Continuing education and lifelong learning programs are normally given high scores by customers on point of sale – performing a transaction for a customer, such as handling a registration or processing a refund – customer service. Operations Team staff work hard to add value to their customers’ point of sale experience in an effort to build an enduring relationship.
Annually Operations Teams should survey participants and ask them to rate their customer service 1 – 5 (1 being Poor and 5 being excellent). Once tabulated the average score should be 4 or higher. If lower than 4, then improving the score should be the Operations Team’s highest priority.
A continuing education or lifelong learning program dedicated to customer service would be considered a customer-focused program. They work hard to ensure high customer satisfaction with course/activity programming or service.
Being Customer-Centric
With increased competition and customers with much higher expectations, winning Operations Teams have lead the charge throughout their whole continuing education or lifelong learning program to shift from being great customer service providers, to being customer-centric. Adding value is important but being proactive about improving participants’ experience has become more important with a higher return-on-investment.
Customer-centric organizations create a positive experience at the point of sale, but also pre and post-sale. A customer-centric approach can add value to your program by enabling it to differentiate itself from competitors who do not offer the same experience. Being customer-centric is a specific approach to doing business that focuses on the customer. Customer-centric organizations ensure that the customer is at the center of the organization’s philosophy, operations and ideas. A customer-centric organization offers more than good service.
A customer-focused program cares about wants, while a customer-centric program cares about needs. Being customer-focused means your processes are designed to deliver the course/activity or service and hitting your revenue, operating margin and net goals. Customer interactions are targeted on selling more to your customers.
Being customer-centric means you deliver your participants what they want, but you dive deeper and understand their fundamental needs as part of your relationship management efforts. You want to understand the world through your participants’ eyes. Being customer-centric forces you to challenge deeply held beliefs about how your business is done and what constitutes success.
The following are best practices customer-centric organizations follow:
- Make customers central to the mission.
- Focus on highly loyal customers.
- Invite customers to give feedback.
- Invite employees to share ideas for improving the customer experience.
- Give staff the resources to solve customer problems.
- Share customer feedback with staff.
- Tell employees when they do a good job serving customers.
Customer centricity requires:
- customer-focused leadership
- a good understanding of your customers
- the ability to design the right experience
- the empowerment of the Operations Team frontline staff
- measuring and reviewing key metrics such as repeat rate, lifetime value, cost per participant, and customer service score
- willingness to accept feedback that drives continuous improvement
The following are examples of customer-centric actions some continuing education and lifelong learning programs have implemented:
- Adding an advisor to the Operations Team to provide more career and academic advising.
- Providing job placement support, including researching and sharing industry-specific data.
- Diversifying delivery methods, thus allowing participants to learn in the mode that best serves their learning style.
- Helping participants develop individualized certificate programs.
- Acting as a clearinghouse for course/activity programming and services their program does not provide.
- Including consulting, mentoring, and research as contract training services.
The following are five core elements to support a shift from being customer-focused to customer-centric:
- Strategy: Overall commitment to develop solutions that solve customers’ needs and focuses on best customers.
- Structure: Understanding each primary market segment.
- People: Power resides with staff who know the most about customers, focus on convergent thinking, are customer advocates, and support a relationship culture.
- Process: Improving customer relationship through policies, processes and procedures.
- Rewards: Staff recognized/rewarded for customer satisfaction, increased share of customer, and lifetime value
Being customer-centric requires you to review data, listen, talk to your participants, and be willing to take actions that make it better and easier to interface with your program, although maybe not easier for your program to deliver. Customer first, you second.