus he would make sure that his $2 million salary would appear even more warranted and deserved as he would increase retention and revenue at the same time.  

What could be done on the OSU campus can and should be done on yours. Increased excellence in academic customer service will and does increase revenue and adds to the budget on the plus side. Increase service to students and increase the college's viability without having to resort to tuition increases as the primary option.

IF THIS ARTICLE MAKES SENSE TO YOU, YOU WILL WANT TO OBTAIN A COPY OF THE BEST-SELLING NEW BOOK ON RETENTION AND ACADEMIC CUSTOMER SERVICE THE POWER OF RETENTION: MORE CUSTOMER SERVICE IN HIGHER EDUCATION  by clicking here
N. Raisman & Associates is the leader in increasing student retention, enrollment and revenue through workshops, presentations, research, training and academic customer service solutions for colleges, universities and career colleges in the US, Canada, and Europe as well as businesses that work with them 
We increase your success

CALL OR EMAIL TODAY
                                             info@GreatServiceMatters.com 
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Thursday, May 10, 2012

84% Solution published in University Business

The 84 Percent Solution

Wednesday, May 9, 2012
Studies have shown that 84 percent of all attrition finally comes back to some aspect of academic customer service. Students leave a school because they do not receive the service they expect or need to succeed and feel a true member of the college community. But academic customer service is not the same as retail. In academic customer service for example the customer is not always right, such as on tests and quizzes. But they are right in demanding the services to which they feel entitled from being treated as a valuable and worthwhile member of the community from parking and food service through to scheduling, classroom decorum, teachers who know their name and all the other aspects that feed into their demand of a good return of three major investment – financial, emotional and affective.
What are the four basic indicators of a successful school in its operations and well-being?
  1. Population
  2. Population
  3. (No surprise here) Population
  4. Customer service levels
If a school is able to maintain and grow its population, then all is in order. Note I said population. Not admissions. Hitting admission numbers does not indicate the health of the institution, particularly if a school is losing 30 percent or more of its students. Simply put, if a sales team sells 100 pet rocks on Monday, but by next week 30 are returned, then how many were really sold? The sales team may be celebrating hitting its goal but the CFO is dying because the lost revenue and costs associated with selling and processing returns have basically wiped out any profit. All the company has learned is that the pet rock can be sold but has very little customer retention power and may just have been sold in a way that can lead to bigger issues down the line.
The direct correlation of revenue to tuition and fees in a college or university is undeniable. Tuition is provided only by students who attend and then stay in the college. If they leave, they stop paying tuition and fees. Therefore, retention is the key to providing an institution the revenue it needs to run its operations.
There is another correlation of academic customer service to retention. Academic (not retail) customer service accounts for up to 84 percent of all reasons that students leave a college according to research conducted by AcademicMAPS over the past seven years. AcademicMAPS surveyed 640 students one year after they left a school to learn why they left. The passage of a year gave the students the distance and anonymity for more open discussion on actual attrition causes. The students were randomly selected, and many had gone on to new schools.
What we discovered is that students will often “play to the interviewer” during their meeting with an exit counselor (if the school has one.) They name generic “personal reasons” as their excuse for leaving the school. Most counselors accept this excuse, because, ultimately, it means the school cannot be held accountable for a student’s personal problems.
But when we dug into those excuses a bit, we found that the personal problems actually fell into a few major customer service categories. Most often, students said they didn't like the way they were treated and that they took personally. They tell us that they felt the school was indifferent toward them as a person, as a learner, or as anything but tuition revenue. A common statement was, “All they seemed to care about was me paying on time.”
This perceived apathy on the part of the school was the primary reason 30 percent of students said they left. This feeling violates our Good Academic Customer Service Principle 1:
“Everyone wants to attend Cheers University, where everyone knows your name and they're awfully glad you came. If they feel you do not care, they are on the way out the door over to Gary’s Old Towne Tavern.”
The second major reason students gave is dissatisfaction with how they were treated by staff, meaning anyone who works at the college from maintenance people on up. Faculty are staff. Clerical workers are staff. Administrators are staff. They are all in a staff-student relationship. Everyone should be working to meet the needs of the student, the primary customer.
Generally students will point out some clerical, management or administrative staff as the primary poor customer service villain. This is because students are more lenient with faculty in general. Students want to believe their teachers care about them even if they don't seem to really show it much. But that can change if a professor awards a grade that is inconsistent with what the student believes is hard work and effort. Grades have become the coin of the realm for students and they believe they are paying for them in one or another way – study and tuition. Students who believe their grades don't reflect their effort feel they have been mistreated, and will not continue to put up with that. So they leave.

Let’s be clear customer service is not about giving easy grades. Customer service is about helping students in their efforts by providing tools that help them succeed. Services such as tutoring by qualified tutors, additional study material and supplementary opportunities to understand the information or achieve a skill are customer service.

The 2010 National Survey of Student Engagement  indicated that over 60 percent of students attend more than one college prior to graduation. That should not comfort administrators if their school is among those that lose more students than they take in. Misery likes company but there are no revenue dollars in the misery of losing a large portion of enrollment, especially to those who get laid off to meet budget as a result of too many drops.

Another major reason students leave is that they are simply unhappy with the school. The institution forgets that it is much easier and much less costly to keep a student than to recruit and enroll them to begin with. Before classes, there are numerous communications, well planned activities at orientations, events, even celebrations to make sure the students will show up. Once classes start, most schools seem to forget to keep up the effort that says we are glad you came.

Even if a school tries to maintain a focus on making students feel welcome during freshman year, it almost always ends at most every school as soon as sophomore year rolls around. Now, it is assumed, the students are mature, focused and will remain satisfied with the college. That false assumption leads to more dropouts. Taking away the focus after freshman year is a sure way to add to potential dissatisfaction. Once any institution provides good initial customer service, it should never be taken away.

Customer Service and its Discontents

Customer service is an overlooked aspect in a school's success. Unfortunately, too many schools have a problem accepting that. They give into notions that customer service is some business concept that has no or little relevance to a college. People in schools have a sense that customer service is somehow a call to pander to students, to just lower standards and make them happy. That is not customer service. That is cheating the client.

Though they may be reluctant to admit it, colleges and universities are businesses at their core. Granted, unique and idiosyncratic businesses, but service providers all the same. Each has its own culture, mores, folkways, traditions, and codes. Yet, common to each is a business model that includes budgets, personnel, administrations, strategic plans, marketing, customer (student) acquisition, and more.

But higher education and its individual schools are unique from other business models and so customer service needs to recognize that. The approaches of the world of commerce and corporations do not always work. At best, they need to be adapted to recognize that the services in a school are not exactly equal to selling widgets. Platitudes will not work. What will work is providing the tools and services to help assure that students get the returns on investment they seek.

And schools must keep in mind what those in the restaurant industry already know. The core service is the final product itself. A nice waiter can never make up for bad food. But a nice waiter can make good food that much better and keep customers loyal. In a school, the product is the education itself. A good education with good customer service will make for greater retention, happier students, and graduates who will support the school.

—Neal A. Raisman, is the founder of N. Raisman & Associates, a customer service consulting and research group. Dr. Raisman is a sought after speaker on customer service in colleges and universities. The author of The Power of Retention (2009), Raisman can be reached at nealr@GreatServiceMatters.com. 413-219-6939


IF THIS ARTICLE MAKES SENSE TO YOU, YOU WILL WANT TO OBTAIN A COPY OF THE BEST-SELLING NEW BOOK ON RETENTION AND ACADEMIC CUSTOMER SERVICE THE POWER OF RETENTION: MORE CUSTOMER SERVICE IN HIGHER EDUCATION  by clicking here
N. Raisman & Associates is the leader in increasing student retention, enrollment and revenue through workshops, presentations, research, training and academic customer service solutions for colleges, universities and career colleges in the US, Canada, and Europe as well as businesses that work with them 
We increase your success

CALL OR EMAIL TODAY
www.GreatServiceMatters.com 
                                             info@GreatServiceMatters.com 
413.219.6939