Colleges lose at least 12% of potential students as soon as they make actually contact with the school. These
are potential students who were interested enough and motivated enough
to contact you for information or even come to the campus to learn more.
But because of poor or weak initial customer service and hospitality as well as the college’s POCmarks, 12% additional enrollment was
lost.
POCmarks?
Yes.
That’s right. POCmarks. Like when you had chicken pox and Mom said
don’t scratch them because they would leave permanent scars. Like the
acne you worried about when you were in school. Afraid that people would
judge you by your appearances. That’s them. POCmarks. Things that can scare students away from looking at your school and attending. And your school or
business very likely has some and they are turning new students and
customers away. 12% of them in fact. 12% do not choose your college
because of your POCmarks and their first encounter with academic customer service at the college itself.
POCmarks. That’s what we call them in our POCmarking analysis of a school we call campus service audits.
These are the POC’s – Points of Contact. The front line initial
contacts that potential students, parents and others make with your
school. They include your
These are all
of the things and people who create the first impression for a
potential student, her family, his friends and the community. These are
the first impression point of contact factors that either build interest
or turn potential students away. BTW, not all POCmarks may seem to be
equal. Wouldn’t an actual interaction with someone be a stronger
imprinting factor than an objective correlative aspect on campus? It seems logical that a rude receptionist would turn off students stronger than say than dead shrubs? But
if the dead shrubs, scruffy grass, poorly designed or maintained signs,
isolated parking lot, litter or fading paint create the first
impressions, the potential student may never make it to the rude
receptionist.
A poorly designed, difficult to navigate or DIY website can block the call for an appointment to discuss coming to the college. A catalog…well, most every catalog generates a huge POCmark if the school is not using a personalization program such as Leadwise.
So it is equally important, sometimes even more important to investigate any potential POCmarks that ARE hurting
your ability to succeed and perhaps even surpass your enrollment and
population goals. So, let’s discuss some POCmarks and what you can do
about them.
Let’s
start with a quick discussion of one of the more common potential
POCmarks – the college website. We have just about completed our annual
study of college websites with the assistance of COREacademics Group and
are not pleased to be able to say that out of the fifty randomly chosen
websites of two and four-year not-for profit and for-profit, public,
private and career colleges, 84% look and perform as if they were
created by the Hoover Group. Hoover? Well, you know what Hoover vacuums do? They suck up dirt – right? Well, take it from there.
These
42 sites had significant issues in design ranging from just plain
boring which is a large POCmark for students to so poorly designed that a
potential student would have real difficulty finding what she needs to
be able to learn about the school because the site was not designed as a
sales tool for potential student but to please an internal audience.
Boring is a sin today. Your website homepage is in competition with not
just other local schools but with the major commercial and social
networking sites that students use to gauge all others. When a person
uses a set of websites on a regular basis and they find some level of
pleasure in them, they become imprinted as the standards against which
to judge others. That means your website is in competition with
Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, even Ebay and Google.
Tough
competition you say. Not really if you just learn from them. There are
definite success characteristics in all of them. First, they are
designed for the customer; not the internal company users. They have
been created based on what the customer wants and needs. They have
studied their clients and then provided them ease of usage to help them
execute quickly and easily from the homepage to where they want to go
and what they want to do.
The
homepages are clean, uncluttered and have no extraneous boxes, buttons,
dropdowns, rolling information or videos, links, words, pictures or
anything for employees. They provide just what is needed; no more, no
less. So what do students look for and need? Students are after a job so
they want to be able to get to information on the programs and degrees
that lead top jobs. They have to pay so they want to know about costs
and even more important, financial aid. They want to apply so they need
application information. They want to be able to contact the school,
administrators or offices for more information. They also want
personalization.
If
they are not, the website becomes a major POCmark for the school. By be
on the page I mean a clear link to the information. Not any specifics.
Give them the way to the information. And when they get to the
information. Keep it simple, non-technical, devoid of our insider jargon
and with a student orientation.
If
you are interested in having your website evaluated and then designed
top be one that’ll help and not be a POCmark, we can arrange for a free
website analysis through our partners. Just let me know and I will make arrangements.
As
for the other items on the list above, they are all serious POCmarks
that will keep you from hitting all your goals and that includes 12% of
all potential students. If you’d like more information on how you know
if you have POCmarks, contact me and we’ll talk. If you’d like to get
rid of them, I recommend an application of information from my best
selling book The Power of Retention as a strong starting point for a DIY study as well as the links I have identified in this article.
If
you wish greater expertise with an expert analysis plus solutions that
will work, contact me. Be glad to help you gain that other 12% or at
least a large chunk of it.
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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