Customers

A few years ago, some hospitals started referring to patients as "customers." The intention was to improve the patients experience, by improving the personnel's attitude towards the patients. Now, bearing in mind the limitations of any analogy, I would still like to look into the idea of the student as a customer. We are more likely to think along these lines when the student pays huge amounts of money to a leading university, but let's expand the notion to K12 as well.

There is a false adage stating that the customer is always right. That attitude is dangerous to businesses, and even more so for a school - we can't have so many always-right customers running around, and maintain any sort of order. A better one is "The customer is not always right, but the customer is always the customer." Without a successful customer, there is no business. Without a successful student, there is no school. The difference is that in business, money is a major concern, while in K12 education - in many places by law - money must not be a concern. So success is considered along different lines.

With customers, there are always several layers of needs: What they say they need, what they think they need, and what they really need. It is advisable for the service provider to be able to tell the difference. If the service-provider gives the customer what the customer said they need, when the customer thought they need something else, it doesn't matter that the problem was first created by customer miscommunication - the customer will not be happy, and that's bad for business. If the service-provider gives the customer what the customer thought they need, while the customer really needed something else, it doesn't matter that the problem was first created by the customer misunderstanding their own needs - the customer will not be successful and will not be happy, and that's bad for business. Now here there is the tricky part of humility: The service provider doesn't always know all that much about the customer's perceived and real needs. But I believe any business can benefit a lot from making the effort to know. It pays in the end. Of course, if the business wants to provide a service which is different than the requirements stated by the customer - they need to show the customer why, and bring the customer around to agreeing with the provider's view, preferably before doing anything different than what the customer asked.

Same with the student as a customer: The student really needs some kind of education - nobody knows exactly what, but everybody knows it's extremely important. For the current discussion, let's say the student needs to be proficient in Math. The student probably thinks they need just to pass the next Math test. Depending on the culture in the school, the student may well say they don't care about Math at all. The teacher and the school must work in this reality, with the added complexity that there are dozens, hundreds or even thousands of student-customers with somewhat different real needs, perceived needs and stated needs. The same way as with the business and customer, the teacher should see all levels of needs, and bring the student around to seeing the real needs. Unlike the business situation, in education we do expect the teacher-provider to know the real needs better than the student-customer, but humility is due here, too: The teachers should allow themselves to be convinced by the students - all is well as long as they agree on the goals.

A few more useful aspects of this analogy:

What happens in a business when an employee or partner tends to alienate customers, to make them unhappy - to lose customers? In a well-run business, that employee will be either moved to a more suitable (non-customer-facing) position, or removed from the company altogether. What happens in a school when a teacher alienates students and causes damage to their education; "losing students"?

In business, it happens that a customer causes damage to the business: Delayed payments, erratically changing demands, excessive complaints, slander, even direct damage to company equipment and personnel. It happens - quite seldom - that a customer becomes too much trouble, and some businesses know that they should "fire" that customer: Stop being willing to provide the services or goods to that customer. In school settings, sometimes a student is a lot of trouble - causing damage to the school and other students while not addressing his own educational real needs. What does the school do in such a case?

To summarize a long-winded post:

• School-Student relationship can be compared to Business-Customer relationship, with the student not always being right, but always being the main interest of the school


• Teacher and student should get to the same understanding regarding the goals of studying


• Teachers should not be in a position where they damage students and school


• Students should not be in a position where they damage students and school