Wednesday, April 18, 2012

Learn from Customer Service and Hospitality Failures

I am reading a book To Forgive Design: Understanding Failure by Henry Petroski an engineering prof at Duke. He writes about what we can learn from failure and when it comes to engineering, it is a great deal. When it comes to improving customer service and hospitality we can learn a great deal from failure too. Now he writes about how bridges fail quite a b it but if we but realize that customer service and hospitality are "ridges to our students" his message comes through clearly.

A college president called me about having a workshop at his school. They are looking at a potential large enrollment drop following the end of the first semester. He said he wanted me to only focus on the positive aspects of the school’s customer service. “I always believe in focusing on the good. What we do well. Use that as a basis to build.”

“Ahhh” I replied. “There is part of your problem right there. You need to focus on the negatives. On what students are complaining about. We need to set up a system that encourages students to complain.”

He was aghast. “You want us to get our students to complain? But that will just encourage them to be unhappy and focus on the negatives. Besides, I don’t need more problems. I want fewer of them.”

“Exactly the reason to elicit as many complaints as you can.” I replied. “You cannot fix a problem until you know about it. If you aren’t aware of issues, they sit there, fester, grow and then explode in attrition rates. You need to get as many complaints as you can get. Then check into them.”

“To see if they are valid before we go ahead and fix the issue” the president asserted quite presidentially. “No sense putting time and money into an issue if it’s not a real problem. I mean just because a student says something is so doesn’t make it so”

“NO.” I empathetically responded. “If a student thinks it is a problem, it is. If it is only a problem for that student, it is still a problem even if only for that student. Keep in mind that if that student is unhappy, has a complaint. He or she may well get to the point of saying goodbye. That’s how attrition rates get up there. Individual students decide to leave.”

“But if I send a lot of time on one student, I’m not sure that’s an efficient use of resources. Shouldn’t we do a survey or something and see how a larger group of students feel about things. What if that student is wrong and a change makes others unhappy?”

“Okay, first off, if one student complains about something, it is likely that others feel the same way. They just haven’t said anything. And at the very least, they have heard of the problem and will give it credence since it came from a fellow student. Complaints are Malthusian after all. The complainer tells another and another and the “anothers” tell yet others and so on. So they need to be dealt with.” Then I added “But first you need to develop a way to flush out the complaints”

“I see. We have a student satisfaction survey we’ve used before. Our VP of Students developed it with her staff. We generally do well on it so maybe there just aren’t that many issues out there.”

“Well, maybe there aren’t. Surveys can be used as a starting point but they need to be developed by someone who does not have a vested interest in the answers. Your student services group may be the best in the country but I hope you can see that they could have a vested interest in the results. They could have, subconsciously of course, devised items, topics and issues that would lead to certain types of responses. You need someone who is detached from the results. Who is interested only in getting valid results. I can make some recommendations of good people if you like.” Didn’t want him to think I was saying this simply to try and get some more work.

We discussed some consultants and then went on to some other methods of gathering complaints such as comment cards like the Applegrams at Lansing (MI) Community College, or an email address set up just for complaints, or even better, a blog to discuss issues students have. I mentioned that in any of these or other methods, they should not be anonymous if at all possible.

“But will students give their names?” he questioned.

“Some will, some won’t but if you can get a name, it is always better. First you set up a community. Second, names provide a level of integrity to the issue. And third, you have someone to get back to with a solution or a description of the review and resolution of the issue.” I let the pause of silence by note taking go by and continued.

“You’ll want to always acknowledge the complaint. Best to do so in a way that can let others know of it so they can join into the discussion. But also to let them know you are taking the issues seriously.” I added.

“But that will broadcast any problems. That’ll tell everyone we have issues. Won’t that just multiply the problems and hurt our image.”

“Only if you don’t respond to and don’t resolve the problems. If the school accepts it’s not yet perfect and let’s students know what they already know, you will get honesty points. Then when you resolve the complaint and publicly let everyone know you did and what you did, that makes the school a hero.” His “ahh” let me know to go on.

“The research is clear that when a business, in this case a school owns up to an issue and solves it to the customer’s benefit, you turn a complainer into a supporter. Maybe even an advocate. Let the issue stay out there and fester and you could create a group of insurgents dedicated to hurting the school by exploding their complaints to everyone they can reach.”

I did do the workshop and stressed the positive techniques of providing good customer service ad hospitality but I did not leave out the failures we so often have in higher education. After all we need to learn  from them.

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)
                                                 
IF THIS ARTICLE MAKES SENSE TO YOU, YOU WILL WANT TO OBTAIN A COPY OF THE BEST-SELLING NEW BOOK ON RETENTION AND ACADEMIC CUSTOMER SERVICE THE POWER OF RETENTION: MORE CUSTOMER SERVICE IN HIGHER EDUCATION  by clicking here
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Thursday, April 05, 2012

Star Facuty Do not Necessarily Equal Star Customer Service or Hospitality

Colleges and universities are on a tear right now trying to attract star faculty to the campus so they can brag about their celebrity professors. Many time the university will set up a special chair and allow the new start to spend most of his or her time doing research and not teaching., After all who would want to waste celebrity faculty on students?

This is a bad idea. It may bring in some more star power and even bring in some more money from research grants or donors to create a chair to attract the celebrity but it is like what can happen at a good restaurant when it hires a celebrity chef. It all become about the star and not the entire team. This can be very demoralizing and will disrupt the morale which is so important to providing academic service excellence to students.

When a restaurant hires a celebrity chef it can attract more diners to the place but the whole restaurant ends up being about the chef not the food itself and certainly not the service.  In fact, the new celebrity chef is usually so focused on bringing even more fame to him or herself that the entire restaurant starts to feel the pressure to build the star’s brand. The kitchen staff might at first be proud that they are now working under a renown chef and that can bring some immediate provide but after a while it usually turns out that the hew star is focusing on burnishing his own glow more than that of the whole kitchen team and does not share the glory very well. The team begins to become demoralized and realize that there is no longer a real team just a star and the revolving people whi are there to make him shine.

The kitchen and  service staff often feel the breakdown in the team effort and since they area at the bottom of the ladder they begin to resent the new star. The same can happen in an academic department. A new star is brought in with a very reduced teaching load if any at all and all the other members of the team feel diminished. The courses need to be taught so they either have to pick them up or more adjuncts (read academic indentured servitude) need to be hired so the new star can spend their time researching and not teaching. The basic work has to get done after all.

I am aware of a school which brought in a star poet and scholar of contemporary poetry and gave him a one course (actually a graduate seminar) to teach a year. And he was given a chair so he was sure to have a pile of money to sit on quite comfortably. At first the department was proud to have this poet and scholar.  But then others who had been working at the university for years and not gained much recognition even though they too had written books and even publishes some poetry and fiction began to feel as if they had been overlooked.  They had reduced teaching loads (after al who but community college, lower level professors and adjuncts who work for pennies on the hour teachers do not have reduced teaching loads it seems).

The morale in the department began to drop and it affected the students who could feel and even hear the tensions between the new start status professor and the faculty in the classroom. The halls became abuzz with comments and complaints and the new start just kept to herself anyhow. Within two years the star moved on to another school but the damage was done, The department felt that they had been slighted especially when the celebrity moved on to an even more prestigious school.
 
The department morale never quite recovered from the celebrity experience because it left most of the professors feeling under-appreciated.  They also saw even more that the reward for becoming a celebrity faculty was to teach even less and that became a greater goal of the faculty. The less one taught; the more important one was. Teaching was even more denigrated in that department to the point that if a faculty member was “stuck” with undergraduate courses he or she felt as if he had been saddled with the weight of the academic world.

Undergraduate students the bread and butter and real reason why colleges exist were the big losers in all of this. They ended up with faculty who did not want to teach them. They were led to faculty whose morale had been brought low. They were just not provided the academic service excellence they had paid for. And interestingly enough, retention in this department dropped off for all these reasons. Students felt, rightly so that the faculty did not care and as we know students place being cared for at the top oif the taxonomy when making decisions to stay or go.

Hiring ad staffing are such major decisions that departments and colleges fail at so often. They think of their prestige and themselves rather than what is best for the students. For the cost of the celebrity faculty member they hired they could have actually hired two full time faculty who may have actually wanted to teach. They could have added to their full time faculty rather than go for the name brand that caused the department years of problems.

One of the best ways to assure that there will be academic service excellence in the classroom is to have a solid core of full time tenure track faculty who care about teaching. But I fear that universities and college shave forgotten that and embraced celebrity and anti-teaching attitudes more to the deficit of students.

And that is too bad since a good teacher will also do good research just as part of what she or he does as a professional while a good researcher may well not be a good teacher nor even care about helping students grow and learn.

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
If you want more information on NRaisman & Associates or to learn more about what you can do to improve academic customer service excellence on campus, get in touch with us or get a copy of our best selling book The Power of Retention.