Tuesday, July 29, 2008

Lessons From For-Profits - Increasing Enrollment Success through Buying Committees

One lesson that not-for-profits (NFP) can learn from proprietary colleges is in the admissions area. In for-profit (FP) admissions, there is greater attention paid to welcoming the entire buying committee than in NFPs. In fact, the NFPs usually do not even know what in the world is meant by the buying committee so there should be no surprise that they do not focus on it.

By the way, ever wonder what the core difference is between a good not-for-profit college and a for-profit college is? The NFPs call money left in the budget surplus or fund balance while the FPs call it what it is, profit. A good college is a good college. And a bad college is a bad college no matter if it is NFP or for profit. And a bad proprietary college can be NFP. That is the fiscal condition that even some bad for profit schools find themselves in but not by either charter or accounting system. By not providing students what they need to succeed and ignoring basics like the buying committee.

Buying Committees

So then what is the buying committee? The committee is all the people who will be involved in the actual decision to put money down and pay for tuition at a college or university. This usually includes parents for a “traditionally aged” student and spouse for an adult. These are the people who will be directly involved in the decision to purchase. Without their agreement, their consent, their buy-in, there will not be a purchase.

FPC’s do all they can to get the buying committee involved from the beginning. They will strongly suggest to a potential candidate that he or she bring a parent or spouse to an admission’s interview. With the full, or fuller buying committee involved from the beginning, the odds increase significantly that a student will enroll if favorably impressed. NFP’s normally work on the student without any committee members. This can be an error since it then requires the student to make the sale. He or she might not have answers to the questions that might arise.

If for any reason or any question left unanswered the parent or spouse is not fully supportive, the enrollment is often lost. Or if the support is lukewarm the first problem that arises becomes a causal factor for dropping out.

For example, say it is an adult student who has decided to enroll even though her husband is not fully supportive or may not have even been involved in the decision to attend. Keep in mind that having a wife in school will require more work, effort and usually belt tightening from the spouse. Let’s say the algebra homework is getting a bit tough. The wife mentions it to the husband who was not part of the buying committee and thus did not buy into her attending college. “I am just not getting this math. It’s just a bit too tough for me. Been a while. And I gotta study history for a quiz tomorrow. Be up late and then I got to work early.”

His response could easily be “I was afraid this would happen. I told you that you aren’t a kid anymore. College would be good but maybe now isn’t the time.”

But if he had been part of the buying committee and they decided to make the academic purchase together, he would have formed a commitment as well. He would then try to encourage rather than discourage.

So how to build a buying committee? The following are steps we implemented at some colleges that succeeded more as a result.

Four Actions to Assure Buying Committee Support

One, make everyone who could be involved in the decision to attend the college and pay money feel involved from the start.

When getting information from a potential student prior to a campus visit, get the names of anyone who could be part of the buying committee. Then make sure they all receive an invitation. A formal invitation card like for an event would be best. Have them printed ahead of time with a picture of the college, a logo or something interesting on the front. Then set up a program in the computer so they can be personalized with recipient’s name, the name of the potential student and information needed to attend the campus visit or interview. When a campus representative calls to confirm the upcoming visit, also call for the parents or spouse to give them the same courtesy.

Two, make certain part of the interview/on-campus meeting or tour focuses on the buying committee issues.

Whoever is going to help make the decision to pay money, and a lot of it, has questions. Those questions may vary from those of the potential student and must be addressed. Create a lost of potential questions a parent or spouse may have, or better, have had in the past. Make certain that they are addressed. If the buying committee member does not ask any of them, help them out by asking. “Okay, any questions about applying for financial aid?” Questions about the time commitment that he/she is going to be making?” It is also a very good idea to create a buying committee FAQ brochure to answer questions and do so in a way that helps minimize concern and potential negatives as we have done for colleges.

Three, enroll the buying committee as well as the student.

When the student is accepted, send a letter of acceptance to the buying committee members as well. The reality is that you have enrolled not one person but at least one more and possibly many others – spouse, parents, guardians helping out and anyone who has cosigned a loan. They deserve congratulations on helping the student achieve his/her future as well as recognizing their commitment to the future success of the student.

Four, give buying committee members a formal link they can use to contact the school.

Consider that the academic buying decision is an every day, every class, every home work assignment and every study for a test occurrence. Students make the decision to buy or not buy the college all the time. They may not share that consideration with the school but with members of the buying committee. If there is an issue that the committee member needs help to solve, or information required to help the student remain in the purchasing line to classes, make sure they know where to get that information or help. Provide a web-based link that will provide up-to-date information that parents and others should know. Things like the calendar, exam dates, tutoring information, counseling information and so on. Anything that anyone might want to know about should be available on the web with a searchable FAQ and interrelation database. There should also be a person who will liaise with parents, spouses, partners, friends, etc. Give them an email address and telephone number so they can simply pick up the phone and find out what they must.

The members of the buying committee can be very important to both the initial decision to come to your college or university and the decision to stay in college. They certainly are important to any decision to leave it. Give them all you can to make them feel as if they are an active positive participant in the on-going decision to graduate. The result will be more retention and student success. It often also leads to an additional enrollment. From a buying committee member.

If we can help your college or university with strengthening its admission's/sales functions through training on issues such as buying committees, please get in touch. Just click here and let us know We are quickly filling up our dates for school opening convocations and workshops in August and September as well as customer service week (Oct 6-10). We would like to be able to help you too so please contact us ASAP for a date. info@GreatServiceMatters.com

AcademicMAPS has been providing customer service, retention and research training and solutions to colleges, universities and career colleges in the US, Canada, and Europe as well as to businesses that seek to work with them since 1999. Clients range from small rural schools to major urban universities and corporations. Its services range from campus customer service audits, workshops, training, presentations, institutional studies and surveys to research on customer service and retention. AcademicMAPS prides itself on its record of success for its clients and students who are aided through the firm’s services.www.GreatServiceMatters.com 413.219.6939 info@GreatServiceMatters.com


Friday, July 25, 2008

Customer Service Book; The Power of Retention overview


Customer service is an overlooked aspect in a school’s success. Unfortunately, too many schools have a problem accepting that. They give into notions that customer service is some business concept that has no or little relevance to a college. People in colleges and universities, especially faculty, have a sense that when anyone discusses customer service in academia it is just a disguised call to pander to students, to lower standards, give the students high grades for little work to make and keep them happy. That is not customer service. That is cheating the client.

Colleges and universities are businesses at their core. Granted, unique and idiosyncratic businesses, but service providers all the same. Each and every one of them has its own culture, mores, folkways, traditions, codes—both written and unwritten—and a language called academicese that generate its uniqueness. Yet, common to everyone is a business model including budgets, salaries, benefits, personnel, administrations, strategic plans, marketing, customer acquisition, and so on, which make institutes of higher education businesses. And colleges, universities and career colleges all have clients/customers called students and employees that demand services.

Higher education and its more than 4000 individual colleges, universities and career colleges are distinctive from other business models and so customer service needs to recognize that. This is true whether or not the school is a not-for-profit, a private university or a publicly supported two or four-year college. Though some might think that a proprietary school would be significantly different from a not-for-profit, sometimes the only thing separating their basic operational models is that a not-for-profit college calls extra money at the end of the year a fund balance or surplus while the career college calls it profit. They all must deliver a concept called education to customers called students through product parts called courses and majors that are supposed to lead to a finished product that is certified at graduation that is supposed to lead to a job or career. If they don’t, they lose their market and the revenue needed to operate.

They are significantly different than other businesses since the final product they create (learning and individual intellectual, professional or technological growth) are both invisible and intangible. Cannot hold an education. Nor smell it. Taste it. Feel it. See it. At best, a graduate and an employer or graduate school may intuit it. Or they must accept the transcript as some evidence that a course of study has been completed at an indicated level of success. Rather unlike the product of a manufacturer, the tangible stock of a store, its proucts or even the services provided by say a Disneyland. For the education sector, the approaches of the world of retail, commerce, hospitality and corporations do not always work. At best, they need to be adapted to recognize that the services in a school are not exactly equal to selling widgets or serving a meal. Platitudes will not work either. And unlike most every other business or professional service, colleges have to provide services every single day, every single class. Students make a buying decision prior to every class they take. “Should I go to class today? Do I want to go to math today? Do I wish to buy Prof. X today?”

It’s not like going into a store and purchasing a retail item, taking it to the cashier, getting a smile, a receipt and “have a nice day.” A retail service experience is a one time moment focused on a particular purchase that lasts maybe five to ten minutes depending on the length of the line. It is repeated only when the customer needs or decides to buy another shirt for example.

In higher education, the experience is constant, two to six year process in which every day, every class, every encounter with the school from parking to walking to taking classes and meeting with employees becomes a buying or return opportunity for a college’s customer.

As a result, the concepts of business, corporations and even hospitality companies do not always apply to higher education. What will work is recognition of concepts such as Learn and Earn and using it to assure that students get the returns on investment they seek. Moreover, the employees at a store for example are rather less independent than employees at a college. In a store or restaurant for example, the management can tell employees “this is the way we will address customers on the floor. You will say the following when encountering a customer….” Just try that with a faculty member for instance and you will likely not forget the response. Faculty and other university personnel see the campus as different, detached from business and commercial concerns. If one wants to engage them in a discussion or processes of customer retention through appropriate service that engagement must recognize their needs, attitude and general disdain for a commercial concept such as customer service.

Keep in mind that faculty are not like waiters at a restaurant. Waiters or waitresses just serve what the customer orders and what was prepared for them to bring out of the kitchen. In most every college or university, faculty members are the restaurant owner, executive chefs, maitre de, and floor manager of the eatery called “my class and section.” They own it, staff it and make decisions about it. In their restaurant they are, speaking quite metaphorically, “the soup Nazis” who decide who will get soup, who will be ejected and who will fail their examinations. Administrators might be the landlords but they cannot dictate the menu, serving style or what goes into each course of the meal called an education.

Administrators, trustees and schools must also keep in mind what restaurants must always be concerned with. The core service is itself the final product – the food. A conscientious and considerate waiter can never make up for bad food. But an attentive and pleasant waiter can make good food taste even better and keep customers loyal.

In a school, the product is the education itself. A good education with good customer service will make for greater retention, happier students, and satisfied graduates who will support the school by becoming advocates for it. Perhaps even donating alumni.

And that’s what this book is about. How schools can improve their services to their core clients – students and the college community. The methods are not very difficult to implement, nor are they counter-intuitive corporate concepts. They are ones learned from many years of research on college campuses; studying how we act and interact. The material and reporting also derives from understanding and listening to our student clients and adapting applicable and successful customer service and methods from sources external to academia such as sociology, neuron and cognitive studies, behavioral psychology and what Paco Underhill dubbed the science of shopping in his important book Why We Buy: The Science of Shopping (1999) to our unique world of academia. They have been worked out on many campuses all over the country and in Europe where I have had the privilege to consult, speak, teach and train. They are also quite practical, inexpensive and acceptable to the college community. Generally the processes and techniques costs much less than a student or two and repay the school in many more retained students.

For instance, the book will discuss providing quality learning, in an appropriate environment that speaks to actual students and offers them opportunities to enjoy themselves and their learning. The book will discuss methods and techniques to make students want to learn more and wish stay at the school. For example, the discussion will focus on helping the students keep focus on their goals in life and career and how the school will help them get to them.

How to do it? Through concepts such as Learn and Earn; not Churn and Burn. Ideas that focus on retention rather than admissions as a core element of an institution’s success. That can help improve your customer service focus.

Understanding what customer service is for an academic environment and then implementing it at your school. Using the principles of Good Academic customer service. For instance, Principle 1 in my list of Fifteen Principles of Good Customer Service for Colleges is guaranteed to help a school increase its population.

Every student wants to attend Cheers University and every employee wants to work there
“…where everybody knows your name and they’re awfully glad you came…”

Sounds easy. And it can be with some simple customer service training that focuses on the business we are in—schools and colleges.

One quick thought to keep in mind when the phrase customer is used in this book. It is core to the discussion that it is realized that students are not exactly customers, they are more like clients. A client hires someone to study the situation, indicate what is wrong, and then offer the tools to fix what is needed to succeed. Like clients, students come to the experts (school) to find out what they must do to improve and grow so their futures will be successful. Schools need to understand their student clients, understand what they really need and want, then provide them the academic and social services to strengthen and grow. And though some skeptics might believe it is easy grades with little work that students want, it really is not.

What I have found in my studies of and for schools is that most students want three things. And it all has to do with returns on investment (ROI), particularly three ROI’s that relate to the customer in the academic environment. They want to feel an f-roi, a solid e-roi, a full sense of an a-roi. And the book will help you understand and increase your and your students’ ROI.

Though this book focuses primarily on students, most everything said for them can be applied to most everyone else in our campus community – even ourselves. We are all customers of one another after all.


The Power of Retention: More Customer Service for Higher Education by Dr. Neal Raisman will be available soon through The Administrator's Bookshelf. The Bookshelf will also be presenting a series of webinars by Dr. Raisman along with other experts on important and valuable subjects such as enrollment, marketing 2.0 and its technology, website upgrading, coaching for success, what we can learn from for-profits, fitness for desk jockeys, faith-based issues, customer service, retention, admissions and other administrative issues. For more on these webinars, click here.

We are quickly filling up our dates for school opening convocations and workshops in August and September as well as customer service week (Oct 6-10). We would like to be able to help you too so please contact us ASAP for a date. info@GreatServiceMatters.com


AcademicMAPS has been providing customer service, retention and research training and solutions to colleges, universities and career colleges in the US, Canada, and Europe as well as to businesses that seek to work with them since 1999. Clients range from small rural schools to major urban universities and corporations. Its services range from campus customer service audits, workshops, training, presentations, institutional studies and surveys to research on customer service and retention. AcademicMAPS prides itself on its record of success for its clients and students who are aided through the firm’s services.www.GreatServiceMatters.com 413.219.6939 info@GreatServiceMatters.com



Friday, July 18, 2008

Admissions, Retention, Zeno and Academic Insanity

By some definitions, higher education is truly crazed. Places of self-defeating insanity. For example, an educational leader I know loved to tell others that “the definition of insanity is doing the same thing that has failed over and over again and expecting different results.” He, like most every other higher education administrator really may have believed that so he and they repeated it every time it seemed to fit. But, when things demanded solution, he actually did the same things that failed over and over again. He did not see that as insanity but as using tried and true administrative and academic approaches to solve problems – even if the solutions were ones that had failed or resulted in long-term disaster.


Considering that oft quoted definition, the situation universities, colleges and career colleges find themselves in now and how they are going about trying to work their way to solutions, it can be concluded that higher education is insane.


The problems are really not all new. Costs are exceeding revenue. Demands are outpacing the ability to fund them Tuition, fees and expenses have surpassed available resources for many families. Internal costs continue to rise faster than revenue can be raised to meet them. Capital deferments and outstanding debt grows. Budgets are being tightened. Competition for traditional, non- and neo-traditional students has never been greater. Technology needed to stay current increase in cost and amount. The only really new part of the problem is that student loans are starting to dry up at a pace that will increase inability to afford the costs to attend and graduate.


The solutions are also not new. They haven’t worked in the past really but well let’s use them again. The major way that universities, colleges and career schools seek to solve the problems is tried and untrue – increase enrollment by increasing new student numbers and build new buildings to attract new students. Yet, more students yield and increase in the demands for services, sections and often tutorial assistance. All require additional expenditures which are usually not provided so the new enrollees turn into attrition numbers. Or even if the services, additional sections and people are provided, students leave anyhow so even more students must be recruited to take their place and add more to the overall population.


But, this Lucy at the Conveyor Belt approach to a solution simply shows how insane academia is as the solution itself sooner or later breaks down and takes quite a lot with it including people and success. Lucy is given the job to box cakes as they come down on the conveyor belt. She does this fairly well but then the bakery owners want to increase the number of boxed cakes. The belt speeds up to push her to speed up but that causes more and more cakes to fall off the belt. The bakery owners do not see the insanity behind their decision and just keep demanding more and more boxed cakes until all the cakes are falling off the belt and Lucy just gives up. Every cake that falls of the track is not just a lost sale but lost investment in the creating of the cake. The lost cakes not only mean that the day’s production has been hurt. It also means the long term ability to meet projections and the buyers’ needs are not met which can cause a longer term negative effect on sales and client retention.


This is similar to what happens with college admissions when given a higher enrollment goal almost always with the same staff and time.


When admission offices are pushed to speed up conveyor belt of enrollment goals, the people in them respond with a combination of enthusiasm and dread just like sales people in any business. And make no mistake, recruitment and admissions are sales. The enthusiasm is from the belief that “we can now show them what we can do. Hit our numbers and be rewarded for doing so.” The dread comes from the reality that the competition is strong, the market saturated, the product not that different from any competitor and “I am going to have to work even harder and longer if I am to succeed most often with not much more resources.” As well as a recognition that population for most schools is really an embodiment of one of Zeno’s paradoxes that will just yield them even more work and increased demand.


The Greek philosopher Zeno devised a paradox that illuminates the paradox of achieving population goals through admissions for most schools. Achilles and a tortoise are running a race. Achilles assumes he will win so he gives the tortoise a head start. But Achilles finds he can never catch up. Before Achilles can surpass the tortoise, he must get to point A, where the tortoise started the race. But when he gets there, the tortoise has moved to point B. When Achilles gets to point B, the tortoise has gone to point C, and so on. As a result, Achilles can never catch the tortoise even though he may get closer and closer because the Tortoise will always stay at least one point ahead. The only way Achilles can catch up is if the tortoise stays still at one of the points achieved.

For colleges and universities, the tortoise is student population which is controlled not just by admissions but equally, maybe more so by retention. Retention is a constant, steady and eventually winning strategy that is the only real way for admissions to ever catch up to demand. And to carry the analogy one fabled step forward, it is the tortoise, not the hare that finally will win the race. That is the race for population, graduation and mission success. It is also the winning strategy for admissions who should, no must focus on not just bring them in, but keeping them too. Otherwise they, like Achilles and the hare must inevitably fail.

Or as Lewis Carroll summarized the situation with the tortoise as retention and Achilles again admissions and population. Oh yes, the Bank referred to, well, it is simply the budget where the institution must go constantly if it does not understand the analogy and value of retention.
Here narrator, having pressing business at the Bank, was obliged to leave the happy pair, and did not again pass the spot until some months afterwards. When he did so, Achilles was still seated on the back of the much-enduring Tortoise, and was writing in his note-book, which appeared to be nearly full.

The Tortoise was saying, "Have you got that last step written down? Unless I've lost count, that makes a thousand and one. There are several millions more to come. And would you mind, as a personal favour, considering what a lot of instruction this colloquy of ours will provide for the Logicians of the Nineteenth Century -- would you mind adopting a pun that my cousin the Mock-Turtle will then make, and allowing yourself to be re-named Taught-Us?"

"As you please!" replied the weary warrior, in the hollow tones of despair, as he buried his face in his hands. "Provided that you, for your part, will adopt a pun the Mock-Turtle never made, and allow yourself to be re-named A Kill-Ease!"


We are quickly filling up our dates for school opening convocations and workshops in August and September as well as customer service week (Oct 6-10). We would like to be able to help you too so please contact us ASAP for a date. info@GreatServiceMatters.com


AcademicMAPS has been providing customer service, retention and research training and solutions to colleges, universities and career colleges in the US, Canada, and Europe as well as to businesses that seek to work with them since 1999. Clients range from small rural schools to major urban universities and corporations. Its services range from campus customer service audits, workshops, training, presentations, institutional studies and surveys to research on customer service and retention. AcademicMAPS prides itself on its record of success for its clients and students who are aided through the firm’s services.www.GreatServiceMatters.com 413.219.6939 info@GreatServiceMatters.com