To serve the customer, engage the customer

Leonard Peters, associate dean and CIO at Columbia Business School in the US, knew it was time to replace his school's "antiquated and clunky" course management system when he began to receive "a ton" of complaints from faculty and students. So, in 2005, he began evaluating a number of vendors. After an in-depth review of courseware products, he chose Angel Learning. Deployed in mid 2007, the Web-based e-learning solution lets students track upcoming and overdue assignments, send and receive e-mail, schedule events, check grades (if used by faculty), participate in discussion groups and create teams for project work. It also allows faculty to administer pre-course work more easily and communicate requirements for multiple courses from a single, Web-based application.

But the intense competition among business schools for students and faculty meant Peters couldn't take any chances on the system's design and functionality. In addition to working with Angel Learning to customize it, in 2005 Peters partnered with both faculty and students in order to create a baseline of requirements. He cobbled together a group enrolled in the school's New Product Development course to determine what the system's key attributes should be. He then used a video-grapher to record faculty members and staff sharing their thoughts on the antiquated system's shortcomings and their expectations for the new solution.

Dubbed 'Voice of the Customer Sessions', Peters shot 28 hours of video, edited it into 40-minute segments, and then posted them on the business school's intranet as streaming media clips for all to see.

By engaging the school's customers (its faculty and students) in the system design process, Peters says, "People felt like we really got it; we really understood what the challenges were and where we needed to take the course management system. And that helped generate enormous credibility."Peters' strategy of soliciting customer feedback in the design phase didn't end with the roll-out. Currently, Peters performs weekly health checks of the system -- the results of which are regularly communicated to faculty and students, along with notifications of system updates and modifications. There is also an advisory team that has constituents from around the community who are focused on the continued improvement of the environment.

For example, some faculty members post quizzes on the system. Answers are hidden until a pre-determined time and date, at which point they're automatically released for public viewing. An early, unintentional release of quiz answers, however, would be ruinous. So Peters performs regular checks to ensure that the system is configured properly, and to notify faculty members of upcoming content release dates. "Probably one of the best things we do is the health checks," says Peters. "More than anything, it ensures quality." In fact, by keeping faculty and staff informed of the course management system's technical glitches, modifications and latest capabilities, Peters has greatly reduced the number of help desk incident reports from 70 during the week of September 17 to a mere 11 during the week of October 8. And, he says, the kids love it.