Summer Projects

I know, I haven’t blogged in a while. But it’s about to get even busier around here. Typically it’s slow in the summer, but not this summer for me! We’re launcing a new and improved blog for prospective students, increasing our university’s presence on Facebook, and using more social media like Twitter. I am really frustrated because FCAdmissions is already taken for Twitter and I can’t figure out if I did it and just can’t remember the password, or someone stole it out from under me. No followers and no messages out so I guess that’s a good thing.

Also, I sort of volunteered for something with our database. The company that runs Continuum is thinking about starting a users group and I volunteered to be a part of the process. But I’m not sure what that entails. I’m looking forward to it!

That’s all for now. However, stay tuned. I am working on lots of projects that are blog worthy. I promise.

Customer Service – What is happening here?

A co-worker of mine had an interesting experience a few months ago and it has prompted an ongoing discussion about the lost art customer service. To summarize, his experience stemmed from a company’s unwillingness to waive a measly $11 fee that was due because of their mistake. There’s more to that story, but the bottom line is, what happened to the benefit of the doubt? The customer is always right?

We experienced our own Customer Service issue at our house Saturday. We have U-verse cable service through AT&T and have been quite pleased so far. However, about a month ago I accidentally put one of our remotes in a washer full of clothes and soapy water. We needed new ones so my husband called and they said they would send two new remotes right out. How nice!

It’s been three weeks and they still aren’t here. So he calls and they said the process is that when you request a new remote, an e-mail is sent to the warehouse. The warehouse then confirms that they received the message. They don’t say yes we will send it, or it’s on the way, just yes, we recieved your request for us to send these remotes to these people. No tracking, no delivery confirmation. Just an e-mail. We know it’s supposed to go out. Will we do it? Not sure. The rep was nice enough and is sending out two more but there is again no confirmation that they will be sent, or when they will arrive. Just the e-mail.

I guess all is not lost though. I had to call our pediatrician’s office today to get a receipt faxed from a visit in February. She was soooo nice, and even apologized that she wouldn’t be able to fax it until later today. Did I want a phone call to confirm it had been sent?

How should we, in higher education, be better at Customer Service? What can we do to improve how we respond to inquiries and questions?

Implementation DONE! So what next?

Well just this week I’m calling it. Implementation is done, and we are now entering a new phase of work for me.

Implementation technically has been done for a while. I only recently have felt confident that our system errors are caused by human mistakes instead of system quirks. Another sign of the end is that I am now transferring the info from Continuum to our campus-wide system, PowerCAMPUS instead of someone in IT. Now, by transferring, I’m really only pushing buttons that someone else set up for me so don’t be too impressed yet!

So what’s next? Last week I went to the TargetX “Xpert Summit”, got re-energized to do some Social Media Integration stuff, and now I’m ready to roll! Our campus site is undergoing a renovation soon (thankfully I’m not doing it) so we’re really trying to be sure our Break-a-way is conveying all the info our old site did. I have access to Google Analytics for that site now and I’m pretty excited about that. Our Admitted Student Community needs some new widgets, more publicity, and I’ve also been doing some work and formulating some strategy for our Facebook Fan Page. There’s a lot going on right now! Stay tuned for more about what’s going on with our site, the Fan Page, etc.