On Hold

This is not going to be terribly interesting, I'll just throw that out there from the start. Nobody is going to be upset if you stop reading now.

I work in education and sometimes it absolutely baffles me that various offices around campus seem to get away with such a low level of productive service. I understand that the bottom line isn't the focus of an institution of higher learning, but when you call an office that services maybe a couple thousand people and you sit on hold for over 20 minutes, you gotta assume someone on their end just decided to either not answer, or take a smoke break.

It's also always the same offices too. You call their general line and the first thing the automated system says is to refer to the website, but shocker, their website is next to useless. When you show the patience of Job and finally get a representative on the phone, the chances your question is answered fall squarely in the "unlikely" category.

Call centers constantly monitor productiveness of their people and if you don't meet the requirements set by some metric, you get canned. I'm not saying everybody that works for these offices at universities should be losing their jobs, but would it be so terrible for these offices to have some level of accountability?

When I call United Airlines and sit on hold with them for 30 minutes it's frustrating but I also realize that they're an international company with millions of clients. In most cases, I'm at least given an answer to my question, whether it's the one I'm hoping for or not.

I think the competitive playing field of higher education is changing as more and more people seem to be perfectly happy with a degree from the university of school online. The university of school online runs their university like a business and the bottom line is key to their success. I've had plenty of interactions with students who tell me just how great their experience was with any of these online colleges. Again, I'm not saying that a degree from one of those should be valued the same as one from an established university, but, in a lot of ways, that's the way the worlds going. University offices need to start treating their customers as if they are actually customers. Treat your office as if it's a business. Develop some sort of measure of productivity so you can actually tell if you're people are doing a good job.

Then again, I guess it doesn't really matter since you have no option but to contact these offices because they are you're only option. They know it as well as you do so there's absolutely no incentive to start doing a better job. Such is life I guess...