Change your service – Match your brand!
As your partner, we’ll develop a campus-wide plan for service excellence that matches your brand and meets your institutional goals. Using realistic service standards for things like turn-around times for email or voice mail, your staff team will become trainers and service champions!
Does this sound familiar…
Bad service reviews on social media? Have your Yelp reviews made you gasp? Back in the day, a student who waited in long lines in our student service office told others in line, their friends in the cafeteria and their family at the dinner table how awful it was. Now, as they wait in your line, they are telling thousands of folks on social media before they even get to you at the front desk. In the current climate of soft enrollment numbers, that can’t be good!
Worried about your brand? You may have spent lots of money and many years to establish the brand that leaps off the page of your view book or website. But if your brand promise cannot be delivered in every daily interaction with students, it won’t have the shelf life that you bargained for! Strategic Enrollment Management may help you get the right students, but poor service, showing lack of respect for students as customers, can quickly sour that relationship.
It’s easy to blame the student but that won’t solve it. Yes, student expectations are high but so are their personal costs and sacrifices to attend our institutions. But when we get frustrated, curt and cranky with students in response to their demands, we lose the battle and perhaps even lose the war as the student can easily walk away! Students will always ask for a lot, but we can certainly always afford to give them respect!
Need campus wide service standards? We can help by analyzing your current services, making recommendations, and even leading the negotiating and brokering conversations across key offices to help ensure buy-in and collaboration. New service level agreements mean that all offices are getting behind the new service standards for responding to email or voice mail, for instance. And realistic staff collaboration, not just consensus, will get the your service reviews to improve.
No staff buy-in? We have a plan. We train staff in proven techniques that really help staff manage daily frustrations while teaching them to partner with students on solutions in teachable moments. If students miss the deadline, they may well have to pay the price, but trained staff can help them understand how not to miss the deadline again … yes, staff really can be part of the strategic service solution, not the problem.
We can help! The SLC Team has all worked or are still working in colleges and universities in student service. We have all been there, struggling with growing student demands in the face of shrinking resources, but we were able to creatively and successfully partner with students to build short-term wins and long-term loyalties!
We’ve got Partner Models. From a 12 to 18 month long engagement that can include core team development, campus presentations, town halls, project plans and certification training to a short one-time consultation session and advice, we have experiences with different levels of engagement that we can offer. Once we know what you want to accomplish, and what resources you can dedicate, we can make a proposal of how we might help.
Let’s talk. Call us or complete the request info form. We’ll get back to you right away.