Enhancing Campus Experience Management
In today’s competitive educational landscape, creating a positive campus experience for students, guests, faculty and staff is paramount. Campus Experience Management solutions enable institutions to manage all key touchpoints across the campus including dining, housing, retail, parking, facilities as well as vendor performance—to elevate the overall experience and remain competitive. Let’s explore how establishing a Campus Experience Management program can transform campus life, focusing on its core components.
Understanding Campus Experience Management
A campus functions like a “mini-city,” providing students, guests, faculty, and staff with everything they need to live and work. By effectively managing key touchpoints that customers engage with daily, weekly, and monthly, you can identify problems and seize opportunities to enhance the overall campus experience while holding vendors accountable for delivering the contracted services.
Campus Experience Management involves collecting, measuring, and responding to the needs of customers such as students, guests, faculty, and staff across multiple campus touchpoints. Utilizing an omni-channel platform that combines real-time feedback, messaging and insights allows institutions to drive more engagement, increase understanding and action results. This consolidation of campus experience data provides institutions with a 360-degree view of campus life and helps enhance the customer experience, increase customer satisfaction and loyalty, reduce customer churn and improve operations.
This approach not only equips senior management with insights into program effectiveness but also empowers stakeholders with relevant analytics for informed decision-making. Engaging with your customers includes closing the feedback loop in a timely manner and acting on the results, ensuring that the campus experience continues to evolve and improve.
The Power of Effective Campus Experience Dashboards
Implementing effective Customer Experience (CX) dashboards is crucial. These dashboards consolidate data from various touchpoints, allowing for real-time analysis. By presenting insights in a visually engaging format, administrators can quickly identify trends and areas for improvement, fostering a proactive approach to enhancing the campus experience.
Key Areas of Focus
Dining Experience: Centralizing Feedback for Empowered Decision Making
The retail and residential dining experience is a critical factor influencing overall student satisfaction and well-being. By centralizing feedback on key aspects such as service speed, staff friendliness, food quality, and cleanliness, institutions can gain valuable insights that inform strategic decision-making.
Engage with students, guests, staff and faculty where they are, both online and offline by collecting feedback in real-time using traditional channels such as Email and SMS, digital channels such as Link, Kiosk, Web and Mobile, and social channels such as Facebook, Twitter/X and WhatsApp.
Integrate your existing systems with the Loop Experience Platform to automate engagement, feedback collection and workflow and close-the-loop with your customers. Leverage existing integrations with POS, Mobile Ordering such as Grubhub, and become a technology partner and create more value for your existing customers.
Utilizing text analytics allows for the isolation and real-time reporting of data categorized by campus, location, brand, menu item, and meal plan. This granularity enables administrators to identify trends and pinpoint specific areas needing improvement. For instance, if feedback highlights slow service at a particular dining venue, targeted interventions can be implemented to address the issue.
Furthermore, holding vendors accountable by incorporating this experience data into the Request for Proposal (RFP) process is essential for fostering continuous improvement in meal programs. By requiring vendors to demonstrate responsiveness to student feedback and adapt their offerings accordingly, institutions can ensure that dining services evolve to better align with student needs and preferences. This proactive approach not only enhances the quality of meal programs but also cultivates a dining environment that prioritizes student satisfaction and engagement. Ultimately, these efforts contribute to a positive campus culture, encouraging students to view their dining experience as an integral part of their overall college journey.
Retail Experience: Supporting On-Campus Retailers
Campus retail spaces—including bookstores, pharmacies, print shops, parking facilities, and micro markets—are vital to student life. The Loop Experience Platform empowers colleges and universities to capture real-time feedback from students, guests, faculty, and staff through surveys, online reviews, messaging channels, social media, and more. With this data readily available, they can gain valuable insights into the sentiments of their community, understand customer preferences on products and services, and identify the necessary actions to enhance student engagement and improve staff retention in an ever-evolving academic landscape.
Supporting online orders through messaging channels, along with gathering feedback post-transaction, allows us to uncover areas for improvement in the purchasing process. Additionally, employing a combination of online and offline methods—such as mystery shopping to assess service quality and a dedicated team inbox for handling returns—can significantly enhance the overall retail experience.
This multifaceted approach ensures that students have easy access to the products and services they need while fostering a supportive and responsive environment that prioritizes their satisfaction and convenience.
Housing Experience: Engaging Students Through Communication
The housing experience profoundly influences students’ decisions to remain on campus beyond their first year. To enhance this experience, implementing real-time communication tools during move-in, throughout their stay, and at move-out is essential. Additionally, incorporating messaging platforms for Resident Assistants (RAs) allows for seamless communication about mental health resources and support systems, recognizing that mental health challenges can significantly impact students. By providing mobile food ordering options alongside these resources, we can offer a comprehensive support network that meets diverse student needs.
Creating an omni-channel communication ecosystem not only facilitates quick issue escalation but also ensures that student concerns—especially related to mental health—are addressed promptly and effectively. This proactive approach fosters a sense of community and belonging, encouraging students to engage more fully with campus life and increasing their likelihood of staying on campus long-term.
Vendor Management: Monitoring Performance for Optimal Partnerships
Effective vendor management is crucial in maintaining a vibrant campus environment. By establishing and monitoring key performance indicators (KPIs) related to customer experiences, campuses can assess vendor performance accurately and better align on outcomes as an engaged partner prior to contract renewal or during the launch of a new relationship. Collecting feedback related to vendor performance in real-time helps ensure that partnerships enhance the overall campus experience, ultimately increasing student and faculty satisfaction while boosting revenue.
To ensure a comprehensive evaluation of vendor performance, it’s essential to include the most relevant questions and options related to key experience drivers. For food experiences, focus on aspects such as food quality, availability of options, speed of service, staff friendliness, cleanliness of the area, whether the price was as expected, beverage quality, portion size, ease of access to ordering locations, ease of ordering, and availability of delivery options. Similarly, for facility management services, prioritize drivers like staff friendliness, speed of service, accuracy of service, and quality of service execution. Incorporating these elements will provide valuable insights into customer satisfaction and help align vendor offerings with the needs of the campus community.
Incorporating customer experience data related to loyalty, satisfaction, effort, response and resolution into the Request for Proposal (RFP) process holds vendors accountable and fosters continuous improvement. By systematically evaluating feedback and preferences from students, we can ensure that the services offered by vendors align closely with the evolving needs of the student population. This approach not only enhances the quality, variety and delivery of products and services, but also encourages vendors to innovate and adapt their offerings in response to student insights.
Ultimately, this commitment to accountability and responsiveness leads to more satisfying dining experiences, positively impacting student well-being and engagement in the educational environment.
Conclusion: The Future of Campus Experience Management
Campus Experience Management is more than just data collection; it’s about creating a responsive, customer-focused environment. By focusing on dining, retail, housing, and vendor management, institutions can foster a vibrant campus life that meets the needs of all stakeholders. The use of effective Campus Experience Management dashboards and real-time communication tools is vital in driving this initiative forward.
The Loop Experience Platform combines omni-channel engagement with AI, workflow automation and insights to enhance your understanding of customers like never before. By leveraging AI support for chatbots and text analytics, you can respond effectively and consistently, boosting customer satisfaction while lowering service costs. This powerful integration ensures you’re always ready to meet customer needs in the most efficient manner.
As colleges and universities continue to navigate the evolving landscape of higher education, prioritizing the campus experience will be essential for student retention and satisfaction. Embracing these strategies can lead to a more engaged and fulfilled campus community, setting institutions apart in the quest for excellence.
About Jordan Parsons.
Jordan Parsons has served as CEO of Benbria since June of 2017. With over 19 years of hands-on experience, Jordan is a passionate entrepreneur with a background in engineering, skilled in building companies, teams, and innovative products. His strong technical background, combined with business acumen, enables him to make informed decisions that bridge both technology and strategy.
Active in Canada’s technology and startup communities, Jordan is committed to giving back whenever possible. Jordan thrives on collaborating with talented individuals, tackling significant challenges, and driving business growth.
