Before you can start overhauling your approach, you have to know where your district’s customer service currently stands. In Lawrence Township, Altemeyer partnered with the American Association of School Customer Service (AASCS) to spearhead a districtwide service audit. “We built the framework for what we wanted to do, what we were looking for, our objectives—but we needed an unbiased third party to conduct the audit,” she explains.

AASCS used a “secret shopper” approach to evaluate each of Lawrence Township’s schools with both phone calls and in-person visits. The results were encouraging. “We really did well overall,” Altemeyer says. “Our staff were professional, caring and committed. Our information was accurate. In-person interactions were warm. Schools could articulate their identities and programs.” The audit also provided a clear blueprint for success: “Our highest-performing sites had clear expectations that were shared amongst the staff, and they were very confident in their front office practices,” she says.

Responsiveness, however, was an issue for some buildings. “At one of our schools, someone called not once, but twice, and the call was not returned,” says Altemeyer. “Obviously, that wasn’t a real family, but if it had been, we just lost them.” And across the board, the finer details needed a little work. “If I call with a question, am I just referred to the website, or am I given the information?” she says. “Is the staff member ending the conversation with limited language—like ‘Okay, bye’—or are they asking, ‘Is there anything else I can help you with?’”

At Orangeburg County School District (OCSD), a 27-school district in South Carolina, Dr. Erica Taylor took a different tack. For Taylor, assistant superintendent for communications and business and community partnerships, the stakes of customer service extend well beyond enrollment. “Our Economic Development Center has shared with us that companies choose to settle in locations based on the experiences that they have in those communities—including with our schools,” Taylor explains. “So we want to make certain that OCSD families feel they’re being served at the highest level.”

That meant first knowing where the district stood. Taylor and her team began by analyzing customer service best practices from other districts and even private sector businesses, comparing what they saw in their own offices to these benchmarks. They also surveyed families and staff about the district’s service quality. “Listen to your families—whether that means running formal surveys or just listening to people who call to talk about their experience,” says OCSD Communications and Graphic Design Specialist Hatara Tyson. “Your families will tell you exactly what you need to do.”

By listening to their families, OCSD found gaps they wanted to address. “We weren’t getting to the phones in time, or we were putting people on hold too long,” says Tyson. Front office staff were also stretched thin: When they were on the phone, walk-ins suffered, and when they greeted a walk-in, callers got left on hold.

Neither district meant these initial evaluations to be punitive; they simply wanted to find out where they had room to grow. Armed with this new understanding of their baselines, both could make targeted improvements to their customer service.

Once you understand your baseline, the next step is to build the standards and training your staff will need to meet your customer service bar. That work has to start at the district level.

At OCSD, Taylor and Tyson created a comprehensive customer service guide that was distributed to all district and school office staff. This resource detailed the district’s protocols for customer interactions, from the maximum time a caller should be put on hold (one minute) to instructions for de-escalating a conversation with an angry stakeholder. Working with building-level leaders, they also made school-specific fact sheets for each front office. “They’re two-sided: facts about the school on one side and a calendar on the other, with the most important dates,” says Taylor. “That way, when parents call asking when prom, testing or graduation is, that person at the front desk immediately has the answer.” 

Of course, front office staff aren’t the only school employees who interact with families. “Many school-based roles are designed around specialized expertise—whether that’s teaching, finance or operations—rather than formal customer service training,” said Taylor. “Yet every interaction with a student, parent or community member shapes their experience with the district." To make customer service a shared expectation, the OCSD team also included practical guidance for phone, email and in-person interactions in their districtwide communications guide.

At Lawrence Township, Altemeyer is thinking about all this as well. “We’ve been having conversations with human resources, thinking about our new hire orientations and asking ourselves: Are we providing professional development to all staff members on that excellence that we’re expecting?” she says. “Because if we don’t tell them what we expect, how can we hold them to it?”

To that end, Altemeyer is also working on a “Lawrence Township Standard of Excellence” to be rolled out at their upcoming administrative retreat. “It’s for all employees, but we are building this with our frontline staff in mind—because those 30 or so people can make or break the experience of a prospective family,” says Altemeyer. “But when systems are clear and staff members feel supported, customer service is going to improve without adding to workload.”

Building the playbook is only half the work. You also need your building-level leaders to carry it through to their schools. After all, families experience your district through their school, not your central office—and each building has its own programs, calendars and personalities. Your principals know that ground-level reality better than anyone at the central office could. That’s exactly why both OCSD and Lawrence Township brought their principals into this work early.

Engaging building-level leaders means helping them understand the baselines of their individual schools: what they’re already doing well and what needs improvement. At Lawrence Township, Altemeyer was careful to share this information in a way that brought leaders along rather than discouraged them.

“First, we gave our principals a holistic snapshot—that 30,000-foot view,” she tells us. “Obviously, we highlighted what we were doing well, but we also shared some of the common challenges across buildings: those first impressions, that messaging, that phone experience. Those concerns aren’t just for one school to be looking at—they’re for all of us.” Every school also received a physical folder with their individual audit results, including a written summary of their performance. “We did not share that information with anybody other than that leader,” Altemeyer clarifies.

This strategic rollout allowed principals to privately see how they compared to the rest of the district without experiencing any public shame. Next came the hard part: leading a culture shift toward customer service. “We’ve got outstanding leaders in our schools, and we have charged them with leading this in their buildings,” says Altemeyer. And lead they have. Remember that school that missed the auditor’s call not once, but twice? “That principal took a good, hard look in the mirror, and he has recultured that program,” Altemeyer says. “He has raised the bar, set the expectations and turned their performance around.”

OCSD got their building-level leaders on board early with the development of their site-specific cheatsheets. “Because they had to help us make those fact sheets, we also got buy-in from the principals,” says Tyson. They have since equipped principals and other building-level administrators to lead professional development sessions on customer service during early release days.

Like most improvement strategies, overhauling your customer service is an iterative process. “It’s important to recognize that this is an ongoing initiative, not a one-and-done. It’s a living, breathing concept,” says Altemeyer. “We'll always have to be mindful of customer service, just like we’ll always have to be mindful of instruction. It’s not going to go away.”

So once you’ve set your customer service standards and trained your staff, it’s time to evaluate. What has improved as a result of your districtwide efforts? And—perhaps more importantly—what still needs work?

At OCSD, Taylor and Tyson tapped retired district educators to evaluate their improvements by calling school offices or visiting in person. “Most of them have had leadership roles—they’re retired principals or other leaders,” she says. “They have significant experience with parents and understand the nuances of our district—so we knew we could trust expertise, but more importantly, their judgments.”

Evaluators scored their interactions on a detailed rubric based on the customer service guide, answering questions like: “Was the phone answered within three rings? Was the greeting friendly, professional and aligned with district standards? Did they use positive language, even in challenging situations?” Likewise, at Lawrence Township, Altemeyer plans to run another “secret shopper” audit in the fall—about a year after the first one.

While the process will never fully be finished, both districts are already seeing the fruits of their labor. In stakeholder feedback surveys, OCSD saw a significant increase in positive experience reported by parents and community members, as well as increased engagement with their communication platforms. “The level of engagement with our parents, the way that they responded and the way that they feel about the district—I think all of that shows that what we’ve been doing as it relates to customer service has been successful,” says Tyson.

Further proof of Lawrence Township’s success is in their enrollment numbers. “We were the only school district in our county that didn’t lose enrollment last fall,” says Altemeyer. “I can help get those people in the door, but our schools have to do the work—and they have.”

At the end of the day, it’s important to remember why you’re putting all this effort into customer service. Yes, it can improve your brand. Yes, it can help stop enrollment drains. But it’s also just the right thing to do. “I understand I’m oversimplifying it, but this all comes back to the golden rule: treating others the way we want to be treated,” says Altemeyer. And as Taylor points out, how you treat families who enter your offices is a good indication of how you’ll treat their kids. “Parents and guardians leave their most prized possessions with us for eight hours a day,” she says. “They have to feel like we will care for their children just as much as they would.”