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 MAKES SENSE TO YOU, YOU WILL WANT TO OBTAIN A COPY
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N.
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retention, enrollment and revenue through workshops,
presentations, research, training and academic customer service
solutions for colleges, universities and career colleges in the
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