Are you losing revenue because you don’t collect student feedback? How to implement a comprehensive voice-of-the-student program
Accurate and fast student feedback has never been more crucial than it is today. Living in a fast-paced and competitive society, students have what seem to be an endless amount of options when deciding where they want to study and continue their education. Without knowing what your primary stakeholders think and feel about their experience with your services, are you losing out on attracting and retaining students and as a result on revenues?
Probably.
To maximize student enrolment and retention, it is critical to implement a comprehensive voice-of-the-student program and monitor all aspects that impact their campus experience. Only by doing so will you have actionable information to gain meaningful insights and make informed decisions. This is especially important for Auxiliary Services operations as these often impact the students’ perceptions about life on campus even more than the academic programs they have enrolled in.
As we start a new semester and look forward to 2023, position your campus services for better financial performance by engaging your students, enhancing their student experience, and more successfully attracting and retaining their business.
Get Ahead of the Competition
Feedback solutions that provide a quick and in-the-moment response are how your organization can accurately know customer sentiments and respond to likes, dislikes, wants, needs, and suggestions. This knowledge allows you to increase satisfaction and profitability by providing more of what your students want and cease practices and offerings that they don’t.
With so many options available to students today it is important to consider your competition and how you can make sure you stay ahead in the game. Providing students with products and services they value can rank you higher on their list of universities and hopefully set the curve for expectations.
Students want what they want and if your institution is not giving it to them another will. Listening to your customer is the best approach to delivering value to them that directly results in increased loyalty and satisfaction. A happy customer experience is what leads to the acquisition and retention of more satisfied customers – and in the case of educational institutions, students.
Track and Monitor Performance
In addition to real-time feedback, what better way to gauge the student experience than enlisting mystery shoppers to go through the experience and report back!? Mystery shoppers are able to test your product or service and immediately submit what they experienced and how it made them feel. This is an efficient way to gauge how your everyday customers feel and therefore suggest any changes or improvements that could be made. This ultimately leads to better profits, satisfaction, and retention.
3 Key Components of a Successful Student Experience Monitoring Program
Ready to create a feedback program? Let’s review the three key components every profit-enhancing feedback program has in common:
1. Getting daily in-the-moment feedback helps to address problems when and as they occur. Feedback is in real-time – not hours, days, or weeks after an experience.
- Feedback is able to be given quickly and simply with text messaging, easy code URLs, QR codes, kiosks, WhatsApp.
- The feedback requests relate to the current experience regarding a product/service/interaction.
- The method of feedback acquisition allows for immediate action to be taken to address an issue.
- There is a two-way communication channel established that allows immediate responsiveness with students to thank them, apologize, answer a question, and provide additional information.
2. Mystery shopping is a streamlined practice. It’s not haphazard or done without intention You strategically incorporate mystery shopping throughout the quarter and year to test, measure, and act in accordance with the data you collect.
- It provides in-depth feedback about your operations.
- It monitors compliance with standards.
- It focuses on the key parameters you want to monitor e.g. customer service, product/food quality, cleanliness, etc.
- It contains no more than 10 to 20 questions.
- It recruits actual shoppers and schedules shops strategically and methodically.
- It focuses on areas and locations that need attention.
3. Surveys aren’t forgotten. Quarterly and annual surveys are solicited so that you can compare overall sentiment with real-time feedback and make the best business decisions for your service while also directly responding to student likes/dislikes.
- They provide feedback on the overall perceptions of the student.
- They are sent by email or doing intercepts.
- You avoid survey fatigue by keeping them short.
- You get a representative sample of responses.
- You compare findings with overall findings. Consider the annual Nacufs benchmarking survey to get a comparison with other schools.
With the implementation of a comprehensive voice-of-the-student program, you are better positioned to increase revenues, attract new students, and retain business on campus. The three programs above provide different insights about the student experience, but they undoubtedly complement one another and together provide a more complete picture that allows for sound business decisions that only seek to enhance the student experience.
Touchwork provides a platform to consolidate all of these programs and access the results easily through a single web portal. To learn more about In-the-moment feedback, performing audits, mystery shopping, or other solutions for collecting student feedback contact us here.
