ResEdChat Ep 20: Craig Kuehnert on Creating Delightful Customer Service Experiences

Dustin Ramsdell:
Our conversation today, I think will be an interesting one, one where the concept in and of itself, I think would kind of be pretty implicit or sort of accepted by most people, the idea of bringing a very true customer service mindset to Residence Life.
But I know that sometimes there is consternation around thinking of students as customers and everything, but just for the sake of the vernacular, we’ll use that phrase. But there’s certainly some really great best practices that nowadays college students, through their interactions with other companies and organizations, especially online, do come to expect. And so their experience in higher education and Residence Life obviously, is a very heavily student-facing and serving facet of a student’s experience on campus.
So we’ll talk all about that in this episode, but we’ll start out with our guest introducing themselves quickly and going over their professional background and how they got to be where they are today.

Craig Kuehnert:
Sure. Thanks, Dustin. And hello everybody, my name is Craig Kuehnert and I serve as the director of Residence Life here in Colorado at the University of Colorado Boulder. I use the he/him/his pronoun series. Started my professional career as a grad student at Kansas State University. Had a bit of an atypical role in that capacity where I served, supporting a lot of enrollment management functions, which made me think about Residence Life from a little bit of a different lens than a traditional graduate hall director position from the early ages of having to sell the residential experience differently than many campuses that have a mandatory live-on requirement.
Finished up my time at Kansas State and moved to the great state of Texas where I worked at Texas Tech for a good decade and had a bit of an atypical role there as well, spending quite a bit of my time working heavily with our student leaders, but also with departmental operations. So, coordinating large projects like move in and move out, all of our break transitions and those kinds of things.
So, also gave me an appreciation a little bit differently for the way that we create warm and welcoming environments and how we build customer service into a strategic priority for the institution.
And then I’ve been here in the University of Colorado Boulder for coming up on six years now in several different capacities, but I’m excited to share a little bit with you today about some of my take on customer service.
And certainly, I think you’re right. I think the phrase customer service probably sends some shudders down people’s spines in Residence Life and student affairs more broadly. So, we can talk about that here in just a little bit.

Dustin Ramsdell:
Yeah, there’s definitely some nuances I want to get into. And for folks that are watching the video, because how I was sort of cued into chatting with you about this, I know that you have sort of a background or affinity for Disney, which is obviously renowned for their customer service and everything. So I think that’s kind of intertwined in all of this.
But we’ll start out with the broad question, and maybe that acknowledges parts of your professional background or anything like that, but what are the ways that you try to bring that customer service mindset to Res Life, because I think, like I said, obviously it is a department that is so much about serving just all of the dynamic needs of students who are living on all of the expected and unexpected ones? So yeah, how do you bring that customer service mindset to Residence Life?

Craig Kuehnert:
Yeah, and maybe I should have mentioned in my introduction, I was going to try not to go all Disney in this conversation, but you brought it up here. So actually, my passion for customer service really was sparked through a trip that I had at Disney, and maybe I’ll share that experience at some point as we chat here.
But it also led me to a point when I moved here to Colorado, we have a Disney store that was at the time, pretty close to campus. And so I picked up a side hustle doing some work with Disney at the Disney Store, which gave me a different lens and a peek into how they write about customer service and how it’s implemented in terms of cast member training and how it plays out in real life too. So there’ll probably be glimmers of my Disney love and passion that show up in parts of this conversation for sure.
You know, at the root of what it is, customer service is really relationship management. And as I see it, our work in Residence Life really is nothing more complex than building relationships with students. We build relationships with parents and family members to support students. We build relationships between the student and the institution by connecting them to resources and to student organizations and to peers, but it takes a lot of work and structure to effectively understand our students and to build those meaningful and connected relationships.
We here at CU Boulder talk about mattering and belonging significantly in how we create opportunities for students across the board, and specifically our students from marginalized identities to find their fit here at CU Boulder. And a lot of that really is some of the same core work that really happens within a customer service model, is understanding students, understanding their needs and then building those relationships and effective strategies and ways.
I think that as you alluded to, so many people have this tension between the idea of student development versus customer service. And for a long time, and there’s still many people who I think, think that those things are at constant odds, and I really don’t see it in the same way.
I think that if we were to think about student development solely without thinking about customer service, I think about interactions with parents. For example, when dad calls and is upset about their daughter’s experience in a residence hall, student development would likely say, “Hey, we need to work solely with this student to resolve this issue because we’re developing the student through our interactions and teaching them how to navigate conflict or how to navigate processes, and that’s how holistically we’re helping a student develop.”
But when we think about customer service as an integration or kind of an overlap or connection to student development, really as I see it, and I coach our staff often to this mindset of, “When dad calls and is angry about their daughter’s experience in the residence hall, we should be saying, ‘Hey, thank you so much, dad for making this call and for alerting us to this issue. We’re going to try to connect you and your student with our staff, and the three of us are going to work through this together so that your student can be actively engaged in trying to resolve their roommate conflict or whatever it may be.’ And we’re providing quality support to dad, who can continue to provide coaching and support to daughter along the way as well.”
Now of course, things like FERPA get in the way sometimes where a student may not want parents to get involved, and we would certainly default to respect those things, but customer service is not necessarily always saying the customer is right. And in fact, Disney would talk openly and often about that.
We have a core set of values, we have policies, and there are times where we have to defend those things. And so often, our customer service is trying to find the blend of, “How do we support the student by giving them the challenging no, but then also finding the yes response along the way to give them an alternative outcome or a different pathway or a different direction, and helping them do a little bit of that critical thinking to a long run solution?”
So my staff here will talk about the no but yes response all the time, of we say no and we give them the yes of what they can do within the parameters that we think are appropriate.

Dustin Ramsdell:
Yeah, yeah. I was just about to say that because I remember that from grad school at Rutgers University. I did a summer internship there at Rutgers where I was doing a master’s because I just wanted to get exposure to orientation. And obviously they have a huge program and stuff, and that was one of those things that they hammered quite a bit, is you’d have the family who comes early before check-in even starts.
And it’s that idea where, “So I can’t check you in, but what I can do for you is this.” So you’re just always following that formula. And yeah, I mean it’s such a good habit and I think it’s just very easily translatable or sort of adaptable to a lot of situations as much as … You know, it’s just funny you saying the whole customer is always right. It’s just like, I feel like so many people’s probably life’s work is trying to just chip away at that notion because that’s obviously, yeah, exactly. When people hear customer service, they’re thinking that of just being like, “Yeah, just let the customer just steamroll right over you. Just give them whatever they want,” and all this sort of thing.
So I know that that’s, I think where a lot of that negative stigma comes from about that, especially in a higher education setting, which like you said, you’re trying to balance student development with the service.
And the funny other, just as my brain always thinking of metaphors or parallels just from my own life is the idea of gentle parenting. I am the father of a almost three-year-old daughter and it’s that idea where yeah, you could just be the parent where it’s just like, “Whatever you want. Yeah, stay up, eat whatever you want, do whatever,” or that you’re authoritarian and using just pure power base to parent and stuff like that.
But it’s like, no, you need to set boundaries and have consequences, give them choices or whatever, all these sort of things. So it’s just a funny thing that my mind thought of as sort of a parallel maybe that others are familiar with because yeah, that’s something else too, thinking back to my Res Life days is that, yeah, it’s such an important thing to be instilling with students, is just consequence.
The idea of, “Yeah, you listening to your music loudly impacts other people,” and some people just never had to deal with that because I think he remembers as the only child or whatever, things like that. So yeah, it could be laborious work, I think, but it is certainly very important.
And I guess, yeah, that could just segue into my question. It was just what makes this concept so important to you? Maybe some of those examples of how this has been implemented and the results of it.

Craig Kuehnert:
Yeah. I mean, so maybe I’ll start this section by chatting a little bit about what was my hook early on. So I’ve worked, as I mentioned a few minutes ago in my introduction at primarily mid to large-sized public institutions where we’re dealing with bed sizes of 5,000 plus students in our residence hall spaces.
And anytime you’re working with state institutions, you’re working with bureaucracy and politics and red tape, and it takes forever to get things done. And that’s just what I knew to be. And a number of years ago, I had actually gone to the, it was a professional conference. It is a national conference on student leadership maybe, and it was hosted in Orlando. And the conference ended right before Thanksgiving and so I decided I was just going to extend my stay a few extra days through the Thanksgiving holiday and enjoy a little bit of vacation.
And I don’t have a family, I didn’t have any students with me. And so it was just Craig living his best life at Disney World for a few days. But I was sitting on a curb watching the 3:00 parade roll around, and my mom had called on Thanksgiving Day to wish me a Happy Thanksgiving and was pretty upset at the fact that I wasn’t with the family and I was by myself and demanded that I needed to get turkey for dinner. That’s what you do on Thanksgiving and so I needed to have Thanksgiving Turkey.
So I promised her after I would watch this parade, I would go find some turkey. And of course, that led me to a very lengthy line in a turkey leg stand or a kiosk on the side of the street. And I waited and waited and waited and I finally got my turkey leg and a bottle of Coke, and I was walking down the sidewalk right in front of the Country Bear Jamboree, Coke in one hand, turkey leg in the other.
And I had peeled the skin off of the turkey leg and was holding it in the same hand with the bottle of Coke looking for a trash can. And as we know seagulls do, they spotted my food and then instantly started dive-bombing me to get all of my food.
And it was a little bit embarrassing. I didn’t really want the turkey. I was just trying to appease my mother. So I ran for cover and thought, “You know what? I’m done with this. I don’t need this turkey leg. It’s fine. I’ll find something else.”
And in that moment, one of the cast members who had been working at the turkey leg stand had seen this happen and came over and immediately, “Hey, are you okay? Did you get pecked or scratched? Do I need to get first aid? No, this is just embarrassing, but I’m fine.” And then immediately was like, “I’d like to replace your turkey leg for you.” Like, “Nope, I really didn’t want it to begin with. I don’t need another. We’re not going to live this experience.”
He’s like, “Nope, stay right there,” and he comes back a few seconds later and has another turkey leg and another bottle of Coke to give me. And I sat there on the curb eating this turkey leg, a little bit angry at my mom for making me do this, but having this realization of, in Residence Life or really probably any entity in student affairs, we spend so much time going through bureaucracy to make something right after something goes wrong.
And I think of, I could name instances where a washing machine breaks and a student’s clothes get ruined inside or something like that, or a sink overflows and textbooks get destroyed. And for me to be able to, as I would say, make it right or do customer recovery afterwards, I probably need to fill out 15 different authorizations and I need approval from everyone to the vice chancellor level to give someone $35 in laundry credit back to them.
Whereas here, this college intern didn’t ask a single person and was immediately able to respond to me with a new turkey leg. And that started to get my wheels turning of helping me think through, what are our systems and processes that are creating internal challenges to quality customer service? And so I thought, “There’s got to be something more to this.” And I started to do some research and then that’s where I got hooked into the Disney customer service philosophy and started to expand from there.
I think some of my key takeaways, bigger structural-wise, we often, and in fact this conversation to this point has really focused on the interpersonal piece of customer service, but that’s really only a third of the equation if we look at the bigger picture. Quality customer service is really an alignment of understanding our setting or the environment in which the service is delivered.
And we think about the signage that we have in residence halls and the overflow of a million and a half posters in a hall lobby, and what message does that send to someone that’s showing up in a space? Or I think about move out where there’s piles and piles of donated items that people are trying to get rid of. And what does that say about our level of care for students?
Certainly could say a positive message about our care for the environment and trying to help divert landfill waste, but it could also say that we don’t maintain our physical assets and our resources and our spaces to best support students by keeping our lobbies clear of debris and pathways to fire exits clear, et cetera.
So that setting, or the environment is a third of the equation. The way that we treat people, and I say people as in student customers, but also the way that we treat our internal staff is a part of that equation. So, that people part of it matters. And then our processes are a part of that as well.
And really, as we build out processes, we need to be thinking about how we best support students. When I attended the Disney Institute, they actually talked about processes, and how many times do you go to a retailer where they have a return policy that’s extremely restrictive? You can only return something within two days if it’s not been opened and you haven’t done this and you did do this and you purchased on this credit card.
And really, they’re trying to protect their own assets, but there are 99% of people in the world who just legitimately have a need to return a product and are being negatively impacted to benefit the company in the 1% of instance they might be screwed.
So as you think about the process, you really need to be thinking about how you benefit the 99% of people who bring goodwill and good intent rather than trying to be restrictive to the 1% that constantly are doing bad things for you.
So, it’s a little bit of what was my motivation or my spark. My staff hear me talk about those things all the time, but it’s a complicated piece to get all three of those parts of the equation done correctly or adequately.

Dustin Ramsdell:
Well, yeah. I think, yeah, even just for me, the very clear just people process, those are just super clear, where I guess those are very much in a pretty clear tug of war, of you want to have maybe some checks and balances but not have it be such an onerous process that nobody even tries to begin with.
The returning stuff is a really good example, where I’m dissatisfied with this. It might just be the wrong size. I want to swap it out. But if you make that so complicated then it’s like, “Well, I’m left with something I don’t want and a blemish on my image of you as a company or a store or whatever,” to where, “I’m not going to buy anything from you anymore because it’s like, hey, you screwed me over. You got me,” whatever. Versus like I said, yes, there might be a pinch, a little dose of fraud or not … Maybe this is a strong word, but having that person be happy is going to be like, “Yeah, I’ll come back because I know you’re going to make sure I get what I want.”
And even that idea of, in that situation, the only point of feedback in what was a very positive service interaction would be that person being, “Oh, yeah, that turkey leg,” whatever. It’s like, “Could I get you something else? Do you want another turkey leg?” That would’ve been the only slight pivot, but just, yeah, they went so far and just the expediency. It’s almost like, I can’t fault you for not being like, “So what kind of kitchen do you want? This or that or whatever. I’m going to give you all the options in the world,” or whatever.
It’s like they were just trying to be really, really responsive and yeah, because I mean, it makes me think of one, obviously the old school is having petty cash or something. Yeah, like student laundry gets ruined whatever, you could just grab it and you’ll deal with reconciling it later.
But then certainly the more modern version is … I mean, I noticed sometimes they’re still cutting checks, but I guess the modern value proposition or manifestation is the institutions that are able to leverage these emergency funds, the idea of, “We want you to be here. We want you to stay here. We want you to be able to focus on your studies, be successful. So yeah, you need to repair your car because you need to get to work to be able to study, that is just a drop in the bucket in the terms of our massive institutional budget or something.”
So again, there’s going to be some checks and balances and all that, but what I’ve seen a lot of institutions doing is being really cognizant of that process and not having it be something that’s like, “Yeah, cool. We can get you that money for that car repair in two months or something.” It’s like, “That doesn’t do me any good right now because by that time I’m dropping out because I lost my job and I have to go back home,” or whatever.
So, I think I’m observing a lot of this sort of value set, I guess kind of permeating or starting to kind of come into play. And I guess for you, are there things that you’re trying to do that hopefully you maybe hope others replicate or good examples that you’re seeing elsewhere of just the future? What do you hope to see more of in this customer service area looking ahead?

Craig Kuehnert:
Yeah. I mean, I think right now, I mentioned the people part of the equation. It applies to external customers and internal customers. And coming out of the pandemic, which has been so hard on our profession and just emotionally having to navigate all of the things we had to do, we’ve really taken an internal dive here to think through the internal piece of that.
How do we better support all of the aspects of our students and professional staff? We focused over the last probably 12 months or so on how do we better support our professional staff through additional resources and care, revisions and policies? And here we’re returning now our efforts to better supporting our RAs and thinking through whether that role serves the purpose that we always thought it had and whether we’re doing the right trainings and providing the right mental health support.
But playing off of your example here just a second ago, one of the things that we’re thinking about and just coming out of winter break here have done, we compensate RAs with room and board, but we don’t provide an additional stipend at this point.
And so while the school year’s in operation and in session, our RAs are largely set. They have all of their food and their basic needs provided through the job, and we get to winter break and we keep a few halls open, but our dining center stop operation.
And in the past, we really had leaned into paying those on-call shifts out at an hourly rate, which means that RAs are getting their paycheck two to three weeks after they work those shifts. By the time the end of the pay period comes, it gets reconciled and paid out.
But as we think about care for our people and managing the relationships with our staff, it was really important for me to think through, “How do I get money to people upfront, knowing that they haven’t earned any cash money through the whole fall semester because we’re paying with room and board, and here we are at winter break, the dining centers are closed and they need to buy food today? Paying them three weeks from now for today’s food isn’t helpful.”
And so we’re able to work through a number of institutional policies with our finance office and we’re able to offer cash per diems to all of the RAs that they could pick up at the beginning of break to front all of their food costs. And so each of those policy moments matter in terms of a collective big picture as to how people view the relationship with the institution.
It took me quite a bit more work to make all of that happen, and I suspect that our satisfaction scores from RAs in general with each of those types of things incrementally will improve themselves.
So at the core of all of it, and I use this phrase. In fact, I just used it last week with our staff, but we need to understand what I would say is the NEWS of our people, the needs, emotions, wants and stereotypes of what our customer is bringing to our business. And so I think good customer service work really starts at a deep dive analysis of, what data do you have? What are your personal experiences telling you? What are the emotions and stereotypes that your client or your customer or your staff member have of your business? What emotions and stereotypes do your students have of your staff members?
And then using that as a springboard for a conversation to then look at the bigger pictures of policies or processes, people and place, and working from there to revise some structure.

Dustin Ramsdell:
What I love … I mean, just kudos to you. And I’m sure just because you’ve done your homework clearly of, so much of what we’ve talked about, I feel like there’s just really great structure and framework for people to just take away and work through to figure out how this sort of core premise and everything will manifest in their context because there’s always going to be little different things, like you said, where that winter break resident assistant is sort of an example where if a campus pays a stipend or something, it just manifests different at a different place.
But just even that is just making sure that you’re cognizant of the reality of what the implication of the policy that you’re putting in place. Well, what does that mean? Oh yeah, well, they’re getting paid because they need the money to get food, blah, blah, blah. But oh, well, I guess, yeah, the timing. That process sort of gums it up.
And I like too, that it’s the idea where at its face too, it’s not even like, “Hey, we’re not trying to pay him more or anything like that.” It’s like, “It’s the same amount of money, it’s the same budget line. We’re just looping it around to have it just come to them in a different form.” And yeah, I think that’s really great.
And I think as it has come up in a few different conversations I’ve had, and I guess very appropriate thing with Disney hovering over our conversation here is just using a little bit of imagination to think through, “Okay, this is where we’re at. This is what our policy is, and this is the implications, the impact of it. Let’s get some creativity going here. How could we think differently and have everything work a little bit better?” because I think it’s just something I see just in broader society, really is just how policies could certainly have a lot of unintended consequences or whatever.
It’s just, sometimes they’re just kind of manufactured problems. “Oh, interesting. Yeah. I mean, I guess, yeah, we don’t even have to pay that.” We could just say, “Hey, you get to stay here for free. Isn’t that good enough?” or whatever. It’s just like you keep making continuous improvement where it’s like, “Yes, okay, we offered this as something where it’s like, “You got a place to stay. You’re helping us out. That’s kind of, again, payment. That’s how it works in the academic year.”
But then it’s like, “Well, we probably should pay them.” It’s like, “Yeah, we’ll pay them hourly. Okay, cool. Yeah, well, I mean, we’re going to pay them. We should probably make sure they have the money so they can actually …” So it’s always kind of striving more towards, because I think there’s other examples where it’s like, “Oh, we pay them, but we put the money on their campus cards.”
It’s like, “Well, I mean, that’s great. It’s a good amount of money that if you equate it, maybe that’s a living wage or whatever,” but it’s like, they can only use it at certain places. And then especially during break, it’s like maybe there’s two places they could go, so all they’re eating is junk food or something.
So it’s always kind of pivoting and trying to observe and then do those assessments of just … It just makes me think of, it’s a structure to do a pulse check of just sort of, “Okay, where are we at and how does that compare with where we want to be if we really examine our values and everything?” So, I love this. Yeah, it’s so good.
But as we’re wrapping up, I mean, I think this will be a conversation, and I’m sure maybe just giving a clear tip of the hat to some of the things that you’ve engaged with on this topic, but just resources that you want to share for folks to check out that we can put in the show notes.

Craig Kuehnert:
Sure. So a few books or things that I have found to be helpful in my journey of customer service work, there is a book called Be Our Guest that is published by the Disney Institute, and it’s a very short, quick read, but it is the basics of customer service from a Disney lens. So, that’s a very easy starting point. I’m sure you can find it online at Amazon or Barnes & Noble or wherever.
And one of my favorite books is a book called Creating Magic, and it’s 10 Common Sense Principles of Leadership after a Life at Disney. And that book was written by a guy named Lee Cockerell, and he used to be an executive vice president at Disney. And so he talks through some practical examples of how he action-oriented some customer service in his leadership of the theme parks.
And then if you really wanted to go all in, and I’ve done this in several capacities and have loved it, but it’s expensive. Disney has an institute and they’re just now, after the pandemic starting to bring back the in-person options as well. But they do have an online virtual option that you can do at a self-paced module. Some of our desk management staff have been through it, or you can actually go to Disneyland or Disney World for three or four or five days and get to go in the utilidors or the tunnels underneath the parks, and you can go behind the scenes and see how they actually do all of the things that they do with a customer service lens. And I think that’s a fantastic learning experience.
And then the last book, there is a relatively new book called Becoming the Best, and it is by a guy named Horst Schulze, who was the former CEO of the Ritz-Carlton brand. And he’s got some good perspectives and a little bit of a variant from the way that Disney talks about it, but he very much talks about customer service in terms of human interactions is really just nothing more than welcome, follow through in what you say you’re going to do and then say a nice farewell at the end. And that’s really all that people need. So, he frames some of his work around that simple concept or premise.

Dustin Ramsdell:
Well, I guess, yeah, that’s kind of funny. It’s just sort concluding thoughts because you can put a lot of set dressing around, obviously like Disney, where it’s like a lot of the examples are contextualized and a theme park, where it’s extravagance and all that. But I think it has very clear connection to Residence Life, is kind of that reliability that they’re coming in with an expectation. And if they can reliably know that, that is going to be consistently met, then yeah, they’re going to be satisfied.
Because yeah, everybody wants something different, and it’s going to be hard in a Residence Life system of thousands of people to be completely exceeding every single one of their expectations at every single moment. But even just some of those core day-to-day things because it’s where these students are living day in, day out, and making sure that you can be responsive and be reliable. And certainly in that example, be pleasant, be just very cordial and respectful and those sort of things.
Those can be, again, just really simple, tangible sort of habits to get into, just like the other one of just, if you’re giving them a no, give them what you can do instead, and stuff. So I think, yeah, just a lot of great stuff and resources for folks to think about and check out and integrate into their work in Residence Life.
So thank you so much, Craig for hanging out and joining us here on ResEdChat and sharing all of your insights and everything, and we’ll have ways to connect with you and the stuff that you mentioned in the show notes.

Craig Kuehnert:
Sure, my pleasure. Happy to chat.