Customer Service in Public and Private Schools
There’s a lot that goes into running a successful educational institution. From achieving and maintaining high enrollment numbers to delivering quality instruction to maintaining relationships with families and communities, there’s no shortage of work to be done.
And while these responsibilities typically span several departments, there’s one factor that can make or break all of their success — and that’s customer service.
Although not all schools offer customer service in the traditional sense, there are many scenarios in which various staff members assist students, their families, and the community. These can all be considered customer service interactions, and they play a significant role in the school’s ability to succeed.
So if your school doesn’t yet have a customer service strategy, keep reading. In this post, we’ll discuss why a service strategy matters, as well as six tips you can use to keep your “customers” happy.
Why Customer Service Matters for Schools
Most educational institutions, from high schools to private colleges, don’t consider themselves businesses. And when compared to the business model used by more traditional companies, there are certainly a few key differences.
But when it comes down to it, today’s students and families have more options than ever to choose from. Public schools need to compete with charter programs, public universities need to compete with private colleges, and traditional programs need to compete with alternative models like online schooling.
This means that you need to have a strong strategy for reaching new prospective students and showing them why your institution is the right choice. Then, you need to ensure that those students have a positive experience.
After all, each student at your institution could spend tens of thousands of dollars on tuition. So if they’re unhappy with the services you provide, there’s a strong chance they’ll transfer and take that tuition elsewhere.
This means that to maximize the long-term value (LTV) they bring to your institution, you have to make sure that students not only get the help they need in applying and enrolling but have access to assistance while they attend.
Customer service plays a vital role in both of these steps. To earn new students and maintain strong enrollment numbers, you need to have support staff equipped to answer questions, address concerns, and resolve issues.
And whether you choose to call the team that handles these tasks “customer service” or not is arbitrary — the important part is that you provide an excellent experience from application to graduation.
6 Ways Schools Can Provide Excellent Customer Service
If your school isn’t yet taking a customer service approach to providing assistance, here are six tips you can use to serve your students and their families better.
1. Adopt a Customer Service Mindset
Providing excellent service requires a company-wide focus on the customer. Today, many businesses have recognized this and have taken steps to highlight a customer-centric mindset.
One US credit card company, for example, developed a needs-based approach to customer care and trained 500 agents and 50 supervisors on this new approach. Over the next three months, their conversion rates rose to 25%.1
This shows that when teams are encouraged to put the customer first, they’re not only more effective in understanding those customers’ needs but can also improve revenue. And schools can benefit from a similar focus.
Everyone at your institution, from administrators to teachers, should be taught to view students and their families as valuable customers and to provide the best level of service possible at all times.
2. Get Familiar With All Segments of Your Audience
A recent study from Rice University found that when asked to rate their overall satisfaction with their children’s schools, only 43% of parents with children in public schools said they were “very satisfied.”2
This number jumped to 56% for those with children in charter schools, and 61% for those with children in private schools. And of all of the factors included in this study, family and communication had the largest correlation with these results.
As study leader Vikas Mittal explains, this indicates that improving satisfaction requires “involving parents in school activities, developing avenues for parents to give input in school policies, improved communication and clearly explaining to parents how their child is graded and assessed.”
So as you build your customer service strategy, it’s essential to include audiences beyond your students — with a particular focus on their families. Parents play a major role in determining the schools their child attends and making sure that it’s yours requires identifying and meeting their needs, too.
3. Be Available and Responsive
Of all of the factors involved in customer service, speed is the highest priority for consumers. This means that in order to achieve high satisfaction levels, you need to have staff available to assist students and their families quickly and efficiently.
And that doesn’t just mean during enrollment periods, either. Customer service is a year-round requirement and should be a core part of your approach to earning and keeping students at all points in the school year.
So if you don’t yet have a dedicated support team, it’s time to consider hiring one. Even if you start small, with one or two agents, having people available to assist your students and their families can go a long way in boosting the level of customer service you provide.
4. Establish Strong Internal Communication
Your support team probably doesn’t have all of the answers a student or parent might need. But they should know where to find them and have efficient channels on which to do so.
This requires establishing open lines of communication between your support staff and any departments that they contact to answer questions, like your financial aid department, housing office, or athletics department.
This way, if a student or parent contacts your school in search of a specific piece of information, they won’t have to waste time while you redirect them to multiple people.
Instead, the support agent they speak with can serve as their point of contact with the relevant department, and provide an answer much faster — and with much less frustration.
5. Make Information Easily Accessible Online
Many people now turn to the internet for all of the information they need, and that’s certainly true of those researching schools and programs for themselves or their children. But finding that information isn’t always easy. And unfortunately, many businesses aren’t even aware of this problem. In fact, 81% of businesses believe that they provide complete information online. Compare that with 56% of consumers, and there’s a clear disparity in expectations.
This means that even if you think your site provides all of the information prospective students and their families might need, it’s worth taking an in-depth look. Then, consider how you might make the browsing experience better.
Are your navigation menus straightforward? Is it easy to find relevant information and forms? Does your copy provide comprehensive answers and details?
If your answer to any of these questions is “no,” it’s time to make some changes. Making information easily accessible online is essential for providing a great customer experience, and will often be what makes or breaks their first impression of your institution.
6. Ask for Feedback
One of the most critical components of any customer service strategy is collecting feedback. It’s the only way to get an accurate picture of how satisfied your audience is with your brand and the service you provide and can lead to valuable insight.
And this is a tactic that every school can benefit from. So if you’re not yet doing so, create a strategy for sending surveys to your students and other segments of your “customer base” on a regular basis.
Ask them to rate their satisfaction with your school, and welcome any feedback they have. Then, use that feedback to improve your institution as a whole. Look for any common themes in the responses, identify the areas that have the most room for improvement, and make concrete changes.
This way, you not only show your students and their families that you’re listening to their feedback but can also make the kinds of changes that help all of your “customers” become more satisfied with the value they’re getting from your school.
Conclusion
Customer service has a place in every organization, whether it follows a traditional model or not. And within the context of a school, its role is especially important.
Running a successful institution requires providing students with ongoing support, as well as making sure that their families and the surrounding community have access to information and assistance when they need it.
So as you look for ways to improve the level of service you provide, it’s important to keep all segments of your “customer base” in mind. Then, make it a priority to be available and responsive, and establish strong internal communication to simplify the process of finding information.
And throughout this process, it’s important to take an active approach in collecting feedback. The more you listen, the better you can serve students, their families, and your community — and the better you’ll become at providing the level of service they deserve.
Sources
1 — https://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/operations/our-insights/elevating-customer-satisfaction-and-growth-through-service-to-solutions
2 — http://news.rice.edu/2017/11/29/105830/
