mortiz0010

A serious misunderstanding that exists on campuses is that customer service and treating students with hospitality are somehow evil things. That they somehow are antithetical to academic quality.  They are not. They are (or should be) simply part of daily life on campus and in fact they are even if done poorly. Colleges and universities provide customer service and hospitality every day in the classroom, in offices, across the campus and even the campus facilities themselves. These are the services we provide to make sure that the basic needs of students are met. An obvious example is the cafeteria where we actually do serve and provide food services. Even the classroom is also a cafeteria of sorts with a defined menu of knowledge and set of portions of information and training that must be presented in an intellectually tasty manner. The major activity in a classroom is instruction and that is a service after all. There is no way around the fact that a college is a collection serv...

Higher education is not a sector well known for change. It is in fact a sector that is laughably slow to embrace any change at all while telling everyone else how they should alter their work habits, strategies, businesses, countries, culture and so on. Academia is also comfortable telling its clients what change they need to make to be successful in my class while using old notes from many classes ago. We have no compunction about telling students what they should do to change even if we are not going to do so. And it is done in interesting and competing ways. Each faculty member, every class sends out a different message to students. In humanities classes, students are told to open their minds and embrace new ideas but don’t try and shake mine even if I believe that Shakespeare was gay and all his plays send out a pro-gay agenda what with all the cross dressing and all. In math we are told to close down our minds and just accept that this is the right way to do this and...

One of the areas that we find quite common from doing onsite customer service audits is the disparity of office functional hours. Most offices that students need to complete their activities to go and pay for school are not available to the second segment of the college or university – the evening students.   Most schools have two populations. There is a daytime dedicated population of students for whom going to school is their work for the week. And there is an adult population who leave from work to go to school. Yet, the schools act as if there were only the daytime dedicated students when it comes to the hours that their offices are open to help students.  Here is an excerpt from a mini-audit that points out the problem and provides some simple solutions to solve it.  Hours of operation An issue that is allied to scheduling of classes is the hours that offices are open to serve students. The College has two populations which are separate for the most part. ...

There is a central concern that I hear from college presidents about academic customer service. “Does it work to increase student satisfaction and retention?" A fair question that I am very pleased to answer with a simple yes. And then prove it through a university that has fully embraced the concepts of academic customer service. Does academic customer service work? If increasing a graduation rate by more than 11%, increasing enrollment by over 2,500 students, increasing applications by 31%, having the funds to more than double the faculty, obtaining investments to start three more schools of study and four new buildings, and jump from 15 to number one in the US News and World Report rankings, then academic customer service works. High Point University in North Carolina under the leadership of Nido Qubein has proven that academic customer service, seeing to the reasonable needs and responsible expectations of students and parents in the classroom and across the campus, works. ...