Here at the Maricopa Community Colleges we have implemented several plans to fully understand and provide High Impact Service. One of our strategies is to hold a monthly meeting where we discuss different standards of this goal. During our meeting last week, we discussed “Excellence” and the following questions were among those addressed:

1 – What does “Excellence” mean to you?

2 – What does it mean to our customers?

3 – What do we do now, and what more can we do to create this expectation of excellence?

I immediately thought of our annual conference (formerly “SAME-TEC“, and beginning this year “HI-TEC“). I remember attending/producing the conference during my first year with MATEC and thinking “Wow! This was one of the best organized and executed events that I have attended”. It was impressive that things ran so smoothly – even behind the scenes – and the audience take-aways were so relevant and valuable. Each year after that, my experiences and contributions to the conferences seemed to get even better. Even the testimonials that I gathered from the attendees were more enthusiastic each year – with many saying “Congrats! You’ve out done yourselves” and “I’ve attended for many years and this was the best conference yet”.

My point is not to boast about MATEC’s reputation of providing exceptional events, but to illustrate a level of excellence that we have managed to establish as a standard that people expect from us. They say that “word of mouth is the best form of advertising” and we have seen this will repeat attendees and referrals. So my advice to you as a marketing person is to really think about the 3 questions mentioned above and to: 

  • Set internal standards of excellence.
  • Try to understand excellence from your customers’ perspective
  • Constantly strive to raise the bar

Lara Smith