The Customer Service Survey
Unexpected Service
Tue - January 30, 2007 02:31 PM in
The past couple of weeks, my wife and I moved our oldest son to a different school.
Minnesota has an "open enrollment" system, where any Minnesota resident can attend any Minnesota public school free of charge. The state education funding follows the student, meaning that schools get more money from the state if they can attract more students.
Thanks, I believe, to the element of competition this introduces into the system, I couldn't believe the level of service we got from the different schools we looked at. We could be excused for forgetting that we were dealing with government entities.
Every school was remarkably responsive, and we were able to schedule tours at our convenience and on very short notice. We were also subject to a level of flattery not often seen outside a high-end clothing store ("I can see already that you have a very bright son"). When it came time to enroll, instead of the expected blizzard of paperwork, we had just a couple pages of forms to fill out. The school was even willing to let our son start immediately, before the paperwork worked its way through the system.
Compare this to the experience my wife had a number of years ago, when she tried to switch schools in the very early days of the open enrollment system. Back then, it was still a shock to public school administrators that students could actually, you know, go somewhere else, and they didn't quite know how to deal with it. My wife, then a high-schooler, was forced to sit through a meeting with her principal, alternating between pleading ("This is going to cost us a lot of money!"), scare tactics ("You really don't know what you're getting yourself into"), and faux-patriotism ("You're letting you school down"). In the end, the net effect was to convince her to leave that much faster.
The old saying is that you attract more flies with honey than vinegar, and it seems that competition eventually forced schools to figure out that they had to start treating parents and students like valued customers rather than poor souls stuck at the DMV.
Posted by Peter Leppik
Thanks, I believe, to the element of competition this introduces into the system, I couldn't believe the level of service we got from the different schools we looked at. We could be excused for forgetting that we were dealing with government entities.
Every school was remarkably responsive, and we were able to schedule tours at our convenience and on very short notice. We were also subject to a level of flattery not often seen outside a high-end clothing store ("I can see already that you have a very bright son"). When it came time to enroll, instead of the expected blizzard of paperwork, we had just a couple pages of forms to fill out. The school was even willing to let our son start immediately, before the paperwork worked its way through the system.
Compare this to the experience my wife had a number of years ago, when she tried to switch schools in the very early days of the open enrollment system. Back then, it was still a shock to public school administrators that students could actually, you know, go somewhere else, and they didn't quite know how to deal with it. My wife, then a high-schooler, was forced to sit through a meeting with her principal, alternating between pleading ("This is going to cost us a lot of money!"), scare tactics ("You really don't know what you're getting yourself into"), and faux-patriotism ("You're letting you school down"). In the end, the net effect was to convince her to leave that much faster.
The old saying is that you attract more flies with honey than vinegar, and it seems that competition eventually forced schools to figure out that they had to start treating parents and students like valued customers rather than poor souls stuck at the DMV.
Posted by Peter Leppik
Posted at 02:31 PM | | | | |