One of the areas that we find quite common from
doing onsite customer service audits is the disparity of office
functional hours. Most offices that students need
to complete their
activities to go and pay for school are not available to the second
segment of the college or university – the evening students.
Most schools have two populations. There is
a daytime dedicated population of students for whom going to school is
their work for the week. And there is an adult population who leave
from work to go to school. Yet, the schools act as if there were only
the daytime dedicated students when it comes to the hours that their
offices are open to help students.
Here is an excerpt from a mini-audit that points out the problem and provides some simple solutions to solve it.
Hours of operation
An issue that is allied to scheduling of
classes is the hours that offices are open to serve students. The
College has two populations which are separate for the most part. There
is a full-time dedicated day college as well as an evening college of
working adults who are attending part-time. The daytime students receive
also the services they are paying for while the evening college
receives almost none of the services they are paying for.
For example, a one-stop center is a good
idea but not if it closes at 5:00 pm. That means there are no business or
student service functions that can take place for an evening student
should he or she wish to get something accomplished. If for example an
evening student wanted to pay a bill, he could not do so because there
is no one there to receive it. If she needs a transcript for a job
interview, she cannot get it because the records office is closed prior
to her coming on campus.
This means that many, if not all,
of the activities of the evening students cannot be done on campus
while they are there. They are distinctly inconvenience. This is a
situation of obvious service bias and discrimination for a large sector
of paying customers.
In one school we recently audited, not only were the offices in the one-stop
shop closed, the bookstore and the
Resource Center/Library were closed to evening students.
This is very poor customer service. It
forces the working adult who wants or needs to accomplish an interaction
with the college to either leave work and come to campus or try to
accomplish the work on line. According to evening students, they would
choose to come to campus and give up lunch time rather than try to
accomplish work on line. They find the on-line resources to be
cumbersome and difficult to use. This starts with the on-line admissions
application and continues from that. This forces students/customers to
sacrifice and that is not good customer service at all.
Schedules should be reallocated to make
certain that there are at least one or two staff members on duty to at
least 7:00 each evening. There may not be steady business but that would
be similar to the level of business I observed during the daytime for
the day students as well. Moreover, the one-stop shop should become
truly more of a one-stop in that all people who work in it, indifferent
to their assigned point of work should be cross trained to know all of
the functions and activities of their counterparts. This would allow a
student to go to any of the four offices, whichever seems most
appropriate and get an answer to most every question he or she could
bring up. What the College has now is more of a service mall in that
there are four separate offices close to one another which cuts down on
the amount of walking a student has to do to get some situations
answered but does not remove being turfed from one office to another to
get an answer. This situation still creates the feeling of being
shuffled around in the quest for information or an answer.
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N.
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