Is it true that student satisfaction is amongst the most easily and rapidly affected part of the rankings scoring system? Can short-term gains in advancing through the rankings be achieved by focussing on student satisfaction to the degree that it is assessed in the ranking process? Where are you in those all-important University league tables?
Is it far easier to satisfy students than to build a better reputation for research?
Certainly student recruitment officers have a natural feel for and understanding of customer satisfaction in their private lives as demanding consumers of all the goods and services required to negotiate adult life. So it is an easy initiative to graft student satisfaction into the recruitment process.
We all have a natural sense of when we are experiencing good or bad services and communications. We also have ready tools and techniques at our fingertips to deploy the fixes. Technology tools like recruitment software is now strengthening universities up and down the UK as the student (customer) demands satisfaction (service).
Not only does a focus on student satisfaction drive your University up the league table rankings but you also recruit more/better students as a happy consequence.
Working with Universites around the UK, we help our clients to discover that our Student CRM is a capable and flexible student recruitment platform with which to execute their student satisfaction strategy once written. The results materialise in Year One for recruitment conversion and in Year Two for rankings (all else being equal).
Stephen Gibbons (LSE has climbed to no 3 in this year's University league table), author on the SERC Blog wrote on Tuesday, 1 October 2013:
"…. a 10 place move up a table of 100 universities only increases applications by around 2-3%. An improvement in position encourages a slightly more able pool of applicants (based on A- level tariff points). The effect of changes in league table position is also slightly bigger in subjects and places where there are more providers from which to choose."