Before my time in education, I did communications work in the hospitality and tourism industry—so the idea of customer service being an essential part of a brand's promise wasn't new to me. However, I did need to figure out what customer service meant in an educational environment. Fortunately, Dr. Terrill not only values communications as an essential part of school leadership, but also realizes that meaningful change starts with understanding the problem. When I asked for the space to do that work, he gave it, allowing us to take a closer look at what was really happening in our schools. 

After conducting multiple surveys, interviewing front office staff, and analyzing our online presence and enrollment process, we came to a humbling realization. Our service challenges had little to do with the attitudes or temperaments of our frontline employees, and almost everything to do with how we as leaders supported those team members. The issue was rooted in a lack of internal processes, inconsistent training and a need for leadership to address both. We had also failed to give front office team members ownership of service as part of their role, and hadn’t established any accountability for falling short of service expectations. This lack of leadership support was jeopardizing our brand.

We began this process guided by CPCSC’s motto: “Pursue Your Excellence.” Just as we encourage our students and staff to pursue excellence in their goals, we wanted to pursue excellence in our customer service and in our brand. 

Listening to our office teams was critical. Survey results made it clear we needed to invest in resources. So we secured a new translation service for on-demand support, created materials to aid new families and developed a Front Office Playbook. This continuously updated online resource is now the go-to for documents, FAQs and policies. It supports onboarding for new office team members and serves as the standard reference for office procedures.

In close partnership with our chief human resource officer, we also launched a yearlong training process, bringing 40 front office employees together once a month for two- to three-hour sessions. We scheduled them at midday, so office teams were still available to handle the busiest periods of arrival and dismissal in their buildings. We also leveraged a small number of predesignated e-learning days in our district’s academic calendar for some of the sessions.

During training sessions, district department leaders presented on the skills and knowledge gaps identified through earlier surveys and interviews. Our superintendent regularly attended these meetings to reinforce their importance. Hearing directly from district leaders helped front office staff understand the “why” behind policies and procedures, creating the continuity and consistency we needed to align expectations across buildings.

We covered a lot of ground in these sessions, from difficult parent interactions to scenario-based safety training to day-to-day use of our student information system (SIS). But it wasn’t all business; we also made time for cross-department and cross-building connections. Despite working together regularly via phone or email—sometimes for multiple years—we had team members from different departments or buildings who had never met face-to-face. These trainings gave employees the chance to connect in person for the very first time.

When they hear about our approach, other districts often ask us how we handle office coverage during training. This is where leadership can make a clear, intentional choice to prioritize service. If we want to strengthen the capacity of the people who interact most with our families and community, we must collectively commit to consistent, high-quality training and professional development. When a building principal asked me what to do if the phone rang while their assistant was out, we discussed how supporting this work might mean stepping into roles we don’t usually fill. Again, I’m grateful to my superintendent for his support in that conversation. 

In the second phase of training, we intentionally moved away from the phrase “customer service” after reading Unreasonable Hospitality by restaurateur Will Guidara. I highly recommend the book; it’s an opportunity to think about how to adapt strategies from another industry to ours. As Guidara sees it, customer service is more about completing a checklist of tasks than building a relationship. “Getting the right plate to the right person at the right table is service,” he writes. “But genuinely engaging with the person you’re serving, so you can make an authentic connection—that’s hospitality.”

We coached our office teams on this concept and asked each department and building to implement a hospitality practice of their own design. We intentionally asked administrators not to lead that process, but instead, to listen to their assistants and office teams as they identified how to make existing processes more welcoming. This gave our front office staff the ownership that was previously missing in their service interactions—and helped our administrators take on that supporting role.

The results were meaningful. Our custodial and maintenance team began walking visitors to their destinations rather than just giving directions. Transportation committed to greeting every student by name each morning. One elementary school redesigned how it supports new families on the first day of school—inviting parents and students to come in early, meet their teacher, tour the school and receive some branded swag. Our high school even physically reconfigured its front office, shifting the feel from a crowded transit space to a calmer, more welcoming environment. Improvements differed by school and department, but each change succeeded because the people closest to the work designed it. 

But what about situations where there’s little buy-in for hospitality? This is also a leadership responsibility. If hospitality is an expectation, it must be built into the evaluation process and formally assessed. Over time, it becomes clear whether a role is the right fit for a team member. As leaders, we are responsible for setting expectations and addressing gaps when they arise. If we only ever design goals or procedures around our most resistant team members, we stall progress. In our situation, when we empowered our team members to take ownership, almost all of them exceeded our expectations. 

While everything I’ve described so far was a joint effort between communications and HR, our comms department (a small but mighty team of two people) also began looking at the ways our families and community encounter our district online. For many families, your website is their first experience with your district. It sets the tone for your brand before anyone ever walks through your doors. So, after analyzing our website traffic, enrollment procedures and online presence, we made a few key improvements.

First, we redesigned our most commonly visited website pages. These are typically the same across districts: calendar, food services/nutrition, human resources and student handbooks. For these pages, we focused on providing better information and easier access. With the upcoming deadlines regarding Title II and online accessibility, it’s likely your district is already reevaluating content on these pages. This is an opportunity to evaluate their design through a lens of hospitality at the same time. 

Next, we installed a chatbot on our website. Consider this: If a parent walks into your front office with a question and the answer isn’t immediately available, your front desk team doesn’t hand the parent a binder and ask them to figure it out. They find the answer. They call other departments. They follow up. Without a chatbot, websites often do the opposite, leaving families alone to search through pages of information like an online seek-and-find exercise. A chatbot can close that gap. 

Finally, we redesigned the enrollment process for kindergarteners and new students, with strong support from our technology team and SIS managers. Together, we found that the existing enrollment process was cumbersome and unwelcoming. For some families, enrollment involved up to 13 steps, many of which also required waiting on internal processes before they could progress. We had overcomplicated our student onboarding and lost sight of hospitality. After the redesign, families now complete five steps at most between clicking “Enroll” and their student’s first day. This process sets the tone for how new families experience our district moving forward. 

I highlight these changes as a reminder that hospitality isn’t always a person-to-person process. It can also be found in the tools and platforms we’re using to connect with our school community.

If your district is considering a service or hospitality initiative to intentionally shape and strengthen its brand, here are five steps you'll need to take: 

• Set a clear vision and outcomes. Define what success looks like and connect it to your brand promise. This aligns your next steps with how you want your district to be perceived by others.

• Simplify systems. Identify friction points and make processes easier to navigate. Take advice from the team members affected by those processes as you redesign.

• Invest in training as infrastructure. Regular, required training for front offices must be a commitment from the top levels of the district. After our yearlong training initiative, we still follow up with office teams at least once a semester to review information.

• Provide tools and resources. Listen to your teams and equip them to do their work well. Trust them when they tell you what they need. Buy tools or build resources to help them.

• Build accountability. Embed hospitality into evaluation systems. Define expectations and address gaps. Leadership must remain committed to the accountability process. 

The changes we’ve made haven’t just improved our hospitality; they’ve shaped how families experience our district. After our yearlong training process, surveys of our community showed that more than 93% of families were satisfied with the service they received at their schools. More than 90% felt their schools valued relationships with families based on their interactions with office staff. 

Your district’s brand is not a logo. It’s how people talk about you when you’re not in the room. And in a crowded and competitive education landscape, those experiences in the front office are often what set one district apart from another. When district leaders intentionally design frontline interactions with hospitality in mind, the brand takes on a different shape. The most important step is ensuring hospitality is not left solely to frontline staff, but instead facilitated intentionally from the top.