How Happy Are Your Students? Here Are 4 Ways to Find Out

Now that colleges and universities are back in session, it's time that we return to leading and managing our academic teams. One of those tasks is measuring student satisfaction, but there are just so many types of satisfaction surveys to choose from, it can be a daunting task just to choose which one to implement.

So, where do we start?

In this article, I’ll help to unravel the mysteries of these tools and shed some light on which one(s) might be a fit for your university. The four most useful are the Net Promoter Score or NPS, Customer Satisfaction or CSAT, Customer Effort Score (CES), and the newest one, the Word-of-Mouth Index (WoMI).

Net Promoter Score

The most widely used and popular measurement tool is the Net Promoter Score or NPS. First coined by Fred Reichheld in his 2003 Harvard Business Review article, The One Number You Need to Grow, the NPS has been widely adopted by many of the Fortune 500 companies, non-profits, and universities.

 The central question measured by NPS is this: “Would you recommend our university to a family member, colleague, or friend?” By asking your student-customers this question, you identify detractors, who tarnish your university’s reputation and would readily transfer to a competing school, and promoters, who strengthen your university with positive word-of-mouth and help generate profitable, sustainable growth. Within a university setting, implementing this single important question as part of your end of term student satisfaction survey which asks students to rate their course and instructor, will help position your school as ‘top-of-mind’ among potential students. 

Customer Satisfaction Score

One of the most widely available tools is the Customer Satisfaction Score or CSAT. The main survey question is: "How would you rate your experience with your recent (issue, product, service)?" This is a tool in which a survey respondent is asked to provide his-her satisfaction for a certain product or service.

A big strength of the Customer Satisfaction Score lies in its simplicity: It's an easy way to close the loop on student interaction and determine whether or not it was effective in producing student happiness. If for some reason the experience wasn't satisfactory, it's easy to pinpoint that 'moment in time' and take actions to remedy the experience.

Not only that, but you can track student satisfaction across the student life cycle very simply using the customer satisfaction score.

Since it's such a quick survey, you can ask it across multiple experiences during a student's journey, including application, admissions, financial aid, course enrollment, etc. and obtain a big-picture view of how your student ‘feels’ at various touchpoints during the process. This makes it easier to find potential bottlenecks and improve the student’s experience.

Customer Effort Score

The Customer Effort Score (CES) takes a different viewpoint compared to CSAT and NPS. Using this measurement tool, the student is asked to describe how much effort he-she put into an interaction with the university. The creators of the CES, CEB, now part of Gartner, shows that service-focused organizations are able to create loyal customers (students) primarily by reducing effort, which is defined as helping customers solve their problems quickly and easily and not by delighting them through service interactions. In practice, you’ll likely come across two versions of CES. The first iteration is: “How much effort was necessary on your part to handle your request?” Customers would rate their effort on a 5-point scale from 1 (very low effort) to 5 (very high effort). The most recent version of the question relies on a simpler scale which is disagreement/agreement. This question is easier to understand: “The organization made it easy for me to handle my issue.”

Word-of-Mouth Index

Customer Experience (CX) vendor ForeSee has created the Word-of-Mouth Index (WoMI) which they deem as the Next Generation NPS. Foresee contends that while NPS was designed to promote a metric to measure customer loyalty, it falls short by only measuring “likelihood to recommend.” Inaccurately assuming that if someone is not recommending, they are detractors.

The consultancy claims WoMI evolves NPS by measuring both the likelihood to recommend and likelihood to detract from a specific brand. According to the company it delivers on the promise of NPS by creating a more precise, accurate, and actionable requirement. ForeSee says this allows organizations to act to foster more positive word-of-mouth marketing and decrease negative word-of-mouth by increasing customer satisfaction and improving the overall customer experience—taking NPS to the next level of usefulness by providing actionable data. 

Foresee’s extensive research found that NPS overstates detractors by 270 percent on average because it doesn’t distinguish between positive and negative word-of-mouth. This overstatement can be a costly and misleading mistake for organizations that are either spending resources pursuing detractors to convert them to promoters or compensating their executives based on what can now be seen as a flawed measure.

“One of the many frustrations with the Net Promoter Score is the assumption that people who aren’t likely to recommend must be actively detracting from the brand,” said Kevin Ertell, vice president, e-commerce at Sur La Table. “I like that WoMI actually asks customers if they’re detracting, so we can get an accurate read on promoters vs. detractors. For us, this metric is still only one part of a more comprehensive voice of the customer measurement system that truly helps us understand our customers’ wants and needs.”

So, how happy are your students? Let's begin a dialog.

 Excerpted from the recently published book, Creating the Happy Student: Why Student Experience Will Revolutionize Higher Education, now available from Graphic Connections:https://bookstore.gcfrog.com/products/creating-the-happy-student