What do you think of when someone says “customer service”? Terrible wait times and unresolved problems at mammoth corporations spring to mind, but these impressions are the opposite of what customer service should be. Every organization—including private schools—should strive for excellent relations with its clients. Your school must actively foster relationships with families, faculty, and students. Careless interaction can sometimes lead to big publicity problems.
Take Comcast’s recent customer service faux pas. A long-standing customer of the cable giant decided to cancel his service when moving to a new area. Instead of complying with the client’s request, the customer service representative tried to convince the client to stay, almost to the point of harassment. After interminable minutes on the phone getting nowhere, the client recorded the session to post on the Internet.
So why are we talking about this? Well, we think there are a couple of important lessons your school can take from this episode when considering future client-school relations.
“The balance between selling and listening”
During the conversation, the Comcast representative repeatedly asked his client why he wanted to cancel service with the company. When the client finally responded—bad customer service—the representative refused to acknowledge the negative response and kept asking the same question. Comcast's CEO Dave Watson responded to this aspect of the conversation in a memo, writing that Comcast must “reexamine how we do some things to make sure that each and every one of us—from leadership to the front line—understands the balance between selling and listening.”
Private School Takeaway:
Think back over the past year of interactions with parents, teachers, and staff. Does your school's research, exit surveys, or general parent feedback produce information you look for and need to improve? Is there a chance that the answers are there, but they aren't the easy or guiltless solutions you sought?
In other words, are you justifying your current program? Or are you truly listening to someone else’s concerns?
It’s these hard answers—the answers we don’t particularly want to hear or know—that help schools the most in the long run. Be careful of assumptions, and don't let your school's arrogance be your downfall. Listen to what your parents, students, and teachers are saying about your school and try not to justify why things are fine they way they are.
Biggest game in town?
Some believe that Comcast uses sales-heavy tactics because they’re often in markets with no direct competition. In fact, 66% of respondents to a recent Consumer Report survey believe that little or no incentive exists to improve their customer service if Comcast’s bid to merge with Time Warner Cable is approved by Congress due to the resultant lack of competition. Comcast, then, believes that people will continue purchasing cable services from the company because they have no alternative.
Private School Takeaway:
But is that really true? Let's look at this from a private education perspective. While your school's enrollment may be at an all time high this year with a healthy wait pool, there will always be other schools—private, public, or charter—waiting to pop up and steal your students with seductive programming or spiffy new facilities. When that competition comes looking to enroll your families, those families will remember how your school treated them during difficulties or other tense situations—and will act accordingly.
Ultimately, parents and faculty want your school to keep its mission promise to the school’s community. Furthermore, they want their suggestions and critiques to be heard. Staying faithful to your mission’s philosophy inside and outside the classroom will accomplish the first, but the second goal can prove more elusive.
Speaking to parents and faculty proactively about potential issues while truly considering their points of view will go a long way to establishing trust and a listening-first attitude that will mitigate problems before they become poisonous. High retention rates and the (current) absence of competition is no excuse for your parent-school relations to be tinged with arrogance.
Work now to establish positive parent-school (and faculty-administrator!) relationships, and you can trust your community to ignore others' shiny marketing gimmicks in favor of your school’s good culture and attitude.
Additional ISM resources:
ISM Monthly Update for Admission Officers Vol. 12 No. 10 Emotional "Banking": Evaluating Unfit Applicants
ISM Monthly Update for Human Resources Vol. 11 No. 6 Rebuilding Working Relationships
Private School News Vol. 12 No. 9 Forget Diamonds--Social Media Mistakes are Forever
Additional ISM resources for Gold Consortium members:
I&P Vol. 33 No. 11 Target Your True Recruitment/Retention Issues
I&P Vol. No. 36 No. 5 Conducting a Communications Audit
