Customer Story

University of Glasgow

“Ombea has helped me gain greater insight into the customer experience journey across Commercial Services, and act on the feedback to improve the overall experience.”

The University of Glasgow in Scotland has a lot to be proud of. Not only is it the fourth-oldest university in the English-speaking world, it continuously ranks as one of the top 100 universities, placing it within the top 1% globally. Within the UK, it is one of the top ten institutions in the country. 

Since its foundation in 1451, UofGlasgow alumni have made their impact: Adam Smith redefined modern economics, and many top UK prime ministers, prominent legals, and business leaders have at one point passed through its halls. 

Today, the University of Glasgow has over 35,000 students spread across multiple faculties. Visitors from the UK and abroad come to the University to see the wonderful architecture that is often described by students and visitors as being like the Hogwarts school from JK Rowling’s Harry Potter series.

Problem

Providing a first-class experience for +35,000 students and visitors is no small task. Much of that responsibility falls on the shoulders of the Commercial Services team. Not only are they responsible for accommodation and dining / catering & events services, but they also manage the University of Glasgow gift shop and run printing stations, while working closely with Student and Academic services who provide Sport and support services to our students and community.

Because of the possible impact – both positive and negative – their work has on thousands of people, across the community, the team needed to understand whether students, staff, visitors, and others were satisfied with their experience across all our areas of responsibility. 

Other than occasional online surveys, we had no way of understanding our audiences’ experiences. For example, is the water temperature of the shower areas having an impact on students’ use of the facilities? Were there any menu items the catering service failed to provide for lunch that day? Even if the services wanted to act immediately to prevent negative experiences, it would be too late. 

This lack of knowledge of their audiences’ experiences also created long-term problems. Would audiences rather have a more expensive, higher quality catering experience, or is having cheaper meals more of a priority? Would audiences rather have a WiFi upgrade, or more welcoming common areas? There was no way to identify what areas needed the most work in order to provide the best experience, thus limiting services to educated guessing. 

To face these challenges, the teams needed the following: 

  • An easy performance indicator at the global and the department level, updated in real-time, to monitor and act on negative experiences. 
  • Clarity as to what audiences want and expect when interacting with the University of Glasgow, beyond just educated guesses. 
  • Anticipate potential issues before they become problems, being then able to dispatch the right teams within services to handle the problem. 

Solution

“The Ombea team has been very professional from day one, asking the right questions to understand exactly what we need. Ombea’ s also constantly innovating, which means the platform will develop as our organizational needs develop.”

Following the completion of a robust tender and evaluation process, the Commercial Services team, alongside colleagues in Student & Academic services chose Ombea. The combination of attentive customer support with a constantly developing product convinced the team of their choice. 

Working with Ombea’ s Customer Success team, the ideal setup for UofGlasgow’s goals was defined: 

  • 24 Express Tab tablets spread equally amongst the gift shop, eateries, student residence halls, print unit, reach out services and sport. 
  • 6 Online licences which allow us to canvas our users via a QR code or online link, providing a modern alternative to the hardware devices.

Because Ombea collects feedback from fourteen different touchpoints simultaneously, Commercial Services has established the “87%” performance indicator. In each of the working areas, in any given day, 87% of feedback received must be excellent. In other words, 87% of users must press the dark green smiley (Highest of 5 options). If a particular location drops below 87%, the appropriate team is notified, which then acts on the issue to get things back on track. 

To gain clarity on what audiences expect, Services have been using Ombea’ s logic function. At each touchpoint, including the 24 tablets and the Anywhere links, users are asked “How was your experience?” If they indicate complete satisfaction, the survey is complete. If, however, the user chooses any of the red, yellow and light-green options, a follow-up multiple-choice question appears: “Sorry your experience didn’t live up to your expectations, please tell us why,” from which they can choose an appropriate option (“self-service,” “cleanliness”, etc.). With this information, local teams know exactly where they need to focus their efforts long-term. 

Equally, the logic is used to determine what we do well, with follow up multiple choice options, or verbatim input prompted to enable us to understand the areas our customers enjoy, so we can celebrate these and share them with our teams.

Results

The 87% performance indicator isn’t just helpful to the teams. Every month, we close the loop with a “You Said” “We Did” approach to allow transparency across our user group about how we are performing and how we are actioning their feedback.

Once the feedback data enters the Ombea platform, it’s easy to break it down by department. This means that each week, management can see performance at the department level without having to dig through comment cards, surveys, or make educated guesses. If something’s off, management knows exactly which department they need to talk to, making for more efficient performance meetings and transparency. 

Post Tender

Following the successful implementation of the contract, we have carried out demonstrations with colleagues in Registry and within our Ecohub, with both services keen to introduce this functionality to their own offer. As such, we have seen an additional device, and 2 additional online devices added to the contract to extend the opportunity wider across UofGlasgow.

As we move into year 2 of our contract, we are now assessing our overall approach to tracking customer experience and how we can individualise it even further within services, the team at Ombea have been fantastic in providing support, insight and guidance into how we can best make that happen, using their considerable wealth of knowledge from across their portfolio, and we look forward to seeing what we can achieve in this space across 2025 and beyond.