Creating a Service Culture in Higher Education Administration

Mario C. Martinez, Brandy Smith, Katie Humphreys

• Publisher: Stylus Publishing
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781620360071
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Higher Education

Service delivery is part and parcel of every higher education professional's job, both to improve service to students and to each other as "internal customers". Until now higher education professionals have had to rely, for their professional development, on books and training designed for the business sector. This book is the first to specifically address the needs of higher education professionals across a wide range of administrative functions within college and university environments. It is designed for administrative staff and management, ranging from professionals working in centralized functions such as student affairs and enrollment management to those working as advisors or in career centers, whether in community colleges, four-year institutions, or for-profit institutions.Each chapter applies customer service principles to scenarios that are relevant to higher education. The book begins by engaging the reader to define service and identify the external and internal customers who are recipients of that service. It then maps customer interactions into a series of steps and offers departments and individuals a tool to maximize the customer experience. Additional chapters address customer expectations, creating a service culture on your campus, and managerial influences on staff service delivery. Creating a Service Culture in Higher Education Administration is a complementary book to the online customer service and management training resources at softskillspros.com.

1
DEFINING SERVICE EXCELLENCE

The steady flow of customer service books and webinars that offer advice on improving customer service is geared primarily toward private business, yet excellent service delivery is critical to the success of any organization—including colleges and universities. For-profit businesses invest millions of dollars in service initiatives to differentiate themselves from the competition and create what is now commonly referred to as a “customer experience.” In higher education institutions, training and staff development budgets devoted to service training are difficult to justify in an environment of scarce resources or shrinking state dollars. Training investments for employees across campuses are focused disproportionately on technical training. Directors and managers can easily justify training for a newly installed software system or perhaps a half-day informational course on new federal regulations pertaining to student aid, but initiatives to improve service delivery or other soft skills–type training usually elicit administrative requests for clarification if not outright denial.

Do Customer Service Concepts Apply to Higher Education?

Part of the challenge of making service training and thus service competency an integral part of higher education institutions is the language that accompanies the topic. Institutions, public and private, two- and four-year, still struggle with terms such as customer and service, which creates a stumbling block to initiatives that can truly improve teamwork and interaction with anyone a particular office on campus happens to serve. It is understandable that many colleges and universities are hesitant to automatically adopt language they associate with for-profit businesses. Are students, parents, and faculty really customers of the registrar or financial aid office? Some campus offices prefer to call them clients, while others avoid either customer or client. For many higher education professionals, it is somewhat akin to the dilemma a department of corrections agency might have calling a prisoner a customer, or perhaps a health and human services department referring to a recipient of government assistance as a client.

Disputes aside, the foundational principles and ideas that underlie excellent service delivery are as applicable to those working in higher education as they are to someone working at a grocery store or a five-star hotel. The implementation of these foundational principles accomplishes two important goals: to improve internal teamwork and to more effectively fulfill the needs of those who come to us for service.

Private business has not cornered the market on effective service delivery. Excellent examples exist in all types of institutions and campuses, where different offices and entire divisions are fulfilling the dual goals of strengthening teamwork and service delivery to end customers. In a College of Health Sciences’ (CHS) advising office with which we are familiar, advisors believe in and demonstrate the principles of good service delivery daily, with students and each other. This particular office has a baseline philosophy of no “runaround.” If an advisor does not have an answer for a student or the student has a need outside of the advising office, it is not uncommon to find a CHS advisor and student walking across campus to enlist the help of another office. The advisors in this office have also been trained to follow good communication protocol with each other. While written electronic communication can be efficient, advisors thoughtfully determine when face-to-face interaction between and among team members may be preferable to an instant message or e–mail. In this office, critical issues are not discussed via e–mail. When disagreements occur, staff automatically invoke the conflict resolutions skills that are a mandatory part of training for everyone in the office. There is a premium placed on soft skills.

The example this particular advising office brings out is this: implementation of good service principles is based on awareness, philosophy (values), and application. It is often the application that we struggle with. Part of the challenge of implementing effective service principles in higher education is that many of the experts who try to build awareness of good service values do not work within higher education. They are not from higher education and do not know the context of postsecondary education or the culture of the many different offices across a campus. Existing resources, in the form of books and training curriculum on service delivery, are virtually all from people who have never worked on a college campus. Their advice remains very general and difficult to apply. Even though many of the principles of effective service are applicable across industries, implementation in different settings requires an understanding and appreciation of a particular field. Someone may offer general advice on what we should be doing, but without an understanding of the industry, they do not have a good sense of how we might do it. To maximize the what and the how, the examples and tools in this chapter—and in all of the book’s chapters—draw on our own work in higher education and the experiences of higher education professionals across scores of campuses. Still, we can learn much from famous hotel chains and amusement park companies that have achieved notable service levels as they explain their processes, practices, and philosophies. It is beneficial, therefore, for us to draw on our own experiences with different types of organizations and capture effective examples of service. An essential ingredient to defining service excellence for your institution, then, is to figure out which service practices from a broad range of industries you believe might apply to higher education. After you do this, it becomes easier to customize effective service delivery practices that make sense for your office environment, wherever it resides within the higher education world.

Starting the Service Excellence Journey

The question now becomes: Where to begin? Knowing where to begin is always the difficult part, whether you’re writing a memo, training for a marathon, or facing the daunting task of cleaning your house. The good news: once we get started, it is easy to get into the “flow” of things and make steady progress. We will start the process of strengthening service delivery on your campus with a couple of key points:

• We won’t get caught up in the language of “customer,” “client,” “customer service,” or any other such words. What is important are the concepts. We will tend to stay with the language of customers and service since those words still, for the most part, denote an emphasis on effective interaction with colleagues and those outside your immediate office environment who come to you for help (e.g., students, parents, and faculty).

• We will draw on your experiences, from both inside and outside of higher education, so you can create a customized view of effective service delivery that applies to and works for you.

• Building a service culture in your office and on your campus is a journey, not a destination. We will start by taking you through the steps in this process: defining effective service delivery in general.

Step 1: Identify Excellent Service Experiences

Though many of us know it when we receive it, good service is difficult to define. This is largely because good service cannot be boiled down to one word or sentence. Think about your own experiences for a moment. You may have had the pleasant and perhaps unexpected experience of receiving the VIP treatment from a clerk at the convenience store near your home as you picked up a morning treat on your way to work. Of course, all of us have had those great, memorable service experiences while on vacation, but excellent service is all around us (so is poor service, but more on that later) as we go about our daily business. As you think about the good service experiences you have had, you quickly realize that different organizations deliver different things, and the quality of service you receive may be a function of the person delivering that service and even your enthusiasm for the product or service you receive. Yet, some common characteristics define good service, no matter where you may have received that service. That is because these characteristics align with some basic laws of human interaction that create favorable impressions of service delivery in virtually all situations.

The best way to begin identifying these common characteristics is to cast a wide net. Good explanations, definitions, and actions are best achieved by going from the general to the specific, all based on your experiences. This eventually gets you to application. Thus, a good first step is to think of some organizations that you generally associate with excellent customer service. You are starting out “in general” because you are to think about good service that you, personally, have received from any type of organization other than a higher education–related institution. Higher education examples or those instances related to your particular office are more specific, and we will work toward those descriptions after we build a general description of excellent service delivery.

What are two organizations that you equate with excellent service? When asked to list excellent service organizations, people automatically list companies like Disney, the Ritz-Carlton, or Southwest Airlines. Certainly, Disney offers a magical experience that is known across the globe, and Southwest Airlines has low prices, crew members who have a great sense of humor, and point-to-point service to numerous destinations. While these are examples of excellent companies, they are not organizations from which most of us receive service on a daily, weekly, or even monthly basis. For purposes of Exercise 1, try to think of local organizations with which you have regular contact. The goal is to identify two local organizations that consistently deliver excellent service to you. You may receive regular service from an organization over the phone or via the Internet, and such organizations also qualify for purposes of the exercise. The main point is that these two organizations, whether for-profit or nonprofit, have consistently and regularly met your standard for delivering excellent service. Write the names of the two organizations that come to mind in the spaces numbered 1 and 2, in Exercise 1.

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EXERCISE 1
Two Organizations That Deliver Excellent Service to You

1. ________________________________________________

2. ________________________________________________

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You may have listed a restaurant, bank branch, retail store, library, or automotive repair shop in your town. Now that you have identified these organizations, ask yourself: What is it that makes them so good at delivering excellent service? Most people, when asked to make a list like you just completed in Exercise 1, think not of some impersonal organization but of the experience of receiving the service, in concrete terms. If their interaction with the company or organization requires their physical presence to receive the service, they think about the location and the people who served them. It is also common to recall the sequence of events that defined the service they received: the conversation that took place, whether other customers were present and how that influenced your wait time, or even the look and feel of the location or office. For the organizations you listed, you may be so familiar with the company that you automatically think about a specific department or person that provides the service you seek.

Maybe the service you received was over the phone rather than in person. In this case, we generally recall specifics about the conversation that made us feel like this was a good customer experience. We may even remember some steps we had followed to get what we needed, or that we were pleasantly surprised not to have gotten confused by complex instructions because everything was so simple.

Step 2: Define Excellent Service Delivery

Whatever organizations you listed, the question now becomes: What specifically did this organization and its employees do to make you feel you received excellent service? How would you describe the service delivery you received? To truly define good service, you must think about what you personally associate with it. Relive those pleasant service experiences you received from the organizations you listed in Exercise 1. Now, in Exercise 2, list words, phrases, or adjectives that you associate with a good service experience.

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EXERCISE 2
Good Customer Service (list descriptors in the space provided)

____________________________________________________

____________________________________________________

____________________________________________________

____________________________________________________

____________________________________________________

___________________________________________________

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How does your list look? We have conducted this exercise over the last ten years with higher education professionals, pilots, human resources teams, and dozens of other organizations and associations—including a team of physicists working at a university! There is certainly some degree of variability in the lists people make, but there is also a striking degree of similarity in the attributes people associate with good service delivery. Here is a top ten list of attributes we have gathered over the years from different audiences and groups:

1. Positive attitude

2. Attentive, friendly, and sincere

3. Provides answers or finds the answers, but doesn’t make excuses

4. Consistent

5. Listens

6. Flexibility

7. Knowledgeable

8. Keeps the customer informed

9. Honest

10. Quick response to questions or requests

How does your list compare with ours? There is probably overlap between the two. You may have used some different wording, but many of the general ideas of excellent service delivery seem to apply to any organization—including institutions of higher education. Let’s take the first attribute from our list as an example. In 90% of the workshops we have conducted, the idea of “positive attitude” emerges almost immediately. There are very few instances when we would rather deal with someone who has a negative attitude than someone with a positive attitude. Of course, there are exceptions. If you need your appendix removed, and you have the choice between a positive doctor who doesn’t know what he is doing and a negative doctor who has done this a hundred times before, you are probably going to choose the negative doctor with the experience. In general, though, most of us prefer to receive service from someone who has a positive attitude. As you make your way down your own list, you will likely find that these items are assets in almost any service setting.

Assuming that your list was similar to ours, take a look at our top ten list one more time. A final question usually surfaces whenever teams develop a list to describe good customer service: How many of the ten items on the list describe technical skills versus what we might call people skills (or soft skills)? The only item that really sticks out as strictly a technical skill is Item 7, knowledgeable. This is not to underplay the importance of knowledge or any other technical skills that are involved in delivering superior service, but a quick examination of the list does make it clear that people skills are a huge part of the service equation. Many of us have even received good service from employees who didn’t have a lot of background or knowledge, but these people were honest with us (Item 9) and assured us that they were going to find the answer (Item 3) and follow up. We still ended ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• CONTENTS
• PREFACE
• 1 DEFINING SERVICE EXCELLENCE
• 2 EXTERNAL CUSTOMER SERVICE
• 3 INTERNAL CUSTOMER SERVICE
• 4 CYCLE OF SERVICE THINKING
• 5 CUSTOMER EXPECTATIONS
• 6 CREATING A CULTURE OF SERVICE
• 7 MANAGERIAL INFLUENCE ON SERVICE DELIVERY
• 8 ACHIEVING SERVICE EXCELLENCE
• INDEX
• Back Cover