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TERTIARY SECTOR GETS SET TO BENCHMARK CUSTOMER SERVICE
TERTIARY SECTOR GETS SET TO BENCHMARK CUSTOMER SERVICE
CSBA is gearing up to help tertiary institutions from across the country to understand, measure and improve their customer service skills and benchmark their performance against their peers. CSBA will be presenting a program it has created, specifically tailored to meet the needs of the tertiary sector at the upcoming ATEM Student Service Centre Conference, “Changing Expectations”, to be held in Perth in April 2009.
A major issue for many tertiary institutions is the ability to develop and implement a program on customer service improvement. Typically the administration part of the university gets told to ‘fix the customer service’ but really they do not have a guiding framework.
At the conference Robyn Reilly will present a program that has been used as a guiding framework to get a consistent customer service across the many touchpoints of a tertiary institution.
The three key steps in the program involve:
· Establishing a clear picture of the institutions’ customer service objectives;
· Engaging their key stakeholders and decision makers; and
· Setting appropriate cultures and measures to ensure success.
According to CSBA Managing Director, Mr Paul van Veenendaal, the tertiary sector is struggling with achieving a good customer service culture across their organisations.
“One of the major challenges is that students are now making contact through a huge range of physical and virtual touch points and it is up to the institutions to ensure consistent customer service,” Mr van Veenendaal said.
“This starts with setting standards and understanding what you are trying to achieve with your customer service in relation to the overall corporate objectives.
“Once you know what you want to achieve, then you know what to measure.
“Our experience working with tertiary institutions means we can help them work out what they need to measure for service improvement.”
“The process will involve the development of a plan to engage and promote attitudinal and behavioural change among front line customer service staff and then continually monitor for success,” Mr van Veenendaal said.
“What I like about the program from Robyn Reilly is that it really is clear and practical. When Clients put the program into place it is amazing how quickly they get focussed on what is required to happen,” Mr van Veenendaal said.
In addition to providing an outline of the steps to an effective program CSBA will be assessing the telephone and email customer service experience of more than 30 institutions.
“We will benchmark the institution’s customer service performance against 30 of Australia’s top tertiary institutions enabling it to keep pace with its competitors. CSBA conducted the program last year and it was a great success with ACU being nominated as the best Tertiary institution,” Mr van Veenendaal said.
“This year we are going to take it one step further and benchmark the performance of the email touchpoint.”
As more tertiary institutions compete for the increasingly discerning student, consistency across the many and varied touchpoints is becoming a critical success factor. Hence, the email is another important touchpoint of the tertiary institution and the quality of the contact really helps the student to determine what they think of the institution.
For any organisation, there’s always room for improvement in customer service. Today’s savvy customer contact managers know that monitoring call quality and coaching call centre agents are two of the best ways to improve a call centre, but sometimes old habits and entrenched systems may get in the way of developing a robust monitoring and evaluation system.
With the right partner, an organisation’s customer service is a powerful way to differentiate between its services and those of its competitors. As the primary touch-point between an organisation and its customers, improving the quality of the contact centre’s telephone and email service will improve an organisations relationship with its customers.
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