mortiz0010

When in our work with colleges and universities to improve their retention and customer service we suggest a survey of student attitudes and opinions, the response is almost universally negative. “We tried to survey recently but students (employees) just didn't respond.” This is a common sort of statement that that we get. People have found that surveys are becoming less and less effective in getting them the information that they need or want. People are becoming tired of taking surveys and opinion studies. It seems that everywhere they go someone is asking them to give their opinion on one thing or another. It’s not that people don’t like giving their opinions; they certainly do. But they are tired of filling in survey forms that don’t seem to have any effect or direct value for them. Even though stores offer to put people into a raffle for a cash prize or merchandise people do not go online to complete the surveys. They simply feel that their opinion doesn’t count or matter for...

As I walked around a college campus last week, something dawned on me dealing with decorum in the classroom and campus. The students were dressed rather slovenly. That was not the great dawning; just an observation. The epiphany came when I realized that the faculty and much of the staff looked quite much like the students. They were dressed to clean out a garage. Not to fill minds. Dress is an objective correlative of the college. It is an outward metaphor of the feelings, attitude and even value one should place on the school itself and the professionals (or not) practicing in it. Just like in any profession, the clothes reflect the statement of how much value to place on the professional as well as the correlative statement of how much I value the school and myself. Take  a medical doctor for example . If you were a patient and a man or woman started to come into the examining room dressed in rumbled jeans, a tee shirt and say sneakers, would you think this was th...

A common question that I hear from many clients is what are the standards for serving students who may come into an office. They want to know what are the benchmarks by which they can gauge whether or not they are providing good customer service to their clients. All of these benchmarks derive from a basic concept that the student is more important than any work I am doing at the time he or she enters an office. So the first benchmark is whether or not people interrupt what they are doing as soon as a student enters the office. If a person cannot interrupt what he or she is doing right at the time the student enters, he should mention that I will be right with you soon as I finish this. And the person should take no more than one minute conclude what he or she is working on. But that is not as good as interrupting what he or she is doing to serve the student. At the very most a student should not have to wait more than 30 seconds to be greeted after he or she enters an office if ther...