3.2 Customer Engagement: How do you engage students and stakeholders to serve their needs and build relationships?
Purpose
This item examines your organization’s processes for identifying and innovating educational programs and services that serve your students and stakeholders; enabling them to seek information and support; and using student and stakeholder, market, and program and services information. The item also examines how you build relationships with your students and stakeholders and manage complaints in order to retain students and stakeholders and increase their engagement with you. The aim of these efforts is to improve marketing, build a more student- and stakeholder-focused culture, enhance customer loyalty, and identify opportunities for innovation.
Comments
■ Customer engagement is a strategic action aimed at achieving such a degree of loyalty that the student or stakeholder will advocate for your organization and your programs and services. Achieving such loyalty requires a student- and stakeholder-focused culture in your workforce based on a thorough understanding of your organizational strategy and the behaviors and preferences of your students and stakeholders.
■ A relationship strategy may be possible with some students and stakeholders but not with others. The relationship strategies you do have may need to be distinctly different for each student, student group, stakeholder group, and market segment. They also may need to be distinctly different in each stage of students’ and stakeholders’ relationships with you.
■ Complaint aggregation, analysis, and root cause determination should lead to effective elimination of the causes of complaints and to the setting of priorities for process, program, and service improvements. Successful outcomes require effective deployment of information throughout the organization.