Tuesday, June 26, 2012

Twenty-Five Principles to Increase Academic Customer Service Excellence

Over the years of researching, consulting and writing about academic customer service and hospitality to increase student satisfaction and retention, we have provided lists of principles. They change every few years as we learn more and see the need to emphasize certain basic ideas that are important to increasing customer service to students. As we looked them all over to rethink the Principles for the next iteration, we discovered twenty-five that have stood the test of time. We have added a twenty-sixth which will be in the upcoming list of fifteen new principles which we will publish soon.  They are listed below.

If a school worked to implement each of these, they would definitely increase service excellence on campus.

Principles of Good Academic Customer Service

1.       Every student wants to attend cheers university and 
every employee wants to work there!   
“where everybody knows your name and they’re awfully glad you came”

2.       Do unto students as you would have done unto your son, your daughter, your mother or your father.

3.       Students come before personal or college-focused goals. 
Students really are more important than you or I are.

4.       The goal is not to recruit the very best students, 
but to make the students you recruit their very best.

5.       Processes, rules and products should assure that students and learning are at the center of the institution. If not, rethink them.

6.       Be honest in all communications.  Do not patronize.

7.       Students can never be an inconvenience.

8.       Just because someone else did a dis-service or harm does not relieve you of correcting the injury.

9.       Students and employees deserve an environment that is neat, bright, 
welcoming and safe.

10.   Students are not really customers.  They are professional clients.

11.   The customer is not always right. 
That’s why they come to college and take tests.

12.   Satisfaction is not enough and never the goal.

13.   Do not cheapen the product and call it customer service. No cheap grades.   No pandering. 

14.   To every problem there is more than one solution and they may be external rather than within academia.

15.   Not everyone is capable of providing good customer service.  That does not mean they do not have value somewhere.   

16.   There must be a good match between the college and the student 
or do not enroll the student.

17.   Fulfill all promises

18.   Engagement starts at first contact and continues into alumni status.  Engage. 
Engage.  Engage and then engage again.

19.   Everyone deserves an environment that is neat, bright, welcoming and safe.

20.   All members of the community must be given courteous, concerned 
and prompt attention to their needs and value.

21.   Train, trust and empower all employees to do what is right to help students.

22.   Give a damn about graduating students; not just recruiting them.

23.  Websites must be well designed, easy to navigate, written for and 
focused on students and  actually informative

24.   Attendance is key to being able provide good customer service and must be attended to with a  Campus-wide policy.

25.   Decorum in the classroom is an important service and training for the future  

26.   Every student and person on campus deserves a greeting and a smile from you. Provide them.

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

The University of Toledo was able to really get its customer excellence focused after Dr. Raisman and his team performed a full campus service excellence audit of the University. Dr. Raisman’s team came on campus for a week and identified every area we could improve and where we are doing well. The extensive and detailed report will form a blueprint for greater customer service excellence at the University that will make us an even better place for students to attend, study and succeed. Thank you, Dr. Raisman, for doing a great job. We unreservedly recommend his customer service audits to any school looking to improve customer service, retention and graduation rates.    Iaon Duca, University of Toledo
The report generated from the full campus customer service audit that N.Raisman & Associates did for our college provided information from an external reviewer that raised awareness toward customer service and front end processes.  From this audit and report, Broward College has included in its strategic plan strategies that include process mapping.  Since financial aid was designed as the department with the most customer service challenges that department has undergone process mapping related to how these process serve or do not serve students optimally.  It has been transformational and has prompted a process remap of how aid is processed for new and continuing students.                            Angelia Millender, Broward College (FL)


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Tuesday, June 19, 2012

Telephone Can be a Good Source of Good Collegiate Customer Service

Twelve percent of enrollment is lost when the potential student makes, or tries to make contact with the school.  Twelve percent of enrollments are lost because the initial contact with the school is handled so poorly. These are potential students who are interested enough in the school to actually make contact so losing them is losing a motivated lead and adds to the need to work even harder to enroll a class of students each semester.

One area of service in which colleges and universities are really falling down is in the answering of phone calls and emails. A primary contact point for potential students. In fact, when we do a campus service and hospitality audit, these two services are invariably weak. They cause many student complaints.

Our findings were also found by Terri Giltner as she related in an article article in the Community College Journal (April/May 2012).about the Kentucky Community and Technical College System. KCTCS had shoppers contact each community college in the system to see how they responded to phone calls and emails. Here are the results she received.

Each scenario was tested at all 16 KCTCS colleges for a total of 240 shops. Results indicated that it was not always easy for prospective students to contact KCTCS colleges, either by phone or email. Just 45 percent of telephone inquiries elicited an answer to a question
on the first call; 10 percent of the shops were never completed. Email inquiries fared worse. Sixty-four percent of email inquiries received no response, even after extending the response time two additional weeks.

This is simply unacceptable service and is losing students from the schools as well as from your schools as we have found similar results in hundreds of colleges and universities. When someone calls a college, a trained person should be answering the phone in less than four rings. And that person should answer the phone with a standard response that begins by saying hello, introducing him or herself by name, welcoming the caller to the school and then asking “what can I help you with?”

This is the way it should be done but too many calls are being answered in a rude, indifferent, and offensive manner. It seems that people answering phones have been doing so while distracted, angry or apparently annoyed at having to answer the phone at all. And these attitudes clearly affect tone, and voice style.

I don’t know but I guess there is something offsetting about a person answering the phone with “Yuh. What?” or with a very bored and indifferent “NameofCollege, WhatCanIDo ForYuh?” And the tone that accompanies that is so often very negative telling the caller that he or she is disturbing the answerer. As we call around to schools to test the customer service on the telephone last week, we hit the best response yet. The person picked up the phone and just said “What?”

And little tells a person he or she is unwanted than being “dissed” on the phone. If a student gets the feeling that he or she is not wanted from an early or first phone call, it can be an uphill battle to retain the student’s interest in attending the school. And it is so simple to assure that people answer the phone in a friendly manner.

Here is one quick and inexpensive customer service solution. Mirrors.
Yes. Mirrors. Go to a local craft store and buy simple, small mirrors and double-sided tape. Give the mirror with the tape to everyone who might answer a phone. Have them tape the mirror to a spot level with their face or where they could easily see their face when they go to answer the phone. Then have everyone look into the mirror and smile before picking up a phone. All they need to do is retain the smile when saying “hello, how can I help you?” Problem solved.

It is a simple fact that when a person is smiling, he or she cannot answer the phone with an angry or negative tone. In fact, the caller will hear the smile come through in the voice. This may not eliminate all the phone protocol issues a school will have but it will certainly help.

Another telephone customer service solution TRAINING
Training. People do not use the phone well anymore and need to be trained how to answer it. They need to be taught how to get their mind into a mellow welcoming tone before answering the phone. They need to learn a set response such as “Hello, this is (name) Thank you for calling (school name). How may I assist you?” This answering script gets a number of things right. It incorporates give-a-name get-a-name and then goes on to offer assistance.

They also need to be taught to answer the phone before it rings for the fourth time. Four rings is the limit on how many times a phone should ring. After four, it is often voice mail or the person hangs up thinking it will go to voice mail.

And voice mail!!!!! It is actually there as a tool for the caller. It is not a default situation that allows the answerer to ignore the call. People really do not care for voice mail too much believing (quite often rightly so) that it will not be responded to. This is the situation we have found at many schools. People let phones go to voice mail so they are not disturbed but do not return the calls. And if they do more than 24 hours pass.

  Voice mail logs must be cleared every day by actually getting back to the callers. At the very least, a voice mail should be returned within 24 hours. Not everyone can be Southwest Airlines which takes the number of a caller in the queue and gets back to him or her within ten minutes or less but any school should demand and make sure that people return voice mails within 24 hours or less.
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, June 11, 2012

Administrators Need Customer Service Training Too - Free Book Offer

I just finished another workshop on academic customer service and hospitality at a major university. I noticed that one very important group was missing from the group of participants. The leadership of the college. The president, vice presidents, deans and many other senior managers were not at the workshop. Somehow they did not think that adding new ways to make certain that students and thus retention would remain in the positive column for the school.

I suppose they thought they had more important things to do. They were wrong. Nothing is more important than strengthening the student experience and showing support of the employees as they are being asked to consider changing the culture at the school. Nothing is more important than changing a culture. And that cannot be done without the full buy-in and modeling of senior administrators.

Did they think it would appear that academic customer service and showing hospitality for students is something for others to do? Do they not realize that customer service and hospitality excellence are for everyone including senior administration? Did they think they were somehow exempt from improving their service and hospitality to everyone on campus?

What they missed was that by not showing up for these workshops (I repeated the workshops twice to make sure that no office was closed for people to attend which would have been horrible customer service) sent a message that they were not fully supporting the effort to improve the student experience on campus. This is an error in changing the culture on campus to improve service excellence and thus retention and revenue too.

As a past college president I know that there are many things for an administrator to do but I also know that it is very important to stamp events and cultural changes with a senior administrator stamp of approval. This tells everyone that this activity is important just by showing up. I also know that even a president can carve out some time to be a role model and show up for a workshop to signal that this is important.

The president of a college has an important role to play by letting others know what is important. This means that at times the president needs to be there to say this is valuable. He or she also needs to tell the administrators that this is important enough for them to show up and show support for the effort.

The power of the role model making it clear that students and their satisfaction with the school are important need to be emphasized by participation. Not simply because it is important to show up but because too many senior administrators do not provide enough customer service to quality them not to learn more.

The simple fact that they did not show up shows that they may not care enough about some of  their customers,  staff and managers, to participate with them. By not showing up to learn with their customers they are saying that somehow they do not care about them that much and they are somehow better than them and already know all that is needed to be known. This is wrong.

As we do audits of campuses for their service and hospitality strengths and weaknesses we find that the staff in particular feel the administrators do not treat them as well as they could. They simply do not provide good service to either employees or students. Yet they do not seem to feel that improving customer service is something for them to do. They are wrong. They need to learn more about customer service as well.

We even have special workshops just for administrators similar to the one we did recently at the University oif Massachusetts in Dartmouth. In that we focus on the specific roles and functions of an administrator and the rules they need to follow to help improve academic cusotmer service and hospitality on campus. These rules include:

Customer Service Rules for Managers


Rule 1
Students are our primary customers
Rule 2
Our colleagues are our customers too
Rule 3
Take care of our customers
Our customers’ needs must come before our own or we will lose customers. Always have time for customers!
Rule 4
If an employee deserves praise, praise her
If an employee does not deserve praise, retrain him
Rule 5
Annual reviews are too late and have limited value
Conduct informal reviews at least once a month and
Listen twice as much as you talk
Rule 6
Say thank you to each employee at least once a day
Rule 7
Celebrate small victories
Celebrate big victories big
Rule 8
Remember that your colleagues have lives outside of work
You do too
Rule 9
If the phone is ringing and everyone is busy, answer it
No work is below you
Rule 10
 
To help out with this furthering the understanding of the importance of academic customer service and hospitality I am offering free PDF copy of one of my books Customer Service and the Cost of Attrition for any administrator. If you want to get a copy to pass on to an administrator you can do that gladly too. Just email me at nealr@GreatServiceMatters.com  and request one. Be happy to get more administrators involved.

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.