How schools and universities can serve their diverse customers better with superior employee experience.
How is it possible to create environments equally enriching for students, parents, teacher and staff? As Asia PMO, we are running Customer Experience & Employee Experience workshops for local and international schools in Asia and believe that parents and students feel great when they are welcomed to a caring environment and community.
1. How to create such a caring environment?
As Richard Branson stated "If you take care of your employees, they will take care of your clients". In service-relevant industries in which personal relationship are important, a caring environment starts ideally on staff level. Taking care of your employees is normally connected to three dimensions of employee experience - Culture - Physical Space - Technology. In the case of schools also the factor "Community" plays a crucial role.
First we need to make sure that community and culture is created by enabling an open communication and personal meeting channels throughout the entire school, e.g. non-academic staff meets cross-functionally, teachers meet staff and everybody has a chance to meet parents and students as the ultimate clients. School activities like community days, theater plays, open workshops and any form of celebrations can bring different people together and creates a common culture among staff, teachers, parents and students. In experience management we try to foster an understanding for each others to be able to support each other more effectively and build solid relationships.
2. Understand your internal and external customer
Schools and educational environments are driven by meetings and direct feedback but often lack more broader and regular feedback channels like rating and surveys. Rather than waiting for personal talks with the parents or parent / teacher meetings in which problems are surfaced regularly, the quality of basic services could be measured by ratings and survey. This could apply to services such as parking / drop-off zone, reception and registration process (especially in times of Covid), canteen food, facility quality etc.). The same applies for staff services as normally teachers are given a higher focus and internal service rather than administration and service staff.
Sample Survey Education Sector
Persona building and customer journey / employee journey mapping are great techniques to understand different client groups, their expectations and needs and employees likewise. All information should be transparent and exchanged between the different functions inside the school so everybody could contribute with ideas how to improve products and services.
3. Start with small but constant improvements and surprises
Customer Experience as well as Employee Experience starts with understanding the pain points and the wishes of the clients or staff and working steadily to improve to make the life of customer or staff easier. Feedback tools like ratings, surveys, NPS, personal talks, etc. should be applied regularly and their result be discussed with different teams to have the best ideas for improvements and surprises. Rather than doing big changes or completely new products or services, we as Asia PMO advice to start and test smaller improvements with a group of customer or staff and see if they like it. For more info on our Experience Management have a look at our previous blog:
As Asia PMO, we can support you to understand your internal and external customer and find improvement and wow action ideas to increase your current services level. Furthermore we can enable your team to build a human-centric culture and to constantly thrive for improvements and test and implement them. For more information please contact us.