Eastern New Mexico University
The New Mexico legislature approved the construction and staffing of a normal school in eastern New Mexico in 1927, and approved appropriation for construction in 1929, but the Stock Market Crash of 1929 and the Great Depression hindered the school's opening, which was delayed until 1934. (Construction had begun in 1931).
From 1934 to 1940, the institution, first named Eastern New Mexico Junior College (ENMJC) operated as a community college. In 1940, the third and fourth years of college were first offered, leading to a bachelor's degree, and the institution was re-named Eastern New Mexico College (ENMC). ENMC was accredited by the North Central Association of Colleges and Secondary Schools as a four-year liberal arts college in 1946-47. Graduate work leading to the master's degree in some departments was added in 1949, and April 5, 1949, the Board of Regents approved the change of the institution's name to Eastern New Mexico University. The post office was started in May of 1960.
The University Post Office now employs three full time and between sixteen and twenty students workers.
Continued . . .
More Profiles
Submitted by Eric Silber
Last month I wrote an article about identifying "good customer service" as quality communication, keeping your word and being sincere. That may be an easy thing to say, but how do we make good customer service a reality in our mail centers? Good customer service can be a hit or miss adventure (or misadventure depending on your odds) or it can be a deliberate, purposeful process.
The first part of creating a process is to listen to what your customers are saying. But before you listen, you need to identify who your customers are. Managing Knock Your Socks Off Service identifies a customer as anyone who suffers if you don't do your job (pg. xx). How can you get the information? The most broad and most vague is a customer service survey. It can give broad trends, but very rarely do they give a concise need statement for you to address.
Customer service round tables are a better way because you can ask questions, probe and get a very good idea of what a department or work group actually needs from your department. This can become even more specific by a one on one interview with high volume or high demand customers.
You're listening needs to be an active listening, not just hearing what the customer is saying. If there is an issue, it is your responsibility to ask what solutions would make the issue better, to actively listen and involve the customer. This all comes back to being sincere in your efforts. If you are visiting with a Dean or a Vice president in a one on one environment to address issues, a sincere attitude is crucial to communicate your desire to serve.
Bottom line: you have to know what your customers expect and you must communicate what you can and cannot do to those customers. Listening gives you the information you need to determine your service goals, bench marks and overall performance. It may be useful to create need statements for the departments you work with that have high volumes, tight time frames or unusual expectations. You may even share this statement with the department to make sure that you understand the essence of their needs.
As tough as listening is, examining your failures is even harder. If policy is written in blood, as they old saying goes, then process must be immersed in it. Unless your process can handle the failures, the process is flawed. Reevaluate the failures of your department, identify, if you can, what went wrong and why. If it is appropriate, talk to the people involved to get another point of view and get more information.
When you look at the failures, hopefully you will see a pattern. In other words, hopefully there is one or two things to fix rather than the whole system. If your problems are limited to a certain area or process, then your attention can be focused on that. If the problems are more widespread, then a very broad approach has to be used.
This brings us, finally, to looking at process. When John Frank Stevens took over the US efforts in building the Panama Canal, he built up the infrastructure, cleaned up the water (which eliminated mosquitoes and yellow fever) and made the canal a feasible work area. He saw laying a good framework of train tracks, hospitals, ports and living quarters as critical to actually building the canal. As a result, the efforts of the US yielded less than 5,700 deaths compared to over 23,000 by the French, the project was actually completed and the canal is still used today.
The same preparation is needed for us. Collecting, evaluating and understanding information about your customers, your existing processes and your current strengths and weaknesses are necessary to improve your customer service to a level of professionalism you expect.
A technique demonstrated at the 2005 SWACUMS conference hosted by UNT and TCU is extremely effective and simple. Every step that needs to occur is written down on a Post-It note. The Post-It notes can be rearranged as needed, additional steps added, repetitive steps removed and the final product is hopefully a flow chart that can be transferred to a process. The process can be improved as gaps, exceptions or resources changes to meet your customer's needs.
As stated before, good customer service is not an accident. It is deliberate project that involves listening, evaluating failures and using that information to improve the processes that need improvement. The annual SWACUMS conference gives you tools and resources to pull from as needed. What works at one school may not work at another, but the overall process development remains constant: Look at what your customers need, want and desire and make that a reality.
| 
