Wednesday, September 26, 2012

The Role of Hope in Customer Service and Retention

Two weeks of illnesses, deaths, funerals, anniversaries of deaths and coaching parents who like me had lost a child had put me in a funk. Even the numerous requests to give talks, workshops and retention audits did not lift my spirits quite enough it seemed. But then I read Jerome Groopman’s book The Anatomy of Hope which somehow made it into a clearance for a dollar table at Barnes & Noble. In the book, Dr. Groopman, an oncologist and the Recanti Chair of Medicine at Harvard discusses the concept of hope and that led me to realize there is an aspect of retention and service that is too often not included in the literature or consideration. There is a strong emotional aspect to retaining a student that is extremely important. It may even be the most important aspect finally in whether or not a college, university or school will retain a student.

The emotional aspect is discussed in articles on ROI and in The Power of Retention as a significant factor in understanding student emotional considerations in applying to and staying at a college. This is presented in the section on affective roi. Affective ROI deals with feelings, the student’s attachment to the school. In it simplest consideration, the student calculates whether or not he or she feels as if the institution is returning the emotional investment being made into the school. The calculation deals with social equity Do I feel I at least a balance of investment I am making coming back to me in care and concern for me as an individual”? The affective focus also considers the student’s perception of the value of being associated with the college.

There is also the student’s concern with whether or not I feel I am valued and important to the school beyond the tuition I am paying. This is also expressed in statements such as “All you care about is my money” and “Hey, I pay your salary”. Heard those? Then you heard core affective roi concerns of a potential dropout.

The affective roi is a crucial emotional component that the student must appreciate positively from the interaction with the college if he or she is to stay. So how do you help form appreciations of caring, valuing and social equity? These simplest indicators and expressions include such simple things as smiling at the student, greeting him or her, interrupting what one is doing when the student needs help, being there for office hours, offering additional help and certainly listening and then helping. The college must do all it can to make the student feel as if it cares about him or her as a full individual.
The sense of valuing is of primary concern. It is something I learned more about while reading Dr. Jerome Groopman’s book. The first two lines in the book are

Why do some people find hope despite facing severe illness while other do not? And can hope actually change the course of a malady, helping patients prevail

I have often spoken and written and spoken about students as patients and we in higher education as doctors. Like medical patients, students come to us to find out what they need to do to get better, stronger, more intellectually and professionally healthy. We prescribe them the medicines of books, lectures, training, homework, papers and here and there a placebo quiz that we believe will make them more fit.

But we like medical doctors have our flaws. We are taught an area of expertise in a discipline as are medical doctors. We become sociologists, engineers, historians, educational curriculum experts, biologists, physicists, even neurolinguists as medical colleagues become orthopedists, oncologist, pediatricians, and neurologists. They and we even specialize within our specializations in similar ways – an historian focusing on the first two months of the French Revolution like a surgeon specializing in the left hand with expertise in the phalanges (yes they exist).

So, we as our medical colleagues know a great deal about our area and focus on the issues involved in that specialization. We listen to students about the same 18 seconds doctors do before we are ready to give an answer from our discipline. And we even have our Dr. House’s as shown by a note on a faculty office door. The note stated “I do not keep office hours because I am too busy but if you need to talk to me, you can try to call me.” We also have our Kildare’s, Marcus Welby’s, Hawkeyes and even a Dr. Cox or two.

Keeping Hope Alive In his book, Groopman explores the very valuable role of hope in the success of patients getting better. He finds that some patients have none and they seem to die more than those who do have at least some active hope. The ones with hope believe they can beat the cancer and often undergo painful treatments because after hearing all the risks and discomfort, they still believe they might work. They might allow for another extra year or even full remission. He also discusses patients an experiment at Baylor College of Medicine in which patients who had arthritis in the knee were led to believe they had surgery to correct it although they didn’t. They were given a placebo surgery without any arthroscope being used; just four small cuts where a scope might have been inserted. Their belief they had surgery allowed them to recover use of the knee without pain without the corrective procedure. The four small cuts along with being informed of the benefits and issues involved in the surgery created hope and belief.

An Bicycle of Qualified Hope in Action The hope the surgeons created made me recall a student who attended Briarcliff College on Long Island. This student did not have a good preparation for college either in his studies, or his intellectual development. He had remedial/developmental needs in basic areas like writing, math, even reading. But he met an admission’s rep who laid out an full program of developmental courses an challenges he would face and overcome. Then she provided him the longer course and goal of graduation. She made him believe he could do it. With dedication, work and more work he could succeed. He was given a clear shot of what I call qualified hope. That’s qualified hope not blind hope.

He was not told by the rep “Sure you can graduate and we are here to help” in a way similar to some doctors trying to boost the sprits of a patient even if there is a minor chance the treatment might work. Sort of like the doctor in Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life telling a person who lost a leg to a tiger “Oh, it’ll grow back. A couple days of rest and you’ll be right as rain.”

No, this student was told what he would have to do, what the treatment protocol demanded if he were to have a chance to graduate. He was told what he hads to do and what we would do. He was given qualified hope. He would have to work hard, do all his assignments, take developmental classes, ask for and get extra help outside of class when needed, not miss any classes and he could have a possibility to graduate. No guarantees but we will be there to help.

He believed the rep and the people he met at the College so he developed faith in the prognosis. When he needed help, he got it. When he needed to be told he was not doing something correctly, he was told. And when his car broke down and he missed a day of classes, he was called to see where he was and what the problems were. We stayed in touch and continued a running prognosis with cures.

That phone call boosted his trust in the college. His trust that the school really did care and would be there for him. If we called when he missed a class, we were letting him know that he really was important. But his car was dead. He didn’t have the money to repair it. He live twelve miles away. But he had faith in the college. This student trusted that Briarcliff did care and would live up to its promises. So he turned to his qualified hope and a bicycle with full qualified belief that it would get him the twelve miles back and forth. No mean feat on Long Island roads and highways.

And he rode that bike to college every day no matter what the weather. He even rode through a snowstorm that had shut the school because to get to an 8 o’clock class he had to leave before we could announce the decision.

And was he angry?

No. He wasn’t. He just asked if he could stay in the library and read until the storm stopped. Since we were there anyhow, why not? We also made sure he got some hot coffee to warm up, brought the bike inside and told him how amazed and proud we were of him. Almost as proud as when he graduated.

Yet other students who had many benefits of a good high school, a reliable personal car, came from a well to do family drop out of colleges and universities every day. Why? Not lack of skill.

Lack of hope or being given false, unqualified hope.

Instilling Hope from Within We can all instill hope, qualified hope in our students. How? By providing a clear picture of a possible future and how it can be achieved. Even if the path is hard arduous and required extra work and plodding through. They need to know what to expect. As Dr. Groopman does not hide the fact that chemotherapy can be grueling and even painful to his patients who will need to decide what their course of action will be, we need to let our patients, certainly our weaker students know what the academic therapy will entail so they can make a decision that is right for them As an oncologist would want a patient with a small window of success know what is ahead and let them decide if they have the hope and belief they can prevail, we need to do that with students who are in need of knowing.

Oncolgists know that some patients will decide to forgo the chemo knowing it likely will not produce enough benefit and accept their fate, so some students really should so the same. Or as patients can choose between different doctors and courses of treatment according to their levels of strength and hope, so we should do with students who we know will likely nor benefit from our college but might do okay within another. Just as it does a patient with an untreatable tumor for example false hope, it does a college no good to accept a student who will soon drop out. Sure it may help a rep meet a quota but it only adds to the next goals for admissions since that drop out will need to be replaced. (oh don’t tell me you don’t have quotas for reps. Call it what you will but we all now people are evaluated on numbers!)

And one more thing. We have to also have informed hope and belief in our selves and our schools. We must believe we can do a good job of helping others if we are well prepared and concerned. As Groopman writes

I learned that it takes much more than mere words to communicate information and to alter affect…I try hard to let patients read in my eyes that there is true hope for them. …for a physician to effectively impart real hope, he has to believe in himself. ..

But I assert that he (the patient) needs to know a at least minimum of amount of information about his diagnosis and the course of his problem; otherwise. His hope is false, and false hope is an insubstantial foundation upon which to stand and weather the vicissitudes of difficult circumstances. It is only true hope that carries its companions, courage and resilience through. False hope causes them to ultimately fail by the wayside as reality intervenes and overpowers them. (P. 209-210) 


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, retention and your bottom line
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: More Customer Service for Higher Education. 

Tuesday, September 18, 2012

Immediacy of Service Demand Equals Perceived Cost of Attendance



There is a direct correlation between cost and expectations of service. This can be seen in the purchase of a new luxury car versus a used car for example. Simply put it is expected that the new car will perform better than the used car. When one spends a lot of money on something it is not just expected that the product will work well, it is also anticipated that the services associated with the purchase will be prompt, productive and done well. The higher the perceived cost of the product the higher the demand for services and performance on demand.

As college costs have been rising, the expectations of service have risen with the costs. Now that students are paying much more for an education, training and preparation for the future, they expect that the “product” will be good and they believe it is. Only 1% said they left a college due to poor or weak educational quality.

They also expect increased service with increased cost. To them they are buying that new luxury automobile and expect that when there is a service issue it will be taken care of immediately. They are innately impatient and that has increased with tuition and fees as well. They have little patience now and will not accept the slow processes that we still cling to. Moreover they live in the golden age of rudeness. They expect what they want when they want it and can get quite outspoken if the service is not provided when asked for.

For example, they do not (nor do I for that matter) understand how an expedited transcript request can still take days to complete. As one student said to me recently, “why can’t they just print the damn thing out right there and then and give it to me? I’m paying a lot of money and need that transcript now.”

And you know the student is right. He is paying a lot of money especially to him because he has had to take out loans to go to school which just increases the demand for service by the way and we should be able to print out a transcript right then and there. I mean how much work is it to look up a transcript by student number and print it out for the student. It would only take an extra few seconds to stamp it too. Or better yet, why not just let the students print out a PDF of a transcript which is watermarked “unofficial transcript” from his or her dorm room or home.

They are paying for the service and should get it. This is just one example of how we could match their demands and there are more but what we need to realize is that the correlation between cost and demand for immediacy is not one that we seem to understand. The cost may not seem that high to us but we are talking about discretionary funds of students who are using them to pay for school. The cost is a proportion of their available funds as perceived by the individual student. Cost is in proportion to the individual student and his or her personal fiscal condition.

That is why we still find that there are high levels of service demand in lower cost community colleges as well as private schools with large tuition bills.

The students who attend community colleges are coming from demographic groups with less money to spend.  The lower tuition at a community college is still a stretch for many of the students and thus is seen as a high cost. Yes, they know it is cheaper than a four year school but it is all a matter of proportion of income and available discretionary funds. It should also be known that as we talk to community college students even those who are on a free ride from Pell grants and scholarships feel the cost is high because the expense is not just money but time, effort and hopes.

Time is an expense especially when that time means having to find someone to take care of the family while the students attends classes. These lead to an expense of effort which can be high and can actually lead to added costs not covered by tuition or fees in the school. If a p[aren’t has to afford the cost of a child cares situation, that is considered by the student to be a cost of going to school and can lead to their feeling that the school is expensive so they want what they want when they want it. The costs develop a customer mindset as one should expect.

We need to find more ways to service students when they want. They see themselves as customers and they are right about that. We need to do all we can to make our services equal to the felt cost of attending college. If we do not they are going to continue to demands more service and get even more frustrated when we do not provide them in what they see as a timely manner.

Start by changing your transcript policy and procedure as discussed above. That will be one giant step forward and will begin to please student demands that the immediacy of service equal their perceived and actual investment. 


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, September 10, 2012

Saying I'm Sorry is Good Customer Service

Businesses have recently rediscovered something very important in providing good customer service. Being polite and saying things like please, thank you and the key to success “I’m sorry…”

For some reason we in higher ed have lost being polite as a basic part of working with our customers.  We still seem to work on the idea of the caste system with the students in the lowest bracket so we do not have to be polite to them or accept responsibility for them getting upset by colleagues. In fact it seems that we have a greater loyalty to our colleagues than our customers. That is wrong.

Our first loyalty needs to be to our students. They pay the bills and are the reason we exist. We should be sorry and helpful when they are given the run a round and always be polite using phrases like “thank you for letting me help you” and most importantly when working with students who have been given the run around also known as the shuffle are two simple words “I’m sorry”.

We need to accept Principle 10. Just because someone else did a dis-service or harm does not relieve you of correcting the injury. This is an important concept because it puts the onus of service on each individual and puts the student as the primary concern; not colleagues. (If you’d like a copy of the 15 Principles of Good Academic Customer Service just click here and request one)

This also makes it not just okay but imperative to use the phrase “I’m sorry” when students have not been helped. For example, when a student comes to your office or location and has been given wrong information the appropriate way to begin the discussion is “I am sorry you were not helped. Let me see what I can do to help you.” The of course you need to do all you can to provide good customer service and help the student which includes finding out what the problem is and finding what the solution is. If it is not within your area to solve the issue it is okay to say “I’m sorry but we don’t take care of that here. Let me find out for you who does. When would be a good time and phone number for someone to call you and get your situation resolved?” Then call around or consult your internal FAQs to find out who the right person is and get them to call the student and solve the problem.

Using phrases such as this also cuts down on the frustration that students feel when they have not been helped and makes them feel valued. Consider that the feeling of not being valued is one of the main reasons why students leave a college, the use of a simple phrase could help boost retention. Seems to me to be worth it.

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, retention and your bottom line
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: More Customer Service for Higher Education. 

Tuesday, September 04, 2012

How to Cope and Overcome Irritated and Irritating Students

Here are four ways guaranteed to help make irritating students less irritated and thus easier to help.

1. Smiling but do not overdo it. There are psychological and physical values to smiling at an irritated student. (Actually we should smile at everyone and even when there is no one there.) Smiling affects mirror neurons in the limbic system which is in the most primitive part of the brain. This is where the fight or flight response takes place. To keep it simple, when we smile, we tell another person that we do not plan to attack. The smile also turns mirror neurons on in the other person. They reflect the smile within the person to affect emotions that start to tell the person to relax and feel happier. 

However when one person is angry and the other smiles too strongly, that can possibly trigger a negative response. An emotional reflection that “this other person is too happy while I am angry. Is that smile mocking me?” A fun if overdone example of this can be seen in a sequence from the movie Planes, Trains and Automobiles. Steve Martin has been dropped off by a car rental company at a car that is not there. He has to walk back to the counter through snow, slush and moving airplanes. When he gets there, the receptionist is on the phone having an inane Thanksgiving dinner planning session with someone. 

The combination of the no car and then her breaking most every customer service rule by making Steve Martin wait while she giggles on inflames him. When she finally gets off the phone, she turns to martin with an exaggerated, phony smile on her face. She asks the usual but wrong question” Welcome to Marathon, May I help you?’ His response “You can start by wiping that f’---ing dumb ass smile off your f---ing rosy cheeks”.

A too energetic and/or faked smile will be like the proverbial red flag in front of an angry bull. It’ll just make the student charge. A smile is correct and called for but it needs to be an empathetic one. A simple, small smile that says “I see you’re upset and I WILL try to help.” The smile you would use with one of your children with a problem. Students are someone’s children and will respond to this smile.

2. Give and Name- Get a Name This is a technique that asks you to do exactly what it says. You provide an irritated student your name and ask her his or hers. “Hi. I’m ________. And you are?” When you exchange names you create a small community of people who know one another. That makes it less likely the irritation will be brought into the discussion. Remember, the student is not irritated at you but the institution. The anonymous amorphous “COLLEGE”. It is also harder for a student to be angry at someone her or she knows by name.

3. Apologize This is a lesson that we learned from people like Captain Kangaroo on TV as discussed in much greater length in the chapter How To’s: Good Morning Captain” in The Power of Retention. Captain Kangaroo taught us to use manners and be polite. One of the things we could learn is how to simply say “I’m sorry”. If for example, he thought Bunny Rabbit had played yet another trick but he was wrong, he would simply say “I’m sorry I thought it was you Bunny Rabbit. I was wrong.”

A simple statement of apology to a student can go a long way even if you are not at fault. Even if you had nothing to do with the situation. Often what the student is looking for is to have someone recognize that he or she is upset and may not be to blame. To hear someone accept the situation with a simple apology rather than turfing him to the next office can work wonders.

The apology does not have to be an acceptance of error or wrong either. Greeting an irritated student with “I see you are upset. I’m sorry for whatever caused it. How may I help you?” Or “Gee, I’m sorry something has caused you to be upset…” or “I’m sorry if it’s something someone at the school did to get you upset….”

The irritated student will not be expecting someone to accept any level of possible accountability. By saying sorry, you sort of accept some accountability not for you but for the student’s being upset. You are not admitting guilt or a wrong has been committed if you say “sorry you have been made so upset”. But you will be recognizing the student is emotionally stressed and the apology will start to lower the stress levels and in turn the resultant anger.

Sometimes the student’s response will surprise you. It may range from “well thanks, but you didn’t do it” to “about d—n time someone realized I was upset. Thank you.”

4. Compliments This might strike you as the most odd thing you’ve read but believe me it works. When a student is approaching you, your desk or window in an irritated state one thing you want to do is to interrupt the flow of adrenalin flowing through the body that reinforces the anger. The adrenalin affects the limbic system’s fight or flight decision. The hormone pushes blood into the muscles to prepare for a fight or flight. The next set of signals the limbic system receives will determine the decision.

So the objective is to interrupt and lower the stress level and thus the adrenalin flow. What can cause that to happen most readily is to introduce a pleasurable event into the situation. A simple pleasure? Receiving a compliment!

Yes it may seem contrived or phony but so what? You will need not to encounter angry students or your own adrenalin level increases, providing stress that makes your heart pump faster. Blood pressure rises. Other hormones like cortisol are released adding physical and psychological stress that can and will cause physical weakening and make you more susceptible to illness and other health problems. So if you need to give a fallacious compliment to keep you and the student healthier, do it.

Here’s an example. “Hi, I’m _____ Just want to say that I like your tee shirt, blouse, hair, glasses, jeans, backpack...” whatever seems to strike your eye quickly. Say it casually too so it will sound less contrived. Then as the student’s anger is interrupted you can even follow it up with a normal secondary question such as “Where did you get the tee, blouse, glasses….”

The student will most often just tell you where the tee was bought or even stop and think about it. This absolutely interrupts the flow of stress and anger and opens up a much more comfortable and congenial path for you to then ask how you may help.

These four techniques are tried and true. Try them and you might just feel that this job is worth the short hours and high pay.

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, retention and your bottom line
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: More Customer Service for Higher Education.