Websites Hide Presidents from Customers

Websites hide presidents. 

We have gone to 100 college and university websites

chosen at random and only eleven of them let the viewer find the president’s email address. Why is that? Why can’t a web visitor get in touch with the president of the college?

Answer is easy. Because the president does not want them to.

He or she does not want to hear from students and parents. The presidents just must think they are too busy to be bothered by students – by their primary customers. This is simply wrong.

People actually believe presidents are important. Here I am talking about students and the parents who think presidents are important. We already know that too many college presidents think they are very important. Too important to deal with students and their issues?

The president is the person that many people think they need to contact when they are having a problem. A problem getting something solved at a college or university? Hard to believe! Shuffle anyone?

The customers want to be able to take their issue to where they believe it can get taken care of so the websites make sure they cannot get to the president but not providing information on how to contact him or her.

The websites may have a president’s page but there is not link there to be able to email to the president and tell her how inspiring her message was. Only two of the presidents’ pages had a live email link to the president. Interestingly enough when we tried the two links, one bounced saying the email address did not exist.

When we went to the college and university directories the president’s name and address were not there. (Campus directories are another issue. Finding the directories and the difficulty of using many of them when located made the almost useless at times.) When we put the word president in the search boxes, we got all sorts of listings about the president but not one brought up how to contact him or her.

Customers often want to be able to talk to the person in charge when there is a problem and we make sure they cannot do that unless they go to the president’s office in person. And when they finally do get there, they are more upset than they would have been if they could have emailed. This finally takes more of the president’s time if she sees the student. If she does not it really creates and angry student and bad customer service.

There are two ways to solve this problem. One is to list the email address on the site. Realizing that many presidents are actually busy we recommend that a separate mailbox be set up for students and parents to email the president. That way the emails can be isolated when the hundreds of pointless emails the president gets every day from people on campus who want him or her to know they are doing their job.  If the mailbox is separated from the daily work box, it would be possible to assign an assistant to answer the emails that come in. This would be a good use of an assistant. The students and parents would be served and the president would still not have to deal with the emails. Of course it would be better if the president answered her own emails but I do realize that there are definitely days when that cannot be done.

The second way to take care of emails from students and parents would be to actually have people take care of issues so they don’t rise up to the presidential level. This is the better idea. Make sure people are trained in good academic customer service, know their area of work and are empowered to take care of issues. Give people the training they need to deal with students successfully so their problems are resolved at the lowest level possible. Then have them to do their jobs. Trust them to do what is right once they have been trained in what and how to do what is right. This would cut down very drastically on the need for students or parents to want to contact the president other to say that his or her web page is great.

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)

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Lucy at the Admissions Conveyor Belt

By some definitions, higher education is truly crazed. Places of self-defeating

insanity. For example, an educational leader I know loved to tell others that “the definition of insanity is doing the same thing that has failed over and over again and expecting different results.” He, like most every other higher education administrator really may have believed that so he, and they, repeated it every time it seemed to fit. But, when things demanded solution, he actually did the same things that failed over and over again. For example, he believed that increased admission numbers would solve all the problems when they did not every year. Every year he would set higher and higher admission numbers even if the recruitment team could not reach the goals. He did not see that as insanity but as using tried and true administrative and academic approaches to solve problems – even if the solutions were ones that had failed or resulted in long-term disaster. 

Considering that oft quoted definition, the situation universities, colleges and career colleges find themselves in now and how they are going about trying to work their way to solutions, it can be concluded that higher education is insane.

The problems are really not all new. Costs are exceeding revenue. Demands are outpacing the ability to fund them Tuition, fees and expenses have surpassed available resources for many families. Internal costs continue to rise faster than revenue can be raised to meet them. Capital deferments and outstanding debt grows. Budgets are being tightened. Competition for traditional, non- and neo-traditional students has never been greater. Technology needed to stay current increase in cost and amount. The only really new part of the problem is that student loans are starting to dry up at a pace that will increase inability to afford the costs to attend and graduate.

The solutions are also not new. They haven’t worked in the past really but well let’s use them again. The major way that universities, colleges and career schools seek to solve the problems is tried and untrue – increase enrollment by increasing new student numbers and build new buildings to attract new students. Yet, more students yield and increase in the demands for services, sections and often tutorial assistance. All require additional expenditures which are usually not provided so the new enrollees turn into attrition numbers. Or even if the services, additional sections and people are provided, students leave anyhow so even more students must be recruited to take their place and add more to the overall population.

But, this Lucy at the Conveyer Belt approach to a solution simply shows how insane academia is as the solution itself sooner or later breaks down and takes quite a lot with it including people and success. Lucy is given the job to box candies as they come down on the conveyer belt. She does this fairly well but then the owners want to increase the number of boxed candies. The belt speeds up to push her to speed up but that causes more and more candy to fall off the belt. The owners do not see the insanity behind their decision and just keep demanding more and more boxed candies until all the candy is falling off the belt and Lucy just gives up. Every piece of candy that falls of the track is not just a lost sale but lost investment in the creating of the candy. The lost candy not only mean that the day’s production has been hurt. It also means the long term ability to meet projections and the buyers’ needs are not met which can cause a longer term negative effect on sales and client retention.

This is similar to what happens with college admissions when given a higher enrollment goal almost always with the same staff and time.

When admission offices are pushed to speed up the conveyor belt of enrollment goals, the people in them respond with a combination of enthusiasm and dread just like sales people in any business. And make no mistake, recruitment and admissions are sales. The enthusiasm is from the belief that “we can now show them what we can do. Hit our numbers and be rewarded for doing so.” The dread comes from the reality that the competition is strong, the market saturated, the product not that different from any competitor and “I am going to have to work even harder and longer if I am to succeed most often with not much more resources.” As well as a recognition that population for most schools is really an embodiment of one of Zeno’s paradoxes that will just yield them even more work and increased demand.

The Greek philosopher Zeno devised a paradox that illuminates the paradox of achieving population goals through admissions for most schools. Achilles and a tortoise are running a race. Achilles assumes he will win so he gives the tortoise a head start. But Achilles finds he can never catch up. Before Achilles can surpass the tortoise, he must get to point A, where the tortoise started the race. But when he gets there, the tortoise has moved to point B. When Achilles gets to point B, the tortoise has gone to point C, and so on. As a result, Achilles can never catch the tortoise even though he may get closer and closer because the Tortoise will always stay at least one point ahead. The only way Achilles can catch up is if the tortoise stays still at one of the points achieved.

For colleges and universities, the tortoise is student population which is controlled not just by admissions but equally, no more so, by retention. Retention is a constant, steady and eventually winning strategy that is the only real way for admissions to ever catch up to demand. And to carry the analogy one fabled step forward, it is the tortoise, not the hare that finally will win the race. That is the race for population, graduation and mission success.
Moreover, when the school has the admissions people speed up the line, they can only do so at most schools by digging deeper into the available pool of recruits. They take students that should not be admitted to make their numbers. But like Lucy at the conveyor belt, many of the cakes will simply fall off the belt and crash to the floor.  Too many of these students will do the same. They will come along the college’s conveyor belt and get pushed off or drop off on their own.

That the school may hit its admission objectives but it will not make its enrollment goal. It finally will lose more students and revenue from the students it should not have taken to begin with. Students who do not fit the school, who should not have been admitted in the first place drop out. Sure maybe a few can actually succeed and we point to them to say we are doing the right thing. Providing access to students who may not have been normally admitted but were and succeeded. But what about the large percentage that simply do not make it?
By letting them in and then having them flunk out or drop out we have done them a grave disservice. We have made them believe they could do it and then proved they could not. We have crushed their sense of value. And we took their money! We took their savings and financial aid to attend the college so we could make our numbers objective even if we dashed the students’ objective of succeeding in college. We have been unethical and immoral and knew we were doing this. We knew many would drop out or get pushed it and we did it just to reach into their pockets so we could get in more money. What does this say about the state of higher education?

If we realize that we also lost money because it costs us to recruit and process every one of the students we accept and then leave, we may not be making all that much money off them after all. And what we made is just pushing off some decisions that will have to be made because they are not staying. All we have done actually is create a funnel that leaks out students rather than a square of retention that holds in all the students and their revenue too.

It would be far better to understand that admissions only really succeeds if we can break the churn and burn approach and focus on recruiting students who will stay. Speeding up admissions has failed over and over. yet we call on admissions to get more students who drop out leaving the school, in a precarious position. that is the definition of insanity.

If this article made sense to you, you may want to contact N.Raisman & Associates to improve academic customer service and hospitality to increase student satisfaction, retention and your bottom line

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: More Customer Service for Higher Education. 

Creating A Service Vision for Your School

In order to change the culture of a college community, it is necessary to

have a common consensus on the customer service vision for the campus.  Everyone must have the same concept of what customer service is. They must have a vision that overrides their personal definitions and concerns and encompass one that everyone can understand and embrace. A vision is not a set of lofty statements such as students are our business our only business that one might find in a seven steps to salvation  mission statement; meant to be read not enacted. A vision must be a practical guide to see how things work and should work on campus.

 

A vision is like corrective lenses on someone who is nearsighted and can only see their office and work. Most everyone can see after all but not everyone sees the same. There are differences of perspective and angle, of ability and cognitive function and some people really do have such bad eyesight that they need to have corrective lenses out in font of their eyes or they will walk all over students who get in their path. They just do not see them. So think of the college’s vision statement as a set of eyeglasses to get everyone focused the same and on the same object and purpose. 

I do not mind seeing the customer service vision statement as a corrective set of lenses either because most campuses do not see students correctly and some don’t see them clearly at all. Students may be ruder than in the past but that is not who they are finally and that must be seen.In fact, there are some schools that wear blinders to keep students out of their research and self-centered vision of the world.

The vision needs to start from an understanding of who our customers are. Students primarily,. There are more than one set of customers on a campus of course. There is the entire caste system and everyone in that academic caste system is a customer of one another but for this vision formation we will focus on students, the primary customer.

And yes, I know there are people out there who hate the idea of student as customers and the college as a business but all I can sy by now is “get over it.” It is true and a fact. Colleges are businesses and here it is once and for all. We are businesses whose budget depends on selling the University (recruitment) to its customers (students and parents) by sales (admissions) and collecting revenue (tuition) by billing (bursar) based on the college's brand (reputation), products (courses, programs, degrees), services (advising, FA..) and creating a connection with the customer (client services) by employees (faculty, staff, administrators) (some in unions) who receive salaries and benefits, delivering product (learning opportunity) fulfilling customer need (degree and career/Grad school). Get the message?

So what should the vision contain? Six elements.  

1.       Providing a positive return on student investment;

2.       Making students feel welcome and valuable in the classroom and on

          campus;

3.       Providing the care, concern and services needed to retain students in a

          college or university…from making a school into Cheers University… to        scheduling and advising to classroom decorum and assistance… to 

          all the services that can yield success for students
      and showing them you want them to be there

4.       Doing all this with a smile and pleased attitude that one can help      

          students succeed and stay in school

5.       The Hillel thing –Do unto students as you would want done for your 

          son, your daughter, your mother or your father

6.       Following the 15 Principles of Good Academic Customer Service. (want 

          a copy. Just click here and ask)

N.Raisman & Associates has been providing customer service, retention, enrollment and research training and solutions to colleges, universities and career colleges in the US, Canada, and Europe as well as to businesses that seek to work with them since 1999. Clients range from small rural schools to major urban universities and corporations. Its services range from campus customer service audits, workshops, training, presentations, institutional studies and surveys to research on customer service and retention. N.Raisman & Associates prides itself on its record of success for its clients and students who are aided through the firm’s services. www.GreatServiceMatters.com
info@GreatServiceMatters.com 
                                             413.219.6939      

Get a copy of the best seller the Power of Retention today by clicking here.

Making Surveys Work

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 much because they cannot see any results. And the odds of wining a gift appear to large for them to spend their time on it. People don’t care to take surveys anymore and they feel as if they are being surveyed to death.

At one university which we’re working with students are surveyed on one thing or another it seems almost every single week. Response rate on the surveys is extremely low. Even on one survey in which we offered an iPad Mini for a raffle for those who completed the survey, the results were minimal.

It used to be that a 10% return from a survey was considered quite good. Now it is considered phenomenal. A 3% return is even good nowadays. Students and others simply are tired of being surveyed with no apparent results coming from the surveys.

It is extremely important that if you use a survey for any purpose students be apprised of the results and these results should lead to something tangible. Otherwise they will get turned off spending that time and at that when it seems to go nowhere. This is also true of the rest of the campus community as well. They don’t mind giving their thoughts and ideas when they believe it is going to lead to substantial change or improvement.

An example. When working with a client college I set up a quality of work life committee. (This is something I recommend at every campus by the way. We have so many committees that look into most everything but what is it like to work at the school and what can be done to make this most important part of a person’s life better.) The first thing the committee did was decide they needed to survey the community to see what the people working on campus felt the quality of work life was. We sent out the survey and got a quite good return actually, about an 21% completion rate on the survey.

We learned a couple of things from the survey as well. We found out that generally people were happy with the way things are going but there were some particular issues that they wanted to have taken care of. In the open response area we learned from the survey that female employees were feeling as if their needs were being ignored. One of the areas that we found people were concerned about was that the door to the female employees bathroom did not close all the way.

I immediately had the maintenance people work on the bathroom door to make sure it would close all of the way. This was accomplished quite quickly and quite easily. We took the next step of repainting the women employees’ bathroom as well as putting in a small couch so that they could sit and relax if they wished. This all worked amazingly well.

How do we know it worked well? Well within a day of fixing the bathroom door we had an influx of additional surveys of returned to us from every segment of the campus. People saw that the survey was actually going to lead to some results and they completed it. We also had a survey out to students on customer service on campus it had a jump in response rate too. Fixing the door got around to the campus saying that we would actually do somethi8ng with the results of surveys.

So the end message here, if you take a survey do something with it. Show that it will lead to a result that has benefit to the people who were taking the survey. If you do, you’ll get a much higher return on your survey response than you might otherwise have received.

If this article has value for you, you'll want to get a copy of the best-selling book The Power of Retention by clicking here.

N.Raisman & Associates has been providing customer service, retention, enrollment and research training and solutions to colleges, universities and career colleges in the US, Canada, and Europe as well as to businesses that seek to work with them since 1999. Clients range from small rural schools to major urban universities and corporations. Its services range from campus customer service audits, workshops, training, presentations, institutional studies and surveys to research on customer service and retention. N.Raisman & Associates prides itself on its record of success for its clients and students who are aided through the firm’s services. www.GreatServiceMatters.com
info@GreatServiceMatters.com 
413.219.6939

Dress for Student Success

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 the doctor? Would you start to worry a bit that this person might not be a real doctor? Would a doctor be dressed this way? Like a…college student. Or at least not a fully professional physician.  If the doctor came into the room wearing neat jeans or khakis and a polo shirt, maybe we would think “this is a very casual doctor. I hope he isn’t as casual in his approach to his work.” Now if the same doctor came into the examining room in a white lab coat we would know this is the doctor. A professional. In fact, if a non-professional came into the room wearing a lab coat we would assume he or she were the doctor and be wrong. The clothes do, in this case at least, help make the professional.

This is true on campus as well. Clothes say a great deal about whom we are and what we are doing. They tell the viewer a great deal about who we are too. I realize the clothes revolution started with my generation back in the sixties and seventies when we rebelled against conformity and the straight-laced approach to college and dress. We were going to show our students that we did not see ourselves as academic bureaucrats. Prior to this time academic dress had been a tie and jacket for men, a dress or skirt and business-like blouse for women.  When students walked into class dressed in chino’s and shirts or skirts and blouses we all could see the roles being played out. The person dressed as a business-type was in charge and we were dressed appropriately to show respect for the professor.

Then in the sixties and seventies as the country underwent a massive cultural shift, clothing started to relax too. Professors came to class without a tie. Maybe even in slacks and a shirt. The tie had become a sign of conformity with the conservative business world that we evolving into something else. We who taught wanted to show a sense of solidarity, of connectedness with our students so we dressed in a way that would show more of that. More relaxed and student-like. And the classroom began to reflect our dress. It became more relaxed. We didn’t lecture as much as try to engage students in the work.

But I also remember that when I went for job interviews, it was suit or tie and jacket time. Had to look professional for potential colleagues; most of whom also wore the suit and tie for the hiring interviews. This was a professional activity after all. Hiring is important so we dressed appropriately as an administrator since they still wore (and still wear) the suit or tie and jacket if a man; business apparel if a woman. This was to show respect and the seriousness of the process and activity of hiring a colleague. But if we taught the same day we may have worn jeans with jacket and tie but when class started, the tie and jacket came off. Back to what had become teaching garb.

Somehow, teaching had become a less professional presentation. One in which we would dress as did our students. In a manner that did not show a separation between student and professor. One that said we are all equal but I am actually an Orwellian so I am more equal to you. I will dress down but demand that you come up to me.

But dressing down has its problems. It really does not show any solidarity with students as much as perhaps a parity that does not exist. When we dress in certain ways we make statements. Tie and jacket is business; professional. Shirt and slacks – business casual – semi-professional. Khakis and polo shirt – simply causal. Jeans and shirt – relaxed and not professional unless you are a golfer. Jeans and tee shirt very relaxed and fully non-professional.

Clothes also set expectations in the minds of the viewer just as the dress examples of the doctor earlier created expectations or even hesitations. Tie says we are here to do business. That’s why administrators tend to always wear a tie or business clothing. It says I am an administrator and a professional doing the business of the college. Jeans says hanging around the mall and chilling with friends.  Jeans and a tee shirt are not serious wear for most people unless of course they are part of the professional dress of the person. Wearing jeans in class usually says this is an atmosphere like hanging around and not serious.

No wonder there are decorum issues in class. We create some of them by wearing clothes that do not say this is an academic environment. That this is an important place for us to learn and for me to teach. It is a place where you are to pay attention and show some level of respect for the activities in which we are engaged. It is not a place for you to chill, IM, browse, talk or leaver early but to engage; not to text but to pay attention to the text. Our clothes too often telegraph to our students that decorum is mall-level; not academic hall level.

Now I am not saying that everyone dresses this way noir am I saying that a professional cannot hold a class’s attention and maintain decorum by her actions and personality. Not at all. What I am saying is that because too many dress too casually it demands greater effort and exertion to maintain an academic atmosphere and teach. Moreover, the complaints I often hear from academic audiences about how slovenly, inattentive and even rude students are while we are discussing academic customer service are most often our fault. We are in charge of the classroom and must demand appropriate academic decorum or we make our own work harder and usually allow one or two students to cheat 20 or more by behavior that often interrupts the class . And dress adds to the problems.

Nor am I saying that everyone should be wearing a tie and jacket. No. That is not the message here though professional dress is called for in all situations Professional dress? Yes. That is whatever the graduate in that major or program would be wearing when he or she gets a job in the area. For example, if someone is studying in a medical field they already have to dress as future professionals. If someone is going into business then the professor should be dressed as a businessperson and should encourage the students to do likewise. Animal husbandry and management may find that boots and jeans or coveralls might be the appropriate dress. And yes, a shirt and jeans could be appropriate professional dress in computer programming since that is normal dress in a position a graduate might go into.  

What I am suggesting here is that we need to begin providing an important academic customer service to our students through our dress. Part of the service we provide to our customers, a major part too, is preparing them for the world after college. We should be working to make them ready to succeed after they graduate. And some of that is knowing the culture they will be entering and how to behave and, yes, dress in that culture. We cannot forget that we are not just there to pour information and skills into them but to make them adults who can succeed beyond out classrooms.

If we dress appropriate to the profession we are engaged in and the one that they will be entering, we will increase decorum in our classrooms and better prepare our students for success.

If this makes sense to you, you will want to get a copy of The Power of Retention, the best selling book on academic customer service by the author of this article.

Booking customer service audits and workshops now for April-August but dates are filling fast so call 413.219.6939 or info@GreatServiceMatters.com