Part I: Understanding the Experience

For Grace Becker, APR, a recent change to her job title reflects a much bigger shift underway in her school district.

Earlier this year, Becker’s title at Eden Prairie Schools in Minnesota changed from director of marketing and communications to director of marketing and customer experience, formalizing the district’s increased emphasis on work that has been a priority for more than a decade. And while the word “customer” may not come naturally to some in public education, the idea behind it is familiar: What is it actually like to interact with your school district?

Customer service training isn’t new in Eden Prairie. Neither is the belief that families should feel welcomed and supported. What’s changing is how intentionally the district is approaching the full experience surrounding those interactions.

“We are going beyond thinking about the way we react when a parent, student or community member comes to us,” Becker said. “How do we go to them?

It’s a question taking on new significance as school districts consider the relationship between everyday experiences and public trust.

New research from NSPRA and Qualtrics found that 75% of surveyed school communication professionals believe positive experiences with their districts strengthen trust. Yet nearly half described interactions across their districts as inconsistent. And while 63% said their districts place a high or very high priority on creating positive experiences for external audiences, only 38% rated their districts as very or extremely effective at providing consistently positive interactions.

That gap raises a bigger question: What changes when a district moves from valuing good customer service to approaching customer experience strategically?

The shift goes beyond better customer service training. It means looking more closely at how a district listens, where families encounter friction, who is involved in improving those experiences and the systems shaping them in the first place. 

Start With the Experience, Not the Org Chart

A family registering a child for school may interact with a website, an enrollment office, a school administrative assistant and a technology platform. A transportation question may begin with a bus driver, move to a school office and eventually reach the transportation department. Internally, those interactions belong to different departments. To the family, they are all the district.

That means improving customer experience requires looking beyond the individual interaction to what is happening around and behind it. Sometimes what appears to be a customer service problem is actually a process problem.

Brooke Allen, APR, saw that firsthand when leaders in her district, Crown Point Schools in Indiana, began talking about improving customer service. Ideas included customer service training and even “secret shopper” approaches. But Allen, director of communications for Crown Point, encouraged the district to first step back and better understand the problem.

“We were on our way to skipping the research step [of the four-step research, planning, implementation and evaluation process],” Allen said during the first module of the Customer Service track of NSPRA Academy. “We hadn’t mapped the problem to figure out what was really going on.”

That research included listening to frontline employees who interacted with families every day. What the district learned shifted its approach.

“What we uncovered was that we were the problem,” Allen said, referring not to frontline staff, but to organizational processes that were making it harder for them to serve families effectively.

Enrollment offered one example. By bringing front office and technology staff together to map the new-family registration experience from beginning to end, the district identified unnecessary steps and handoffs. A process that had included 13 components was reduced to five.

“There were so many handoffs, so we stopped handing off so much,” Allen said.

The example points to a different starting question. Rather than wondering how to get employees to provide better customer service, districts might first ask: What is the person on the other side actually experiencing? Where do they start? What happens next? How many people, departments or systems do they encounter? Where does ownership become unclear? Where might someone get stuck?

For Allen’s district, mapping the experience led to a simpler registration process. Elsewhere, it might reveal the need for clearer instructions, fewer handoffs, a redesigned form or a better-defined point of contact. The goal is to understand the experience before deciding how to improve it.

Listening Becomes Part of the System

For Becker, that same shift toward understanding the experience is showing up in how her district gathers feedback.

Eden Prairie Schools has long used entrance and exit surveys, but over the past year, it has begun turning them into a more systematic feedback process, with intentional timing and a consistent cadence. New families are asked about their experience after they have had time to settle into the district, including whether they felt welcomed, whether teachers connected with them and whether they’d like someone from the district to reach out. Exit feedback can help identify patterns among families who leave and potentially reconnect with them later.

The goal is not simply to collect more data, but to create a more intentional process for listening and acting on what the district learns.

That approach is also taking shape in Aurora Public Schools in Colorado, where Chief Communications Officer Patti Moon describes her district as working to become a “listening and learning organization.”

APS gathers feedback through superintendent listening tours, school visits, advisory groups and surveys, and has built infrastructure around that listening. A Survey Governance Committee oversees an annual survey calendar, helping coordinate when and why stakeholders are asked for feedback. A Survey Governance Framework helps ensure feedback is collected with a purpose, reviewed by the right people and used to inform decisions.

Moon shared the approach during NSPRA and Qualtrics’ recent “From Friction to Trust” webinar, along with another important piece of the district’s strategy: making what it learns visible. APS shares survey results through public dashboards and is continuing to focus on action planning, closing the feedback loop and communicating what it plans to improve.

Together, those structures address a challenge that can undermine even well-intentioned listening efforts: asking people for feedback without a clear plan for what happens next. The shift is not necessarily about asking more questions. It is about becoming more intentional about when districts listen, who sees what they learn and how that information makes its way into decisions and action.