TSPRA VOICE Schools and customer service: Why you should treat your stakeholders like your customers By Melissa Martinez
Oftentimes what keeps parents coming back year after year is the customer service they receive.
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hink back to when you were in school. Can you remember why you attended the school you did? Did your parents look at scores, programs and extracurricular activities and choose a school based on the best fit for your interests? If you attended public school, you likely attended the school that was assigned to you. Plain and simple, no questions asked. Unfortunately, those plain and simple days are long gone. Parents now have choice: charters, private, parochial, online and homeschooling, among others. Add in open enrollment and even public schools are competing with each other. School administrators can no longer take for granted that students will just show up on the first day of school. Just like businesses, schools now must earn and keep students within their walls. Just as they shop for a car or appliance, parents now go shopping for schools. What will set you apart? We all have great teachers, programs and achievements. Oftentimes what keeps parents coming back year after year is the customer service they receive. The schools that are doing this the best excel because they understand that stakeholders are customers and should be treated as such. However, when the topic of students and/or parents as customers comes up, many in the traditional school setting find this difficult to reconcile. “Students aren’t customers.” “Schools aren’t businesses.” We have to look beyond the confines of customer service in the business world and understand how it applies to school systems. Customer service for schools is 1) understanding that your students/parents/taxpayer/staff have choice and they can take their “business” or trust or engagement elsewhere; and 2) like a business, the level of service that you provide will determine the relationship with that stakeholder and whether or not they return. A quick review of the complaints that a school or district administrator receives will likely reveal that most are customer-service related. Rarely does a parent ask to see the principal to threaten to remove a child from the school because of an issue with academics. More likely is that there was a disagreement with a teacher, nobody responded to an email or they didn’t feel welcomed upon their visit.
With the multitude of choice, school districts simply cannot afford to ignore this aspect of the family experience. Ultimately, good customer service for schools returns the focus to building relationships. Whether you have a district-wide initiative or want to start with a few campuses, here are some things to consider and do to improve customer service:
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