Year after year, Todd S. Nelson watches as Education Management Corp. adds to its list of locations. As the company expands into new cities and new states, like its recent venture into New Mexico, the more Nelson and his top team are removed from direct contact with their students.
However, that doesn’t mean they don’t have a pulse on the students’ needs.
“If you’re planning ahead and you understand your growth, make sure that you are providing the resources to be able to maintain that healthy level of contact with your customers,” says Nelson, CEO of EDMC. “Really the key is making sure that you’re planning ahead … regardless of how fast you’re growing or how big you become; (maintaining customer contact) is a very core guiding principle that will help you and your company to stay successful.”
In order to maintain that healthy level of contact, you must stay in touch with your customers, monitor and measure customer satisfaction and hold employees accountable to providing great service.
Nelson has done just that to better understand those who EDMC serves, its students, and to better determine how to make the $2 billion company (NASDAQ: EDMC) stronger.
As one of the largest providers of private post-secondary education, EDMC has four primary education institutions — Argosy University, The Art Institutes, Brown Mackie College and South University — as well as Western State University College of Law. With 20,212 employees and 136,000 students, as of October 2009, providing quality education and service is a constant priority.
“As an organization becomes larger, it’s easy, at times, to get caught up in the organizational issues,” Nelson says. “As it gets bigger, it’s easier to get more removed from the customer, and that is a huge mistake. If you’re not communicating with them, you don’t know their perception of whether you’re doing a good job or not.”
