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Achieve Excellent Customer Service

As the university clearing process has just taken place and this year’s cohort of new students are about to start their courses it reminded me of the current ‘crisis for action’ in the Higher Education sector, namely the reduction in government funding and the increase in student fees.

The sector is having to adjust quickly to the concept of students as consumers. The academic view is that students are not customers as they “cannot buy a degree only the opportunity to study for one”. However as this new cohort arrives and enrols they will be assessing what value they get for their money as they do see themselves as customers. This is the paradigm: a disconnect between the vendor’s and the purchaser’s point of view. The danger is that once an organisation loses sight of providing for its customer’s wants and needs and doesn’t understand what customers’ value then they can quickly become obsolete. It is important for all organisations to Achieve Excellent Customer Service just to stay in business and grow in the future.

This academic debate is happening across most universities in the sector at present and those that quickly understand their position on this controversial view are the ones that might adapt fast enough to the new paradigm and the creeping quasi-competitive market place whereby institutions have to compete for their customers more and more.

From the student’s point of view (and their parents, who are fundamentally involved in the selection process) the type of course, its content, the future prospects that it opens up, work placement availability, the quality of teaching, the amount of lecture and tutorial time as well as the support structures provided during the student’s journey through the university. This all combines with the extra-curricular activities that might influence the selection process; namely the student union, refectory facilities, pastoral activities like clubs and societies as well as the gym, library and accommodation available all rounded off with good Wi-Fi access and IT systems for enrolment, assignment submission and feedback mechanisms. Listening to the comments of students whilst wandering around campus’ and seeing the feedback provided in the hugely influential NSS survey all suggest that even if the institutions themselves don’t perceive the student as a consumer, the students (and their parents) do and ultimately it is the customer who perceives and defines value. Those institutes that rapid adapt to this paradigm are those who can start their long journey to become a customer-centric organisation and re-engineer their service delivery processes and practices to put the student at the centre of the overall complex university system.

A recent conference I attended at City University about Customer Service Excellence on 15th April in conjunction with the Institute of Customer Service ICS) highlighted how some institutions were embracing the sector changes and using them as a starting point to transform the rest of the organisation. The discussion ‘How customer service excellence fits with City University London’s vision for the future’, by John Tribble, Director of Services for Students, described how:

Institute of Customer Services Logo

  • the senior leadership team have embraced customer service excellence as a key strategy,
  • they defined what customer service excellence meant to the organisation,
  • front-line customer-facing staff gained qualifications in delivering excellent customer services,
  • they now recruit to a set of values and behaviours by screening candidate’s for Emotional Intelligence
  • most importantly how they now call their student customers.

They’ve noticed a big difference in how student feel they’re now being treated across the University which is translating into their NSS scores and they’ve recently won a National Customer Service Week award and a national WOW! Award for ‘Services to Students’ as well as retaining their ICS ServiceMark accreditation.

A forward-thinking University preparing for a brave new world in Higher Education.

In response to these common challenges ChangeWise has launched the Achieve Excellent Customer Service training course to cover some of solutions to the challenges posed. The course covers the concept of customer demand split into ‘value’ and ‘failure demand’, you will understand the ‘Voice of the Customer’ and the principles of Lean Consumption to reduce the effort a customer has to exert to use your services and in turn improve your service levels and customer satisfaction scores. In addition, it covers improved complaints handling, ‘true’ root cause analysis and most importantly how to link-back to performance and process improvement activities to prevent it happening again. Ideal for customer service providers and public sector.

If you would like to know more then please visit our website or please call Mike Williams on 02380 464 153 or 07866 537 580 for more information about this and our other public training courses.

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