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Case study text version

Interviewed in October 2008:
Vicki Marchant, Manager, Teaching and Learning Resource Unit, Illawarra Institute, TAFE NSW

© State of New South Wales, Department of Education and Training, 2008

Client relationships and business networks

About the Teaching and Learning Initiatives Unit, Illawarra Institute (slide 1)

I work for TAFE NSW Illawarra Institute and I work as the manager of a teaching and learning initiatives unit which is a unit that looks after systems and resources and professional development for teachers and staff around e-learning mainly and technologies for teaching and learning. We also do resource development projects and some of those we do for teachers inside the Institutes, some of them we do for state-wide projects and some of them we do for external clients as well and community groups.

Who are the clients? (slide 2)

Our clients are mainly internal clients, so the teachers and staff of our Institute —they’re the clients that we develop resources for or we provide services to or we help with capability development programs or just-in-time sort of services. We also have external clients and they will be clients that will come to us for projects that might involve resource development, developing web-based resources or information. So those external clients might be businesses, or industry or community groups that have funding for a resource development project so they’re the main sort of clients that we have. I suppose sometimes we undertake projects at a state or national level, usually in the area of teaching and learning or vocational education. So the clients will be those national bodies, like the Australian Flexible Learning Framework, for example.

Interpersonal communication strategies (slide 3)

It’s really important with clients to establish what their needs are. So when we first meet with clients we like to just sit down and have a fairly informal conversation with them to identify what their needs are. It’s really important to be friendly and warm so we’re quite informal when we first meet with our clients, though still being quite professional — interested in them and what they do, getting some background and just talking with them but then taking it to a more formal level if necessary to get the information that we need from them about what they need, what service they want or what the product is specifically that they want us to develop for them. We want them to develop confidence and be comfortable with us and work with us closely. Some of the information that we need to get from clients is quite detailed. It’s important to be very clear about what their needs are and what their expectations are and so listening is a very important part of dealing with and communicating with clients and also making sure that you’ve got the same understanding so that you’re reflecting back and making sure that you’re all on the same page. I think that interpersonal relationships with clients are an important part of client service, mainly because you won’t be able to work closely with clients and have clear communication with them. You also want them to know that you know what you’re doing, that you’ve got expertise and they feel confident that they can work with you and that you’ll deliver the service they’re expecting and that they want. They also want you to be professional, I think, and a lot of that has to do with the way that they’re treated when they come into your office and when you go into their office, so when we have clients come into our unit, the first point of contact is always very important for us so it’s about making sure that there’s someone there to greet people when they come in to the office, answering the phone after three or four rings, just simple things like offering them a cup pf tea or coffee, making sure that they feel comfortable in your environment when they’re there. So you can then actually communicate openly with them about what they’re there for and what you’re there to talk about.

I think another part of communicating with clients is also making sure that, in being clear with working with them, that you’re very open — and listen to them because in some and also take criticism constructively and being open to that. Being open to criticism is important because it helps to avoid any misunderstandings and communication barriers and defensiveness building up between you and the client when that happens, communication can break down. That then becomes difficult to work with clients and providing the service for the client to receive is quite difficult then and the customer will feel that they are not getting what they need and not getting the service they expected.

Client management strategies (slide 4)

In terms of client management, we have a number of strategies that we’ve put in place and a number of standards that we have, sort of informally, agree on with our team and they are things like greeting the customers when they arrive, making sure that phones are not left unanswered, and following up with clients to make sure that they know that you are making progress with their project, that they’re happy with the service they’re receiving from you, following up to make sure that if you’ve helped them with an issue that the solution is working and they’re happy. We also maintain a jobs database which helps us track clients and client services jobs so that we know that the jobs are progressing and that everyone in the team knows what their responsibility is to that job and that the jobs are completed and signed off within a time frame so it sets a time frame for us so we know where we are up to with a client project and we can make sure that it gets finished up and then followed up.

In terms of client loyalty, I suppose that the main thing that we rely on there is that we do a good job with all that the work that we do with clients and quite often we get repeat business from some clients because they come to us and we help them meet their needs and so they come back and they also tell others what they’ve received from our unit and they often come because someone’s told them what they’ve been able to do with us

We also have a network of people that we support out on our campuses that allows us to provide wider support services to our internal clients, particularly.

Some of the other client management procedures I suppose that we use and tools include things like putting information about our unit and our services and products up on the Intranet and we have an Intranet site for our unit which provides information to clients about what services we provide and what products they can receive from us and how they can go about that. And we also provide information and support materials to clients on a wiki and we use that so that clients can access support services online even when our staff isn’t available so it means there’s some 24/7 support there for people with online resources and frequently-asked questions and things like that.

Building business networks (slide 5)

In terms of building networks, it’s a really big area for our unit because our unit works in innovation and e-learning. And that’s an area that’s at the cutting edge sometimes. It’s new and we’re looking at new technologies and new things all the time and so in terms of sharing knowledge, learning with others and tapping into expertise, finding out what’s out there, the networks are really important. So, personally, I have quite a number of networks that I interact with and a number of ways that I interact with those networks.

One of the key ones for me is the Flexible Learning Networks that’s part of a group of people within TAFE NSW that work in similar roles to mine in other institutes and we meet regularly to share information, share what we’re doing, share new things, findings and new practices and technologies and learning and that’s a really key network and we also share and tap into other experts around TAFE NSW and outside of TAFE as well and you know people like Telstra and the Australian Flexible Learning Framework and the Centre for Learning Innovation. We invite them to come along to our meetings. We have meetings, we also communicate via a wiki and blog that we’ve just set up and we share lots of capability building resources as well through that network. I’m also part of national flexible learning network and I became part of that through a Australian Flexible Learning Framework program called Flexible Learning Leaders in 2001 and that’s a network of leaders in flexible learning that have continued to communicate with each other, share information, ask questions through a number of forums — one is an email distribution list. Another is through some of the discussion areas in the Flexible Learning Framework, tools like Edna and other forums and also through the Knowledge Tree journal that’s published quarterly which is a really useful way of tapping into that network. I also utilise a number of other networks through online forums and I’m a member of a number of those, probably too many to sort of list here but mainly around online facilitation. There’s a forum for that. There’re forums around innovation in teaching and learning. There’s also Australian Computers in Learning in Tertiary Education Association that I belong to. So there’s some associations, some conferences that I go to that help me to keep up-to-date with teaching and learning thinking and technologies. There’s one coming up in November called Mobilise This which is about mobile technologies for teaching and learning and I’ll tap into that and the people that become involved in those sorts of conferences I can then make contact with them if there’s some common areas of interest and I often do that follow-up with people I’ve met at conferences. Also I attend online conferences and events as well which also helps to tap into people across the world really and there’ll probably be people across the world involved in Mobilise This which will really be a very interesting experience.

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Case study text version – Build client relationships and business networks XXX

© NSW DET 2008