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Closing the Gap Between Residence Life, Facilities, and Business/Assignments Using a Customer Service Approach

By Melissa Giles, Associate Director for Residence Life
Wright State University

Does your department struggle to have Residence Life, Facilities and Business/Assignments see eye to eye? This is a fairly typical dilemma for housing programs.

Recently, Wright State University in Dayton, Ohio undertook the task of attempting to better align this area of our department by using a customer service approach. We decided to use a text to guide our work and chose Ken Blanchard and Sheldon Bowers’ “Raving Fans.” As a residence life educator, I have to admit I was skeptical about using a book designed to address customer service in a business setting. None the less, I begrudgingly used the book and with a sheepish grin had to admit that I really came to appreciate its value for our work.

The book, which is really a quick and easy read, outlines 3 principles for creating “Raving Fans.”

  1. Decide what you want
  2. Decide what the customer wants
  3. Deliver, plus 1%

We operationalized these concepts by creating surveys that were first filled out by all individuals. Individuals then got together with their respective area and discussed the surveys further. All information was then compiled and distributed to the department as a whole.

Survey questions included:

  1. If your area within this department were perfect in terms of how it delivered service to other areas in the department, what would that look like?
  2. If (insert each area here) were to provide you with perfect service, what would that look like?

This approach yielded a great deal of honest and helpful information. Some of the main findings included:

  • We needed to better train each of our staff members about each other area
  • We also needed a new vision/mission and goals

We held a retreat that focused on understanding each others’ areas and creating a new mission and goals and have seen great improvement so far.

Finally, we also used this same approach to examine service to other University departments and service to students. Both were also effective.