The Observer, February 29, 2008
Volume XL, Issue 19
USG to determine student satisfaction with campus offices
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Did your application for graduation mysteriously get lost? Is your DPR consistently wrong? USG wants to know about these and other frustrations students might have with offices around campus. Beginning next week, USG will e-mail a Customer Service Initiative Survey to all students to assess satisfaction with all campus offices and identify underlying causes of poor office performances.
"We feel that some offices on campus are providing excellent service and feel that all offices should be up to this level of excellence," said USG president Adam Rupe.
Over the summer, USG organized a University Services Student Satisfaction Committee in order to evaluate student concerns about campus offices. Born out of general student dissatisfaction with university offices, the committee decided to implement a survey this semester to better assess specific student concerns with all offices, including the registrar, Student Affairs, and the athletic office.
The survey, to appear next week, will include 10 questions about each campus office, with six to seven of the questions simply requiring students to rate specific qualities on a one-to-six scale of satisfaction. Students may be relieved to know that participants may pick and choose which offices they evaluate, rather than evaluating every office on campus. USG representatives are interested in students reporting on what they know, said Matthew Gardner, head of the University Services Student Satisfaction Committee.
The goal of the survey is to identify a "model of excellence" for campus offices, said Gardner. Meaning, the USSSC will use the survey data collected to identify bright spots and trouble spots around campus. Then the USSSC will investigate the specific policies and practices of all the offices, both good and bad, to identify why the offices are perceived as such.
USG hopes to find out "which offices are providing stellar services and which are in need of improvement, but more importantly why in both these cases. Is it staffing, philosophy, number of support staff, what?" said Rupe.
Once identified, this model of excellence will provide USSSC with guidelines for how offices should be effectively run on campus to increase student satisfaction as well as efficiency.
"The survey is not meant to blame or point fingers at university personnel," said committee member Alex Hamberger. "Rather it is designed to identify areas where improvements could be made, enhancing the experience for students and staff members alike."
Once the data is collected, the USSSC will report its findings to the Staff Advisory Council, which provides suggestions and feedback on policies and issues to both the administration and staff.
"If the data shows strong statistical evidence that one office or another is causing students a great deal of dissatisfaction, we hope to open a dialogue with that particular office to constructively strategize what can be done to make sure all parties' needs are met," said Hamberger. "In fact, we hope it will bring students and administration even closer together to encourage more collaboration and information."
While USSSC will have no direct influence on whether office policies are changed in the future, Gardner is convinced that the committee and its results will have enough support, including from president Snyder, to effect changes through the Staff Advisory Council.
USG is unsure whether the USSSC will continue into future semesters, but hopes that this survey will provide a model for future councils.
"We hope that this will set a precedent for future student government representatives to address student issues in unconventional ways," said Hamberger.
Immediate plans for the future, however, include another survey that will ask students to reflect on specific experiences in various offices.
This will provide us with slightly different pieces of information, said Gardner.
USG highly encourages all students to participate in the survey since this information will be directly applied to increase student satisfaction.
"It is the hope of USG to empower the students to have a say in what their time at Case is like. If students are unhappy with campus services, we don't want them to simply complain to their friends–we hope they will see this as an opportunity to voice their opinion in an arena that looks to actively address these concerns," said Hamberger.
