As competition in higher education grows and enrollment challenges loom, institutions must prioritize service excellence to enhance student experience, retention, and overall satisfaction.

This 1.5-day workshop, designed specifically for higher education professionals, offers a unique certification in customer service. Through interactive learning and small-group activities, you’ll build key competencies, strengthen communication, and gain strategies to navigate difficult situations while fostering a consistent culture of service across campus.

More details about the specific schedules per day can be found by clicking Learn More and Register, but session descriptions for the two days follow below:  

Defining Service: How Does Customer Service Impact Higher Education? 
What defines good customer service versus bad? We’ll dive into customer service models and research that will enhance your understanding of the role customer service plays within higher education. This interactive session will set the stage for the rest of this workshop and provide strategies to educate, lead, and empower others to shift towards a culture of service excellence at your institution.

Policies and Practices that Impact Service 
Higher education is a place where policies—both formal and informal—proliferate. This session will provide examples of formal policies you need to be aware of that have implications for the way you provide service. It will also challenge you to think about informal policies or practices that may be creating service barriers.

Competencies for Service Excellence 
This session will provide an in-depth, example-based overview of the various competencies you need to provide high-quality customer service to students in today’s higher education environment. We will discuss different types of competencies, including physical, emotional, knowledge-based, environmental, and cross-cultural. You will leave with a self-assessment that you can use to measure your own customer service skills and help to identify areas of strength—as well as continued opportunities for growth.

Enhancing Communications Through Scripting 
This session will focus on the art of scripting as a means to ensure consistency across service channels. You will be given time at the end of the session to write your own scripts for phone, email, face-to-face, and virtual conversations including greetings, closings, and apologies.

Active Listening and Communication Strategies 
You will build upon your knowledge of scripting to look more holistically at the four key phases of the conversation cycle. You’ll learn how to help navigate through unclear student requests and questions, as well as how to avoid using jargon in your interactions with students.

Practice: Role-Playing 
During this role-playing activity, you will break into groups and work together to practice and apply the scripting and conversation cycle techniques you learned in the previous sessions.

Micro-Inconveniences and Their Impact on the Campus Experience 
Typically, customers don’t leave an organization because of one major, catastrophic challenge, but rather because of many small issues that happen over time.  Learn about micro-inconveniences and what you can do to mitigate them for a better campus experience.

Measuring and Assessing Your Customer Service Culture 
Join us as we explore a variety of measurement and assessment tools and techniques that can be used to gauge the quality of customer service that your department, unit, or campus currently provides. You’ll also be given time to begin formulating and adapting some of these tools to your own context.

Assisting with Difficult Customers 
From students to colleagues, to parents and alumni, you are likely to come across a variety of stakeholders who can be challenging to assist. This session will focus on how to manage the occasional difficult and/or potentially volatile situations in which you may find yourself. We’ll discuss best practices for saying no, ensuring safety, escalating the situation and asking for help, and adhering to your service standards. You will be given time at the end to role-play in small groups and practice the techniques you have learned.

Service Excellence Action Planning 
Building an action plan is critical to moving your service excellence work forward. This interactive working session will provide space for you to identify barriers you will likely encounter, champions from whom to get buy-in, and next steps to take to enhance service excellence in your role. You will also work through an exercise that will help you to begin the conversation about strengthening service with teammates in your unit moving forward.

Academic Impressions conferences provide the opportunity for quality conversations and relationship-building through both formal and informal networking opportunities in an intimate setting. Our in-depth and hands-on approach to learning provides you with actionable takeaways.

Learn More About the Academic Impressions Conference Experience ➞