Trends for Your School
What customer service trends would you like to see incorporated at your school? How do you think this might help?
The trends mentioned in the module that best fit our newest customer service efforts are "Tell the World" and "The Brand's are Listening."
Whether we initiate it the process or not, students' are reviewing our school publicly on social media outlets. This is negative in the sense that disgruntled students that were negative to the point of termination are able to make comments and reviews that are untrue because of their anger. However, this is positive because we can make this outlet known to our students that have had such a positive experience, and they are able to publicly tell a multitude of individuals about that experience. This is free publicity for our school.
We have implemented the other trend by providing surveys and other methods for our students and graduates to provide feedback about our school. We go over each of these surveys and summarize the responses. We then implement an improvement plan based on that feedback.
We have made quite a few technological advances that have helped our customer service. Our website, contact via email and text, and social media expansions have greatly upped our customer service.
One customer service trend we have emphasized more lately and hope to continue to grow in is personalization of our programs/curriculum/schedule to best fit each student. We are a cosmetology/barber/nail technology/esthetics school, and we realize that every student has different needs. In particular, our regular full-time and part-time schedules simply are too difficult for some students to attend with their own personal life (jobs/children/family). Therefore, we allow schedules to become more custom and personalized for each student.
Implementing the use of technology has been key to the customer service we provide our students and prospective students. We are an older school, and technology updates were needed. We now utilize a website and social media. Students and prospects are able to connect with us via social media, our website, and email.
Using instant chat has also helped with our customer service to our current students. Students are provided the director's number so they are able to call or text the director with questions of concerns directly when needed.
Scott,
What a great idea! Allowing students to speak with instructors gives them a first-hand view of the classroom experience.
Dr. Jean Norris
Students should be visited at different stages of their school career and interviewed as to how things are going with their Concorde experience. This gives them a chance to voice opinions or concerns so that they may reach the right persons. Knowing that someone is available to listen will surely benefit the students' customer service experience.
Having an instructor available to answer questions from prospective students during one of their first couple visits to the campus is a trend I would like to see incorporated. I think this would allow prospective students to get an even better idea of what to expect once enrolled in a program and also give them a chance to get familiar with one of their instructors as well as letting the instructor become familiar with them.
Mayra,
Excellent point! Students want information in different ways, and at different times, and if your institution can provide that variety to them by using Blackboard you then can meet the needs of that type of student.
Elizabeth Wheeler
Having access to Blackboard for our students would be great. Giving students the opportunity to go home and be able to find their lectures from that day online would help. Especially if a student misses class they can access it at home and that way they don't feel like they are missing out. They can come back the next day and not have missed out on the lectures.
For some students YES. Other students (younger)just don't seem to care. These, unfortunately, are the ones that will not succeed.
Paula,
Thank you for your post. Bringing in speakers is a great idea! Have you found that managing student expectations has had a positive effect on the customer service level?
Dr. Jean Norris
We bring in speakers (past graduates, Advisory Committee Members, etc.) to speak to our students about customer service as this has been a problem with our students in the past. This helps them know what to expect.
Nicole, GREAT! Thank you for posting and keeping us updated!
Dr. Jean Norris
I'm happy to say that when I spoke with someone about live chat they said that they are currently working on it to add it to our school website!
Mary, Exactly! Very well said! Treating prospective students like a person and building rapport with them will set your school apart.
Dr. Jean Norris
I absolutely believe customer service will increase enrollment. I work for a career college and when you compare our programs with the competitors in town, the programs are similar. The only tangible factor that can increase enrollment is the customer experience. If we build rapport and trust with a prospective student, identify and understand his/her need , verify/validate the need of the individual and effectively communicate value based upon the verified needs and not "the sell" enrollment should increase.
Mary, Do you agree that customer service will help to increase enrollments?
Elizabeth Wheeler
I would like to see our campus take a more personalized approach to customer service. Specifically assessing if we have done everything within our power as administration, faculty and staff to provide our students with an exceptional educational experience from admissions to career service.
After going through the first module, it's very clear student focused customer service will increase enrollments.
Nicole, Great forward thinking! When considering the admissions world, it's always important to put yourself in the shoes of the student. Is live chat a possibility for your institution?
Elizabeth Wheeler
I think using more online services, like chat features would give our school the ability to provide better customer service. I know for some people it can be intimidating to pick up the phone and call a school that they are interested in attending. They might have had a bad experience with another school, they might be nervous and have a hard time getting their questions out, they might be in a location where they can't talk on a phone or they maybe they just don't like talking on the phone. So having a chat feature on our website would be another way to reach out to students so that they have the ability to actually speak with someone from the school and get all of their questions answered directly. Also, during registration time is when continuing students have a lot of questions about how to register online for their classes, if we had a chat feature a registrar or adviser would would able to walk students through this process online by sharing screen shots and other step by step information. As a school our focus should always be on the students. What is best for them? What is the best way to get them information quickly? Especially if they are "shopping" around at different school and trying to decide which one is best for them.
