Universities Challenged to Adopt Customer Centric View

Customer First, the awarding body for Customer First®, the national standard for Customer Service, has today set its "University Challenge" asking all universities to reconsider their relationship with students and adopt a more customer centric view.

Customer First's University Challenge has been developed in view of the changing customer relationship between universities and their students - and also strongly links into Lord Mandleson's thoughts on the issue.

Lord Mandleson highlighted in his annual grant letter to the Higher Education Funding Council of England (HEFCE) in December 2009 that a high quality student experience is vital for our universities to continue to flourish.

With many students now having to invest their own money into their education, there is an increasing drive to ensure the course they undertake is to the highest standards and that they receive the utmost quality of service for their experiences throughout their time at university.

In a huge shift, universities and their courses are being viewed by students as products and, in like more traditional service sectors, these students, or the customers, are now demanding a higher level of customer service from their supplier.

However, as universities generally do not view themselves as operating in a customer service field, nor necessarily have the awareness of key customer service principles, there is a real potential of this increasing customer demand not being fully realised.

As the awarding body for Putting the Customer First®, the national standard for customer service, Customer First UK has supported hundreds of businesses across the UK to achieve the national standard for customer service a practical and effective organisational quality support standard for businesses striving to enhance their performance and profit by improving all aspects of their customer service.

Speaking about the issue universities are facing, Frea O'Brien, General Manager of Customer First UK, said:

"We believe that universities are going to come under increasing pressure to demonstrate commitment to their students by providing a first class customer experience.

We are certainly seeing a peak in interest for the Customer First quality standard from a variety of universities demonstrating that this is an issue that a number are already facing."

Frea continues:

"Plus, with competition at a high level across the sector, and set to continue, good customer service may be seen as a key differentiator between universities in the future both from potential students and more widely from key stakeholders.

We've developed the Customer First University Challenge as it's important that universities seriously consider the trend that's emerging and strongly look at their customer service processes."

A number of universities have already officially assessed their customer service principles and achieved the Putting the Customer First standard. One such university is the University of Leeds, which put its Residential and Commercial Services division through the Customer First assessment to support its strategic theme of providing an exceptional student experience.

Kim Whitaker at The University of Leeds said:

"It was important for us to be able to demonstrate the fact that our students are at the heart of what we do and obtaining the Customer First standard has allowed us to achieve that.

Since achieving compliance, we have seen a positive increase in customer ratings in our annual survey, complaint numbers are down and staff are now actively engaged in service improvements."

Customer First UK is currently contacting all UK universities in order to raise awareness of this customer service issue and the associated "Customer First University Challenge".

For more information or additional comment on the Customer First "University Challenge" or for further case study examples of universities that have achieved the Customer First standard, contact NFEA Head of Communications Hayley Williams: hayley.williams@nfea.com / 01234 831623. Info: www.customerfirst.org.

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