Customer Service is Feeling the Love on Campus

Just returned from the AACRAO SEM conference in Nashville, where it seemed that the sessions focused on customer service – and unabashedly using the phrase “customer service” – had SRO crowds.  Apparently, the days of “Look to your left, look to your right, at least one of those students won’t be here next year” are over.  And not a moment too soon.

Institutions, both virtual and brick-and-mortar, are full of students for whom “Amazon” is as often a description of a service level as it is the name of an online retailer.  With everything from books to furniture to shoes and accessories available in a convenient, user-friendly environment, is it any wonder that students expect more than a “Come to the office during our business hours” approach to taking care of business?

And yet…providing exceptional – or even just acceptable and consistent – levels of customer service to students and parents, staff and faculty, is something that still eludes many institutions.  It’s not that campus administrators want to do a shoddy job or create a frustrating experience for students who are trying to pay bills or register for classes.  But for many staff members, the campus organizational structure perpetuates a culture where silos of information and fragmented services are the norm.  Add to that rising expectations for enrollment, greater workloads resulting from stagnant budget and staff lines, an increasingly diverse student body, and expanding modes of communication, and it’s no wonder that some offices on campus have stopped answering their phones or responding to email. It’s hard to focus on voicemail or incoming calls when the line of students trying to get into your office extends out the door, down the hall, and around the building.

“One-stop” centers are still seen as a great way to bring together a variety of offices and services in one place to minimize the need for students to run all over campus.  However, students still end up going from office to office, albeit in a smaller space.  And if you can’t physically get to campus, you may not see the benefit of such a center.  I worked for an institution that had an extremely good one-stop center, combining Student Accounts, Financial Aid, Campus Security (for parking permits and ID pictures), and the Registrar.  Everyone was cross-trained, to a degree, and most could answer about 80% of the questions that came their way.  Unfortunately, the center was only staffed from 8-5 Monday through Friday, and on the occasional Saturday morning.  And if the issue that required you to come to campus wasn’t related to one of the offices in the One-Stop Center, you still had to hike from building to building to resolve the problem before you could return to One-Stop (before 5 pm, remember!).

Don’t get me wrong, I applaud the idea that we need to bring more services together in order to make various enrollment processes easier for students to navigate.  But many of the solutions that have been developed thus far still put most or all of the responsibility on the students – who are the folks in this equation with the least amount of experience and the least knowledge of how to go to college.  If every potential problem or transaction a student needs to resolve has only one possible answer, that’s great.  Then they only need to contact one office and everything will be peachy.  Unfortunately, that’s rarely the case, and students quickly feel overwhelmed and frustrated.

Whether it’s anticipating students’ needs, finding new ways to communicate with them, increasing the use of technology, re-examining business processes, or finding new ways to organize staff resources, we can do a better job of helping students (and other campus constituencies) to navigate our campuses.  We’ve recognized the need to improve services to students, now we have to focus on ways to actually deliver great customer service.

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