Elevating Customer Service in Higher Education: A Practical Guide

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By Heath Boice-Pardee, Emily Richardson, Eileen Soisson
198 pages
ISBN: 9781948658034
Boost your department’s standard of customer service.

Elevating Customer Service in Higher Education provides an in-depth guide by three practitioners with decades of combined experience in the higher education and hospitality sectors. Our authors are deeply embedded in customer service initiatives and have certified hundreds of higher-ed professionals at Academic Impressions’ customer service trainings and on-campus workshops.

What’s Included

In this guide, our authors will walk you through:

• Core service competencies
• Strategies for supporting frontline staff in enhancing customer service
• Examples of customer service scripts for dialogue, phone, voicemail, and email
• Detailed guidelines for creating physical environments on campus that facilitate better service
• Worksheets and tools for auditing policies and practices that impact customer service
• Tips for cultivating faculty and staff buy-in
• Examples of exemplary customer service initiatives at other colleges and universities

Reviews from the field

“Elevating Customer Service is an excellent addition to the literature on service excellence and academic customer service. It is clear, practical, well written and covers a great many ways a school can upgrade its service to students so they will engage more fully and stay.

The book provides the basics of academic customer service in a very considered and practical guide by pulling on some of the best work in service excellence, academic customer service, and business practices. It provides the background needed to engage in customer service on campus and initiate the thinking necessary to begin setting up a service excellence program. It should be read by every administrator who cares about retention and service excellence.”
Neal Raisman, N. Raisman & Associates “How refreshing and encouraging it is to read a book about customer service on today’s college campuses. The reality is higher education today is rapidly changing and models of leading a university are significantly altered in today’s environment. Customer service can no longer be viewed as a negative concept on our campuses. Rather, such service is mandated today in whatever form one wishes to call it. Students, parents, employers, and college employees are demanding it. Implementing such measures that change a campus’s culture may mean the difference between those colleges that survive and those that do not. The foundations of quality service discussed in this book should be mandatory reading for all college administrators.”
David DeCenzo, President, Coastal Carolina University “This insightful book provides a step-by-step guide to assess, evaluate, and implement strategies to improve the effectiveness of any department or division within the academy. The authors provide valuable information and a workable template to enhance the student experience on campus and ultimately improve retention, and recruitment efforts in an era in which colleges and universities are fiercely competing to attract and retain students.”
Jim Pillar, Associate Vice President of Housing, Monmouth University “In today’s competitive market in higher education, a partnership between academics and customer service is key to attracting and retaining students. This handbook shows practitioners how to enhance service excellence while maintaining academic integrity.”
Bill Destler, President Emeritus, Rochester Institute of Technology “This really made me think about our office environment and how we can work toward improving not only the student experience but the front-line staff experience as well. It truly is a practical guide with relevant activities and things to consider.”
Kerri Wilson, Director of Off-Campus Living and Community Partnerships, Rutgers University-New Brunswick

The book is available in print and digital editions. The digital version is a downloadable PDF. Upon payment, you will find your book available to download in the Downloads section of My Account.