As Pogo put it so well many years ago “We have met the enemy
and they are us”. That is especially true when it comes to service excellence
on college campuses. We are the enemies of good service.
I am not just talking about service to students. Colleges
too often seem to be equal opportunity bad service providers. This is especially
true when they are dealing with anyone outside of the campus . Just ask anyone
who has applied for a job at a college how they were treated. They are requested
to apply through an ad perhaps. They are most normally asked to apply by email.
So far so good but as soon as an application goes in, the poor service starts.
The applicants never receive any motivation that their
application has been received for example. This would be so easily done too.
Just set up an auto responder to send out an email back to the applicant
stating that their email and application have been received, Thank you for the interest.
Then the search goes on and if an applicant is not
successful in the process, he or she never hears anything again. No one thanks them for the application and writes
that “we are sorry that though you are an excellent candidate…” (or some such polite
brushoff that was the norm years ago) . There is most often no response at all
leaving the applicant hanging and feeling absolutely ill-served. The candidate took the time to write a cover
letter, direct her resume to the job and apply,. The least one could do is
acknowledge that. It would be so easy too. Just create an Excel list of applicants and email address and use a
mail merge to send out thanks by emails. A simple polite gesture.
The gestures are often the key to helping promote a culture
of caring and service. We have found many schools that just by-pass simple politeness
because “we don’t have the time to do that” or “if I were to thank everyone I wouldn’t
get any work done”. Well, one of the most important jobs a person can do is to motivate
and show appreciation for others. It only takes two seconds to say thank you. It
takes a minute to let someone know you appreciate the good work she has done. That
moment would be well spent too because that small customer service to another
would be repaid mover and over.
It amazes me that
quite often the higher some people go in the system, the lower their civility
and politeness to others gets. We deal with many college administrators. Many ask
us to come and talk with them about helping them make the service on their
campus better to increase retention. After very many of these meetings I realize
that service on the campus is not good because the people at the so-called top
do not know what customer service and even manners are. They are often the ones
to ask for the meetings but then treat us as if we are just getting in their
way or as if we are somehow an imposition. If they do this with us I am sure
they do it with others. After all, we are the customer service people and others
try to polish up the politeness for us.
For example, I had a meeting recently that a college
president requested. I was to fly to her city and meet with her the next day.
When the time arrived for the meeting, she was late of course. And when she
came into the conference room she just introduced herself and started in right
away with “So what can you do for us on retention?”
We spoke for over an hour with her interrupting me at every
turn so I could not finish a thought. She also did not listen to the responses
I was giving so she asked me the same question more than once. If I answered
her questions about increasing retention in a way that she didn’t agree with
she simply told me I was wrong. Maybe I was but it is bad manners to do so to a
guest. And I was a guest of the president and the college. She asked me for the
meeting.
After the meeting she asked me to send her a customer service
proposal to do an audit for the college. I did so. That was two months ago and
I never received even a simple “Fugetaboutit”.
I did email twice to ask if there were any questions pertaining to the
proposal and another time to offer to come back to discuss any issues that
might be there but these emails were never responded to.
It is interesting that this college president had asked us
to survey her administrators to see where they were on basic customer service
issues. It was not a pretty situation by the way. The administrators ranked low
on their service and also felt that service on campus was weak. No wonder why.
The president set the tone and I am certain that if the customer service and
lack of basic politeness she gave me were the norm as I guessed they were, the people
who report to her learn politeness and
good service are not important to succeed.
It is interesting that afterwards her assistant did respond
to an email I sent her asking about the proposal. “So what do you think out
biggest problem might be?” she asked. I wanted to say “your boss” but politeness
led me to say that likely there were no clear positive champion for customer service
on campus to set the tone for providing good service and hospitality. I also
mentioned that service needs to begin at the top to lead the way and I was not
certain that was happening fully enough
This was not an isolated case. In many situations I have found
that the president and the leaders of a college or university are central to
the problem at the school. They do not show appreciation for others. They are
not polite and hospitable. They treat too many people as afterthoughts at best.
At another school, I found during an audit that the president
had a habit of belittling people in
public and made comments about the staff that said they were not important. As
I recall, the statement was” I can replace you by just grabbing someone at a
bus stop.” And he wondered why the staff did not teat students better. Because
he did not treat staff well is why.
In this situation I was called on to report the problems at
the school as precursor to more work to do for them. I wrote the truth as politely
as I could. Oddly enough I did not get any more work from that school after writing
that the problem starts at the top and works its way down.
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N.
Raisman & Associates is the leader in increasing student
retention, enrollment and revenue through workshops, presentations,
research, training and academic customer service solutions for
colleges, universities and career colleges in the US, Canada, and Europe
as well as businesses that work with them
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