Ask a student whether they see themselves as a ‘customer’ of their university and the answer will be a definite ‘yes’. Students have been encouraged to act as consumers from an early age, and have come to expect a high level of service in return for their engagement. They’re used to brands wanting to form and maintain relationships with them, even when there’s no payment involved. Students know they can’t be passive, that they take responsibility for their academic performance, but increasingly they also expect to be partners in the process rather than subordinates.

Raising the same question about whether students should be treated more like customers among Higher Education professionals leads to a far more ambivalent response. The language of customer experience, of HE as part of the service sector, of introducing more ‘lean’ processes to improve student experience more generally, is still alien and challenging. Like all businesses - and ultimately universities are very much businesses - HE institutions need to keep improving and evolving, and making sure they are responding to changing market and customer needs. UK HE has to be able to compete with institutions internationally who are all eyeing the same pool of potential students. At the same time our universities have to be able to demonstrate value to UK taxpayers in terms of the different ways they contribute to economic activity, to developing people with the skills, knowledge and qualities the country needs, as well as to the nation’s culture.

HE is a service sector like other public services and management needs to be geared towards ensuring that high standards of services are being provided for their users, including staff. Universities are huge and complex organisations running large numbers of processes, often on the basis of teams working in their own silos. My research has looked at how this works in practice and what it means for the student experience. In particular I’m interested in applying the principles of lean management and service design - implementing continuous small improvements to improve the quality of services - to HE as a means of helping the sector adapt to a world of service delivery to customers.

Lean not mean

Lean in HE is about understanding people, awareness of experiences and emotions. In my action research I take a human-centred approach as a starting point and combine lean process improvement with service design. So that when there’s an analysis of how a process works, of where mistakes or delays are happening, it’s done with sensitivity. It can be scary for staff to be subject to process mapping. A good value stream map will show all our mistakes, rework and waste very visibly. Nobody wants to face the idea that their work is somehow ‘wasteful’.

That’s why any continuous improvement approach needs to begin with time to think. Lean initiatives usually come about as a result of some urgency: something doesn’t work, we need to fix it. The lean teams launch themselves into action too fast and underestimate the impact on those involved in the process delivery. The ‘time to think’ leads to more ease and readiness for change, helping teams understand the purpose of improvement and space for both discussing aspirations and facing fears. It’s space for asking questions like: if our team wasn’t held back by our organisation’s poor communication, what would we be doing? If we knew that our stories could reveal what may be wrong with the processes, what stories would we tell our managers? If we could trust our experiment or a new initiative would be a success, what would we do next?

Think Disney

Action research has been used to look at how introducing lean methods can impact on student experience. In each of these cases there’s been no explicit mention of the lean terminology with the teams of staff involved, just reflections on experiences on both sides of the process and what needs to change. I often make use of an example from the organisation most famous for its attention to customer service, Disney. Very often its staff have to deal with a stream of questions that on the surface may not seem that smart, that might become annoying. Repeatedly being asked “what time is the 3 o’clock parade?” for example. What the Disney team learn is that the customer isn’t really interested in the time of the parade at all, they want some other kind of help or reassurance. And this is the all-important approach to student experience, the ability to look behind surface questions and demands to real needs and use this understanding to re-design processes: leading to service design with built-in empathy.

One project involved the re-design of processes around a Study Abroad scheme for students. The team were used to receiving a large volume of email queries about all aspects of the programme from students, creating a heavy workload and frustration in the Study Abroad team. At the same time, fewer students were attending promotion events, making use of the online resources and actually taking advantage of the opportunity. Students were being passed between separate teams dealing with external partners in the US and in Europe, and rather than being inspired to travel they were preferring to stay put.

Following discussions with the team we took inspiration from an airport and how they go about making sure a passenger’s journey is seamless. We mapped out the process involved, gathered feedback from students and immersed ourselves in their world - watched, looked, listened and reflected. We concentrated on the value for the student rather than our own responsibilities, changing the flow of the service, timings, venues and modes of information delivery. Processes were standardised and the whole service made more visible and accessible. As a result the once overflowing Study Abroad mailbox has become almost empty; information sessions are buzzing with interested students; the online resources are used regularly; back office processes are under control and the team involved is happier and more actively engaged with the scheme and making the whole experience better and more memorable for students.

Another piece of work has addressed low levels of take-up of valuable career support on Masters degree programmes. We asked students to map out their journey on the programme in terms of what they saw as the most important moments for them and why, what they were thinking and feeling at those moments. It was a real eye-opener for the careers support team puzzled by the lack of interest in their services. What they saw was a picture of challenges and distractions, homesickness early in the first term, struggles with first assignments. With this more personal insight the team have been able to re-work the offering to be more sympathetic to experiences and needs.

Small insights lead to small changes that have a dramatic impact. And it’s a principle that needs to be at the heart of the design and re-design of any process affecting the student experience - using feedback loops and journey mapping that improves how students feel about their tutors and course delivery, their accommodation, and makes everyone involved with the university more engaged and energised about the service being provided.