Organizational Transformation to Meet and Exceed Service Expectations: The Role of One-Stop Centers in Higher Education

Strategic Enrollment Management Brief - AACRAO Consulting - SEM BRIEF

One of the greatest challenges for today’s enrollment manager is meeting and exceeding the expectations of students, parents, faculty and administrative units in the modern college and university environment. The utilization of new technologies to provide service to customers in retail and service segments of our economy has driven the expectations of students and other key constituencies to new levels and uncharted waters.

While many of us can find examples of outdated processes or policies on our campuses, the thought of transforming the way we serve students can be daunting. Where do we begin and how can we address the issues of personnel, technology and information? Adding a framework and approaching the process in step-wise fashion can provide a roadmap for enrollment managers who seek to reshape the way their institutions do business.*

A growing body of research on the relationships between service, marketing and customer retention in the business community can illuminate our view of service in the college or university environment (Boulding, Stein, Ehret and Johnston, 2005). In translating these into higher education and specifically enrollment management, we can view these as the relationships between recruitment, retention and student satisfaction with enrollment services. We must start by examining the changing landscape of service through the eyes of those we seek to serve.

A Framework for Examining Enrollment Services

One of the more recent terms heard in higher education when referring to enrollment management is Customer Relationship Management (CRM), especially in reference to our computer systems and communications. Bringing together technology, data, and organization forms, CRM seeks to leverage the knowledge we have of our students, parents, guidance personnel and others to create a more personal and efficient experience for them when interacting with the institution. It seeks to create greater value for both the consumer/student and the company/institution. When we successfully implement CRM as a tool for enrollment management, students are more pleased with their enrollment service experience; meanwhile, we gain in student numbers, qualities of entering students, and student persistence in meeting their educational goals at our institutions.

A Step-Wise Approach to Organizational Transformation

When we change internal processes and organizational form to respond to the changes in the external environment, we must do so carefully and deliberately. Using a process developed for organizational transformation as it applies to a service organization (Christopher, Payne and Ballantyne, 1991), an intentional process can be organized that will lead the institution in examining and redefining its service paradigm. The steps below have been translated here to apply specifically to higher education and the transformation of enrollment services.

Step One: Understand the Expectations and Needs of Your Key Constituencies

Organizations must seek to understand the expectations of the constituencies as a whole and among the various segments they serve. For higher education, these could be traditional freshmen coming directly from secondary education, their parents, guidance he Role of One-Stop Centers in Higher Education
counselors, transfer students, returning adults, transfer counselors at community colleges, international students and graduate students, to name a few. Equally important is the understanding of how each segment routinely accesses or receives information in their lives through other sources (banking, music, hotel, airline or other services).

Step Two: Assess and Redesign Processes

From the perspective of the needs and expectations of the institution’s clientèle flow the processes and organizational structures that leverage technology and deploy personnel into more effective roles in the organization. In the community college setting, for example, the broad range of traditional and working adult populations, mostly geographically proximate to the institution, may demand that the service model provide students the choice of interaction formats (on-line, in person or over the phone) and convenient locations and times. Other institutions that serve a narrower, more traditional student market that spans a broader geographic range may focus on on-line services and extended service hours to accommodate multiple time zones.

Step Three: Develop an Infrastructure Aligned with Modern Practices and Technologies

As our routine transactions become automated and process redesign streamlines the processing of information within our institutions, the role of service providers also must be redesigned. Interactions between service providers and students will come to focus on the unusual or problematic situations in enrollment. Often, these situations span more than one office of the institution and are intertwined with admission, registration, financial aid and payment issues.

To solve problems more holistically and across office boundaries, a growing number of institutions are turning to a one-stop shop in enrollment services, where generalists with broad unit knowledge interact with students and other constituencies and specialists focus on the systems and information processing
that support student enrollment. Specialists and their deep subject knowledge also assist in service by handling the complexities of student requests and problems that go beyond the broad knowledge of the generalists.

Step Four: Develop a Personnel Plan

Job descriptions, training and change management are all part of the personnel plan. New skill sets are required, especially in creating a generalist-specialist personnel plan that utilizes a one-stop shop, surrounded and supported by specialist teams, to deliver services. Transitioning existing staff to these new jobs and hiring new staff to fill vacancies will require focus on a number of customer service and technology skills that differ from those used previously. Initial and ongoing training programs must be developed to impart new and constantly updated information, processes, policies and systems.

This organizational structure makes new demands of staff and managers alike. The anxieties associated with massive organizational change must be considered and planned for when undertaking such a project. While the one-stop shop concept is attractive in its promise to improve service, it is far less comfortable for those faced with changes to the roles to which they have become accustomed and trained over the years. The enrollment manager is required to exhibit exceptional leadership in providing the unit and university a clear and consistent vision of the outcomes of this transformation. Providing communication vehicles that are both written (e-mail, web) and oral (unit-wide and small group staff meetings) can accelerate the adoption of the new service paradigm by those who must deliver it.

Step Five: Develop Monitoring and Reporting Mechanisms that Measure Effectiveness and Seek Ongoing Improvements

Data on customer service measures both the efficiency of the processes of the enrollment services unit and customers’ satisfaction with them. Call center software can display the number of calls in queue, the number of agents available to answer calls and the average wait time for callers. Customer
comment vehicles, such as short, automated phone surveys at the end of phone transactions or comment cards with convenient drop-off boxes allow customers to provide quick feedback. Satisfaction surveys should start with baseline measurements and be repeated at regular intervals to measure changes; these can be part of large regular surveys, such as NSSE and CIRP, which accommodate local survey questions that can be developed for your institution.

Sharing these measurements of efficiency and of customer satisfaction within and outside the unit is essential to build an understanding among academic leadership of service levels and milestones. By demonstrating the increased levels of service available to students, you will make allies of faculty, who will refer students to the one-stop shop for assistance.

Conclusion

Behind each of these steps are specific areas to be addressed within the enrollment management organization. The alignment of institutional information
available to prospective students and parents with their preferred methods of receiving information and tolerance for marketing, for example, is but one of many steps that will appear daunting to most institutions undertaking such a large-scale operational review. For this reason, it is important to seek peers who have successfully implemented institutional transformations or the counsel of a consultant with expertise in this area.

As the pace of technological change and innovation races around us, we struggle to choose the paths that can bring the greatest results without chasing fads or gimmicks that may be replaced by next year’s model. As Boulding and other researchers noted, the institutional transformations of CRM that link marketing, service and quality are not passing fads but “the outcome of the continuing evolution and integration of marketing ideas and newly available data, technologies, and organizational forms” (Boulding, p. 156).

While the initial transformation of a college or university’s enrollment services will be revolutionary on your campus, the future of its success will be predicated on its ability to be evolutionary. The ability of enrollment managers to connect with and respond to the needs of their customers, then adapt services to meet their emerging needs, will dictate the success of enrollment services, whether they exist in the one-stop shop or the yet-to-be-invented format of the future.

References

Boulding, W., Stelin, R., Ehret, M., & Johnston,W. A customer relationship management roadmap: What is known, potential pitfalls, and where to go.
Journal of Marketing, Volume 69, Issue 4,
October 2005, pages 155-166.

Christopher, M., Payne, A., & Ballantyne, D. Relationship Marketing. Oxford: Butterworth-Heinemann, 1991.

*It is important as we begin this examination, however, to clearly distinguish differences between business and education. In drawing parallels between the experiences of customers and students, these are limited to those interactions and transactions that occur when a student or parent (acting within appropriate FERPA laws) attempts to transact enrollment services (admission, registration, financial aid, payment, etc.) with the institution. It does not include student learning activities, inside or outside the classroom, where the “product” is student learning that leads to personal growth and development. In those cases, the use of “customer” confuses the issue, given that customers usually drive the delivery and content of a product or service. Student learning is an activity directed by faculty or some administrative areas of student life that impart knowledge or values deemed important for development.

Written by Tom Green, Ph.D., Senior Consultant for AACRAO Consulting

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Posted on June 29, 2007