Enhancing the Client Experience
How do your students feel when they get an email or letter from your school? Does your college culture promote customer service? Is your website easy to navigate? Are your processes clear? Customers of any product appreciate being heard and receiving the help they need without roadblocks. How does your company enhance the client experience?
Putting Customers First
There is an adage often attributed to Disney: "We take care of our employees, our employees take care of our customers, and our customers take care of our profits." It's catchy, but more importantly, it has serious merit. For any organization that strives to be relevant today, the importance of placing value on individuals that champion the brand should be at the center of all communications internally. To everyone outside of the organization, each member of your team IS the company and the brand.
At Disney, the culture that is instilled from the beginning in each member of the organization promotes its value and messaging. There is a magic that exists when each employee is focused on making its customers feel the same enjoyment that they feel when representing that brand.
For anyone that has visited one of Disney's theme parks, it’s pretty clear that customer service is at the forefront of every interaction. Disney has made customer service a priority for the entire company and empowered its employees to act in good faith on behalf of the rest of the business. This is not by accident, but rather by requiring each employee to take part in an internal leadership program that reinforces the culture that has been established over time. This reinforces the psychological contract and encourages each person to champion the values of the organization as their own.
As institutions whose mission is to educate and empower future generations, why shouldn't we begin with empowering our employees? There are too many tales of students receiving the runaround on campus when trying to obtain an answer or help to a specific issue. Whether it's a student trying to obtain a new student ID, purchase a meal plan, obtain a transcript, register for a class, or get help with their laptop, these pain points are real and negatively impact the student experience.
Higher education should strive to do whatever it takes to be "easy to do business with." We need to be better at understanding and responding to students' expectations and encourage problem solving on the front lines. Institutions should celebrate great service by promoting the stories of exceptional delivery throughout the organization.
From a student and parent perspective, each member of the institution IS the institution. As leaders in higher education, we have an opportunity to create meaningful cultures that encourage our teams to own the students' experience. If we fail to meet those expectations, however, someone else at another institution will.
Delivering Customer Service
What are the pillars of superb customer service? Although it doesn't necessarily matter what industry you're in, it does matter how the focus on the customer is shared as a key strategy across an organization. The more customer-centric you are, the longer it takes your competition to figure out your game.
My state credit union sends me a newsletter each month along with my account statements. The publication contains helpful, timely tidbits about banking, personal finance and savings strategies, along with the current list of rates.
This morning, I realized that on the rear of the bottom side of the mailing was a section requesting feedback on customer experience. Feedback was divided between the following four categories:
Promptness
Courtesy
Knowledge
Level of Service
I have been a member of the State Employees' Credit Union since taking my first job out of college. In what now seems like eons ago, one of my first professional experiences was teaching seventh grade resource in a middle school. Believe it or not, I remember receiving my first paycheck and realizing that as a state employee, I was eligible to join the credit union. I drove straight to the local branch and opened an account, and I've been a proud member ever since. That was 16 years ago. Since then, I have held checking and money market accounts, vehicle loans, a mortgage and savings accounts for each of my children.
Although I had never realized it before, it is now obvious that a quality customer service focus is employed by every employee in each of the branches that I've ever visited. Yet, until recently, I failed to connect the countless positive experiences that I have had with the simple focus on feedback that the newsletter included: "How might SECU serve you better?"
The Strawberry Farmer
I met David Rowe while selecting strawberries at the grocery store. The strawberries looked beautiful, and the sign attached to the stand announced I could buy one pound and get one pound free. Upon seeing my reaction to the alluring look of the strawberries, David introduced himself and told me he had grown those strawberries.
After talking with David for a bit, I found out that what we hear about local food is true. He said that after picking strawberry, squash and his other crops fresh in the morning, and after a negligible time for processing, those beautiful fruits and vegetables make it from his hands to the grocery store displays in twenty minutes. I learned from him that our generation changed the food distribution chain and pushed the collective consciousness towards local foods. He also noted that his family members have been North Carolinian Farmers for five generations.
However, two things that David revealed stuck with me.
David told me he was at the grocery store because he often drives to see what his product looks like when stacked on fruit and vegetable stands at the stores. The second important point he made is that after five generations of farmers, he would be the last generation of his family in this profession, because the work is intense and the monetary reward is very small. The interest for the trade within his family has diminished to nothing.
The lifecycle of any product ends only after your clients have become an advocate for your business. In this case, David could have responded to market forces, which in farming would dictate increasing or decreasing the supply of a certain crop after measuring how much of each crop sells and how much of it rots in storage. That is one way to understand and respond to the way the world reacts to your product.
What David does, however, is to check on the performance of all other businesses upon which his product depends. This way, he can make sure that those businesses are delivering on their promises to properly display and represent his product, just as David himself promises to those businesses that his product is of great quality. If strawberries are not selling well, it may be correlated to an external factor other than quality. The store display might be hidden or dirty, in which case, David’s response would not be to grow less strawberries, but to find a better store to help market his product.
The solution proposed to a problem in business may require an adjustment aimed at improving the client experience. Conversely, it may require corrections to internal management. You need to decide what the focus should be. The efficacy of your proposed solution will depend on your willingness to accept that your client is indifferent, and that you must earn his or her business at every step of the way. Furthermore, David’s commitment to the entire cycle of his product is firm, even though he knows his business will not be around after he has stopped farming. That commitment comes from a characteristically American trade that has pushed people like him to act in this way for as long as our nation has existed. David is providing the world with his best performance, not because of a future reward, but because excellence is a discipline that cannot be turned off.
I anticipate that will continue even after the very last strawberry has been picked.
Stability in Motion
One morning last week, I was invited to join a friend for a paddling trip out on the water. Rather than take my kayak, I decided that I would try my hand on his extra stand-up paddleboard. (Paddleboarding is very popular in and around the area in which we live, and so I felt like it was only a matter of time until I gave it an honest try.)
The stand-up paddleboard requires a much different approach than most other board related activities. Skateboarding, surfing, and snowboarding all require similar postures, foot positioning and balance techniques. On a stand-up paddleboard, however, the feet are spread across the board, and the individual stands facing forward. The stance also requires a different balance technique, as the emphasis is not placed on heel-to-toe control.
It was the first time I actually thought about how to maintain stability in motion. The other board sports that I've participated in for years came natural; this was something new, and it required a lot of focus to adjust and remain upright. The consequences of losing focus and balance would result in falling into shallow winter waters over jagged oyster beds.
Maintaining stability in motion takes practice, in your daily activities as well as in business. The external factors that can derail our focus are as present on the water as they are in the office. Whereas on the water, winds, wakes and tides can work against the casual sportsman, making it difficult to remain atop the board, it is just as easy to become distracted at work, too. Depending on where you might sit in the organizational structure, distractions can come from a variety of sources: emails, meetings, pet projects, and other random requests and activities that don't actually move the business any closer to its goals (but somehow keep you "busy").
Because of such factors, the art of maintaining balance in business requires that each member of the team consider the view of the business through a customer lens, an ownership lens, and an employee lens. It is the overlap between the three that create the balance every business needs to continue on its path towards success.
Stability requires balance and focus. Cut down the communication channels, create a list of the most critical items that need to be completed, and move forward. All other requests will simply rock your paddleboard.
One Tough Customer
Each of us likely knows someone that has had experience working with a person that never seems to be satisfied with the output or the solution that is offered. There are then tales of frustration when the individual rejecting a proposed solution fails to render any reason why that idea is not acceptable, or furthermore, just flat out refuses to join in on helping to identify a resolution. (One often questions how these individuals are appointed to carry the posts that they have, let alone how co-workers must view working with them.)
You can please some people some time,
But you can’t please all the people all the time.
- Bob Marley
So, what is the best way to go about working with individuals of this nature, especially when one is your [paying] customer? Is it possible to deliver a solution of value if the expectations are too unrealistic? Our experiences have taught us that in these types of situations, one must remember to hide frustrations and maintain composure. Try to remain visibly positive (as outward expressions and body language have a tendency to reveal otherwise). If necessary, excuse yourself politely or ask if it would be acceptable to return a phone call if working remotely. Above all, though, one must remain courteous and patient.
It is in these moments when responding positively is perhaps the only way to diffuse a situation. Remain in control and solve the actual issue at hand, and turn a critic into a pleased customer.
Built-In Analytics
As children, our parents encouraged us to play board games at times when we weren't able to be outside, instead of watching too much television. Now as a parent, I make sure to set aside time each week to also encourage game play with my children. It brings enjoyment to an evening and helps them settle down after an active day, and it helps instill accountability to a set of rules (while also forcing them to get along for the good of the game). Whether it's a game of Rummy or a round of Scrabble, my oldest child keeps score on a piece of paper torn from a notepad. We then keep score over the course of a few games until we run out of page.
I've always enjoyed games, and the landscape for online play is ubiquitous and expanding. While I personally don't keep many games on my smartphone (as a way to reduce distraction), I do have two weaknesses: Words with Friends and The New York Times Crossword. I play Words with two of my younger brothers almost daily, and I try to fit in a crossword over a cup of coffee each morning.
There is something different about today's digital games that I hadn't noticed until last week, though: games are now including data as a natural extension of game play, allowing a player to review and digest past performances, which acts as a means for improvement and another point of engagement. The concept of badges (or awards for meeting a goal) have been around for some time, and as an incentive, it's a compelling notion to promote greater adoption. This ultimately results in more time in the game. But when I discovered that I could look back through my statistics and review specific data points, such as the percentage of a type of word that I played, or the average time it took me to complete a puzzle, I was very surprised.
At the same time, I was immediately reminded that Higher Education still has a ways to go. My primary question was, "Why isn't data baked into everything we do within higher education and then used to make decisions daily?" Institutions have been making progress, collecting and leveraging a number of specific data points (i.e. IPEDS), and those practices are subsequently starting to have an impact on certain pillars within each institution, such as in Admissions or Financial Aid offices. The push towards greater student success and learning outcomes acts as another primary driver for data collection. But as that data consist of metrics that are only available in hindsight (often times after a semester ends or in year over year trends), why is there not a greater catalyst to require data collection at a more granular level throughout the course of a semester? For example, campus card systems capture every interaction, and so there is an opportunity to identify patterns in student behavior that may be cause for concern before a student retreats into isolation or withdraws from an institution. Learning management systems track engagement patterns in online courses, allowing instructors to monitor patterns and engage if a student begins to fall behind with coursework.
But when it comes to the daily insight that is possible with sound financial data and resulting practices, the distribution of relevant budget information remains a laggard. Outside the Business Office, it's not too common to find others looking at their spending patterns or adjusting their operations in response to the climate of the institution. Higher education needs to build analytics into its fiscal practices in order to help secure its financial future.