As I was listening to Horst Schulze, the Ritz-Carlton co-founder, I was suddenly struck by how poorly universities do customer service, and how used we all are to our low standards. At Ritz-Carlton hotels, whoever gets a complaint from a customer – either a room cleaner or front desk person – they deal with it. They do not send the concerned guests to someone else. Every employee, including kitchen staff, are authorized to spend up to $2000 without further approval to make a customer happy. By contrast, on many campuses, hundreds of students are still forced to walk around collecting signatures on paper forms such as Add-Drop class, and Change of Major. Technologies to eliminate this irritating exercise have been around for at least 25 years, and yet no one somehow thinks it is a priority. Even freshmen know that electronic workflows do exist. They assume we simply do not care enough, and they are right.
Despite all the talk about student success, most universities are not committed to customer service. We say all the right things about student success, student engagement, and student experience, but we fail to address multiple bureaucratic micro-barriers to having a pleasant, friction-free experience on campus. We profess lofty ideas of challenging their minds, expanding their horizons, and training them for real life, but fail to make campus life as smooth as a stay in a good hotel. Do you want more evidence? Let me give you a few, and these things are by no mean unique to my university.
Our systems are so glitchy that hundreds of students fail to register for the classes they need and want on time. Students experience massive anxieties and frustrations, and so do chairs, program coordinators, and staff members that have to manually register all of these desperate students. This happens every semester on every large campus, and somehow is never treated as an emergency, and it is by choice. We have other priorities. Not one university has put in their strategic plan something like fixing these small bugs.
Our rules are so complex, that the absolute majority of students do not understand them. I have written about problems with catalogs several times before and will not repeat the argument. Just tell me what kind of business creates such complex rules from their customers? What kind of business keeps their customers accountable to the rules that are beyond comprehension? Just imagine your local grocery store having a loyalty program explained on 30 pages of text.
We tolerate incompetent employees (both faculty and staff) who are rude, patronizing, or dismissive, skip or cancel classes, do not return graded work for months, do not respond to emails, bounce a concerned student around, refuse to help, do not bother to prepare for class or update syllabi. There are very few of those, about 1 %, but they cause sustained damage to many students. We tolerate them for years and decades. What kind of business can afford to do that?
We all have no refund policies, no matter how awful was student experience in a particular class or program. Yes, sometimes we relent, and offer tuition refund to make a legal threat go away. There is very limited practice, but no policy. We are definitely not Costco, and not willing to bet any money on student satisfaction with our services.
I know what you all are going to say – we are not a hotel, and education is not a service industry. We need to have authority over students, we maintain academic standards, and ours is a higher calling. I say: BS. There is no educational reason not to make student experience pleasant and anxiety-free. We just cannot muster the will to make a simple and strong commitment to customer service. We prefer build innovation hubs and art museums, instead of truly caring for the everyday experiences on our students. The first university who implements the kind of commitment Horst Schultze did will set the trend for the next generation of higher education.
Despite all the talk about student success, most universities are not committed to customer service. We say all the right things about student success, student engagement, and student experience, but we fail to address multiple bureaucratic micro-barriers to having a pleasant, friction-free experience on campus. We profess lofty ideas of challenging their minds, expanding their horizons, and training them for real life, but fail to make campus life as smooth as a stay in a good hotel. Do you want more evidence? Let me give you a few, and these things are by no mean unique to my university.
Our systems are so glitchy that hundreds of students fail to register for the classes they need and want on time. Students experience massive anxieties and frustrations, and so do chairs, program coordinators, and staff members that have to manually register all of these desperate students. This happens every semester on every large campus, and somehow is never treated as an emergency, and it is by choice. We have other priorities. Not one university has put in their strategic plan something like fixing these small bugs.
Our rules are so complex, that the absolute majority of students do not understand them. I have written about problems with catalogs several times before and will not repeat the argument. Just tell me what kind of business creates such complex rules from their customers? What kind of business keeps their customers accountable to the rules that are beyond comprehension? Just imagine your local grocery store having a loyalty program explained on 30 pages of text.
We tolerate incompetent employees (both faculty and staff) who are rude, patronizing, or dismissive, skip or cancel classes, do not return graded work for months, do not respond to emails, bounce a concerned student around, refuse to help, do not bother to prepare for class or update syllabi. There are very few of those, about 1 %, but they cause sustained damage to many students. We tolerate them for years and decades. What kind of business can afford to do that?
We all have no refund policies, no matter how awful was student experience in a particular class or program. Yes, sometimes we relent, and offer tuition refund to make a legal threat go away. There is very limited practice, but no policy. We are definitely not Costco, and not willing to bet any money on student satisfaction with our services.
I know what you all are going to say – we are not a hotel, and education is not a service industry. We need to have authority over students, we maintain academic standards, and ours is a higher calling. I say: BS. There is no educational reason not to make student experience pleasant and anxiety-free. We just cannot muster the will to make a simple and strong commitment to customer service. We prefer build innovation hubs and art museums, instead of truly caring for the everyday experiences on our students. The first university who implements the kind of commitment Horst Schultze did will set the trend for the next generation of higher education.
As usual, enjoyed your thought provoking blogs. Still trying to make sense of your Trumpet article. Your historical contextualizing of politics, morality, spirituality, etc. is testing my cognitive limits, although I know that I basically agree with you. Hope to comment later.
ReplyDeleteRe your article on Customer Service. I totally agree with you. What to do? One suggestion-- make it easier for students/customers and prospective students/customers to voice grievances/complaints/suggestions, informally/anonymously and formally during the semester and after grades have been submitted; perhaps appoint an ombud, one of your associate deans or better yet, an independent outsider, who cares about what we do, to be the recipient of the grievances, which should eventually appear on your desk. (I just detected a ringing in my ears, which I only have when I am extremely stressed....)