Learn how you can provide better service to students and parents and how to develop a customer service training program for the rest of your team.
The interactions a student has with your admissions, financial aid, and registrar office staff members are crucial to engagement and retention.
Join us in Boston to learn how you can help your enrollment services teams create a stronger commitment to providing excellent service. You'll leave this interactive event better equipped to handle emotionally charged situations and move students and parents toward solutions-oriented conversations. But most importantly, you'll receive materials and guidance on how you can facilitate customer service training for all of your enrollment services colleagues when you return to your campus.
This conference is designed especially for managers and team members in the enrollment management areas. You will learn ways to improve customer service for students and parents over the phone, in person, and by email. The program is designed as a "train the trainer" event; you will participate in a training and be provided materials and guidance on how you can train your colleagues when you return to your campus.
After participating in this conference, you will be able to train your staff to deliver exceptional customer service using a training package.
Understanding what your current wait times are as well as your students' tolerance of wait times is important to offering good customer service. In this pre-conference workshop, you will learn how to collect and analyze data to identify current wait times at your institution as well as the length of time students are willing to wait. Following this analysis, the workshop will offer tactics for triage and better management of wait times, so that you can improve customer service on your campus and meet student expectations.
The work-intensive conference program will lead you through a dynamic customer service training coupled with preparation for training your own staff using the conference training curriculum. Within this orientation session, we'll walk through the conference program, define exceptional customer service, discuss how we'll meet the learning outcome, and position you to meet the needs of your trainees back on campus. We'll also define what are not tenets of customer service and the impact of your campus culture on training.
In this session, you'll begin to identify the specific needs of your staff on campus, focusing on the different types of training formats and topics. Faculty will review their five customer service essentials (student-friendly policies, streamlined processes, student systems support, skillful managers, and staff trained for excellence). The session will conclude with your identification of the training outcomes you want to achieve with your staff.
Students today have elevated expectations around wait/call times, technology, and treatment as customers, and they bring those expectations along when they set foot on campus, visit an institution's website, or seek one-on-one assistance. In this exercise, you'll draw on your own customer service (and student) experiences and expectations to outline what expectations and needs customers have, and together we'll develop an initial list of customer service needs from the perspective of a student throughout his or her life cycle on campus. This orientation to customer expectations and experiences will drive the remainder of the course.
A large part of the customer experience is transactional, with two or more parties meeting or bringing something unique to the conversation. Experienced customer service representatives know they can't control what the other party brings to the table, but they can manage and adapt how they respond by understanding themselves first. In this exercise, participants will identify their thinking and communication preferences, as well as those of others, and begin to develop strategies to work better with student-customers and their diversity of communication and thinking styles.
At the end of Day 1, we'll discuss and identify the meta-training techniques essential to guiding customer service training and to Day 1 activities. You will begin to identify your training plans and the facilitative practices you'll use in training.
During this session, you will "watch and play" several important and typical customer service transactions in the enrollment setting (e.g., angry parents, students unable to register or enroll, FERPA issues, phone calls). Faculty and attendees will debrief the positive and negative interactions they have witnessed and identify ways the situations could be improved using the communication/thinking styles worked with earlier.
In this second check-in, you will build on your training plan and continue to identify facilitative techniques to use in your staff training on campus.
This is an opportunity to review ways to monitor the success of your new customer service approaches. You will learn ways to assess student satisfaction, monitor improvement in call and in-person wait times, and assess employee skill improvement.
In the first of two concluding sessions, you will continue to develop your training plan for implementation with your staff back on campus and identify facilitative techniques you'll use within your training. By the end of the session, you will have completed a draft of your training plan.
Within this concluding session, you'll have an opportunity to share your training plan, offer each other final ideas and advice, and receive feedback and final thoughts from the conference faculty.
Susan Leigh joined DePaul University in 1992. With more than 30 years in higher education, Susan oversees Student Records, which is responsible for all academic enrollment records, placement testing, registration, grading, graduation, transcripts, diplomas, immunization, and advising reports such as the course history and degree progress reports. She is also responsible for DePaul Central, the university’s new integrated student services concept that offers a one-stop location for student records, financial aid, and student account services.
Since beginning his career in higher education administration in 1982, Larry has served in a variety of roles on a variety of campuses, including director of admissions, dean of admissions and financial aid, and vice president for enrollment management and strategic planning. He has written articles and made presentations on a variety of topics in financial aid, admissions, business process redesign, and customer service in higher education.
Hyatt Harborside101 Harborside DriveBoston, MA 02128
To reserve your room, please call 888-421-1442. Please indicate that you are with the Academic Impressions group to receive the group rate.
The rate is $149 for single or double occupancy, plus applicable tax. Due to the popularity of this conference, the standard rooms may no longer be available. The hotel is offering an upgraded room type of a Harborview room at the discounted rate of $189. Availability is limited, so please book your rooms soon.
A room block has been reserved for the nights of March 21 - 22, 2012
Make your reservations prior to February 25, 2012. There are a limited number of rooms available at the conference rate. Please make your reservations early.
The Hyatt Harborside is a luxurious, historic Boston Logan Airport hotel offering captivating harbor and city views and outstanding dining options. Take the hotel's free shuttle to a public transit site (T Subway System) or hop aboard a private water taxi (discounts available for attendees) to Boston's historic North End. Explore famous attractions including Faneuil Hall, Quincy Marketplace, Boston Public Garden, New England Aquarium, Charlestown, and the USS Constitution. The hotel also offers free 24-hour transportation to and from Boston's Logan Airport.
Full access to all conference sessions and materials, access to the networking reception on Thursday, breakfast and lunch on Friday, as well as refreshments and snacks throughout the conference.
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