Student Feedback Zone

The Student Advisory Team makes every effort to listen to all feedback received from Graph showing survey resultsstudents, good and bad and where possible make changes to improve the service we provide for you.

During the 2007/2008 academic year, the team dealt with 90, 489 interactions.   Although the single most popular way of contacting us was face to face (37% of total interactions),  45% of queries were received by telephone and email.  These along with post and follow up queries are dealt with by members of the Student Advisory Team working in the back office of the Student Services Centre.  

You said:  “The queues in the Student Services Centre are too long”……….

We have 

During the first few weeks of term in October which is our busiest time:

  • Employed Queue Busters to help make sure that you are in the right place and answer simple queries. In October 2008 the Queue Busters answered over 5000 queries which meant 5000 students didn’t need to queue for long, if at all!
  • Trained a dedicated member of staff to work on the ID desk with a separate queue for ID queries freeing up other staff to deal with non ID queries making a quicker more efficient service. 

Throughout the year

  • Put a secure post box at the start of the queue barriers where you can leave  forms and documentation that you don’t need to hand in, in person.    
  • Made sure that the majority of forms are available to either download from Student Resources Network or to collect from the leaflet holders in the Student Services Centre.   We also email out electronic forms wherever possible, allowing you to return them by email, post, fax or in person. 
  • Placed signs at the start of and along the queue barriers with tips on how you can reduce your queuing time or possibly avoid having to queue at all.   We explain our most common queries and how to resolve these as well as signposting to the correct place for your query.    We have also added a Tips to Save you Time section on our website. 
  • Regularly updated the plasma screen with topical information and forthcoming events such as the accommodation application deadline and housing week dates. 
  • Promoted the online payments website which can be used for credit/debit card payments as an alternative to paying in person. 

You said:  “I have to wait too long for my phone call to be answered”……..

We have:

  • Ensured that members of the team not working on the front desk are logged on to the phone system to take your calls between 9am-10am as statistics show that this is the time most of you contact us by telephon
  • Set up a floater system on our rota.  This means that the phone queue can be monitored and if it becomes busy, a team member (if available) can login and help reduce your waiting time.
  • Promoted the Accommodation and Enrolment Hotlines when they run during the summer.  Directing these calls to the hotlines frees up our phone lines for other queries. 

You said:  “It takes a long time for me to get a reply to my email”…….

We have:

  • Rota’d one member of  our  team to concentrate on answering the simple emails each day meaning that a lot of emails can be answered very quickly.  The rest of the team are then free to answer the more complex emails which often take longer to be resolved.
  • Ensured that when possible our team  answer emails in between telephone calls. 
  • Set up an auto reply email during busy times explaining that we are very busy and that it may take slightly longer to get back to you. 

Did you know?

That in the Times Higher Education Survey ‘By the Students for the Students’ the University of Southampton was rated 14th out of 101 for “helpful interested staff”

Tell us what you think

We regularly use focus groups and questionnaires to monitor students' satisfaction with our service, and to get ideas for improvements we can make. We also provide a suggestions box in the Student Services Centre atrium so you can let us know your thoughts at any time, or you can email us on ssc@soton.ac.uk.