mortiz0010

Charles Cezar who owned the Ritz Hotel in Paris back in 1898 became famous for saying   " le client n'a jamais tort "  (the client is never wrong). Granted he may well have said this because his Parisian employees treated the hotel’s clients poorly because they were not Parisians and thus  in the staff's minds wrong all the time, but the  motto became the standard by which he ran the hotel.  Harry Gordon Selfridge remade the phrase to make it more emphatically positive with the better known “the customer is always right”. Now considering the state of customer service in the country today’s phrase might well combine the two mottos to become “the customer is always wrong”. This seems to be the operative concept of most companies if they even think of the customer at all. This was obviously the operative belief of United Airlines when it dragged a paying and seated passenger down the aisle on his back injuring him enough to put him in the hospital.  This actio...

The following is from an abstract of a paper Twenty Years of First-Year Student Success: An Inventory of Strategies and Programs That Work by DeLaine Priest, Stephanie Gisler and Maribeth Ebasz of the University of Central Florida's Student Development & Enrollment Services. In it they recount and explain what UCF has dome of the last twenty years to increase their retention from 70% in 1994 to 87.5% in 2014 as the school grew from 25,000 t0 61,000. The authors write: This paper describes strategies and programs that have been crucial drivers for the increase in retention as well as contributors to overall academic achievement in first-year students. Tutoring, academic advising, coaching, career readiness, and student engagement are among the strategies and programs that will be examined in this paper. Additionally, specific programs offered through offices such as the Office of Student Involvement, the Recreation and Wellness Center, and Housing and Residence Life wi...

A customer service facet that is often overlooked is the “ objective correlative"  aspects of a college. The phrase objective correlative is one taken from my English background and was discussed primarily with literature. But I find it has numerous applications to colleges. Besides, using the phrase helps justify all those years of English study. The phrase was popularized by the American poet TS Elliot to explain emotional reactions to literature.  Objective correlative   refers to a physical object or more likely a grouping or combination of objects, images, or visual descriptions that create(s) an emotional response to piece of literature. For example, if a poem has images of grey things, a tumbledown house and crows sitting on a broken fence, these physical allusions and objects set a tone, an emotional metaphoric response, of gloom and foreboding. Try an Edgar Alan Poe poem for examples and pleasure. In a college, the objective correlatives are visual and physical a...