In a strategic planning meeting recently, one of the questions asked was, "How do we improve processes and services for our customers?"
My swift and direct answer was, "Stop thinking of them as customers. They are faculty and students. They aren't customers." Here's the long version.
1. Customers Are Outsiders
Customers are outside the organization. McDonalds customers don't work for McDonalds. They come, they consume, they go. They don't know or need to know what goes on inside.
Faculty and Students are part of the organization: indeed, they are the bulk and primary fulfillers of the mission of any educational institution.
Calling them "customers" is a form of institutional arrogance because it elevates your group to central status - you are inside, special, central, the true heart of the organization, and they are peripheral outsiders.
True communities don't function well when bifurcated into insider and outsider. McDonalds does.
2. Relationships Are Commodified
There is no true relationship with a customer because the relationship itself is not the goal: the relationship is just a means to the true goal, to sell and buy something. In fact, the "relationship" is just that: an exchange of goods.
One of the attractions of this way of thinking about people is its simplicity: it reduces a complex, organic relationship, often calling for judgement and decision making, into a simple, definable one governed by exceptionless policies and rules. This lends itself to simplistically quantifiable thinking as well (budgets, assessment.)
Communities, on the other hand, don't see themselves as groups made up of goods exchangers; they include that, but are much more. Membership means ownership: having a place, rights, and claims, as part of the community, not simply based on exchange.
"Customer" is the language of the commodification of a relationship into something which is primarily economic, where persons become objects. The customer relationship is fundamentally impersonal. And effective learning is not.
Reducing relationships into commodities in an educational context is tantamount to a denial of the essential personalness, and messiness, of learning.
3. Your Name is Your Function
The term 'customer' transforms the relationship from one which focuses on their function in the organization (student, faculty, staff) to their function only in relationship to you ('my customer').
Using the term 'customer' redefines the relationship purely from your own perspective and ignores - in fact, must ignore - how they see themselves and how others see them. If we do this long enough, often enough, they start to see themselves this way, too.
As a result your framework narrows to the exclusion of the larger perspective: if one of the trees is my customer, what do I care about the forest? And once again, (real) forests, like learning, are messy.
4. Effacing The Educational Mission
Adopting a term from retail business further erases that fact that we work in an educational environment.
Education has an economic component, but it's not central.
Education is the transference of culture - knowledge and skills - from one generation to another. This involves trial and error, mistakes, experimentation. There must be a protected place free from exploitation set aside for this to happen in.
For good reason, the relationship between teacher and pupil is so protected: like that of parent and child, mentor and protégée, doctor and patient, lawyer and client.
Educational staff, in particular basic business function and technology support staff, already have issues remembering this, partly because they simply do not participate in the fundamental daily activity of their organization: taking classes.
Adopting the language of retail business can only further estrange us from the basic mission of an educational institution.
The Two Counter Arguments
I usually hear one of two counter argument in favor of using the term customer.
1) The "It Doesn't Matter That I Work in a School" argument
This objection usually sounds like this:
"What I do (fill in the blank: vacuum floors, landscape, fix telephones, configure routers, balance the books, fulfill purchase orders) is a basic business function, the same wherever. It doesn't matter that I work in a school. I don't have to know anything about what really goes on here. It is just about money. What's wrong with the word customer?"
To me, this is little more than saying, "I've been commodified, so it's okay to commodify others." Or: "I have a basic skills job so I can treat everyone else that way." Or: "The school doesn't care about me, why should I care about it?"
In the end, such an argument amounts to little more than a type of ressentiment.
One obvious answer to this is the golden rule: "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you." A positive practical way to do this is to get them involved in the educational process by having them take classes. It's amazing how therapeutic a little walking in someone else's shoes can be.
However, the more common alternative in educational institutions is "housecleaning" or, increasingly, outsourcing. After all, if these truly are basic business functions, then either of those should work.
But it won't solve the basic problem, because, in fact, I would suggest that such knowledge of insecurity about ones job is at the root of the fearful attitude itself.
And because this root fear is not addressed, we witness the periodic flip-flip of purges and "team building," in & out sourcing.
2) The "It's Better Than Nothing" Argument
The second objection goes something like this: in a defective organization with poor service and support, introducing the ideas and concepts from Customer Support in business can improve things.
I'm sure that's true - for a while.
But this is what I call the "Methadone Argument" - methadone may cure heroin addiction, but it doesn't cure addiction, it just replaces one with another, less nefarious.
Introducing the concepts and practices of "Customer Service" may very well temporarily improve certain services and support, but for all the reasons I have listed above, it is a bad strategy.
If you are a Defective Educational Institution whose goal is to rise to Mediocrity, treating faculty and students like customers may help you become functionally mediocre. If your goal is to rise to Excellence, it will not.
How About Just Good Service?
Moreover, none of the techniques used in "Customer Service" are really new or special.
Good service is perennial.
There is nothing special about the various techniques and tactics that have been bundled together and sold as a training plan for better serving customers - except that age old service skills have been salted with an attitude of commodification.
I say, skip the customer part altogether: go back to the source of what makes good Service anywhere at any time for any type of relationship and organization.
Do you have to work harder to do this? Yes.
Do you have to think about how to customize it for the culture of your institution? Yes.
Do you have to think about what is appropriate to the educational environment? Yes.
Do you have to go through some trial and error? Make judgements, take responsibility, delegate responsibility? Yes.
Do you have to resist the temptation to take a generic, off-the-shelf corporate customer service training program and simply overlay it on your current practices without altering your culture and way of doing things?
Yes.
Unless you are selling hamburgers.
In which case, repeat after me, "You want fries widdat?"