Peter Wagstaff is a Senior Lecturer and Marketing Academic at Monash University. We speak to Peter about customer experience in higher education. We ask the question: Who actually is a university's customer? We debate the reasons why bureaucratic organisations struggle to provide great experiences. And Peter shares a controversial opinion of why it's sometimes actually good to make a student's life difficult.

Resources mentioned:

• The CX field-of-study is being driven by industry bodies like Gartner, Forrester, McKinsey, PwC and Harvard Business Review.
• The 4 Ps of goods marketing and the 7 Ps of services marketing
• "What people really desire are not products but satisfying experiences" (source: Abbott, 1955, Quality and Competition).
• Education learning management systems (LMS) such as Moodle, Blackboard, etc.
• Trying Slack as an alternative tool for student interaction
• The Zone of Proximal Development (theory), by Lev Vygotsky.

Key takeaways (starts at 27:52):

1. Know who the customer is—that is the ultimate truth
2. Find ways to exceed expectations
3. The experience your customer has is partly beyond your control
4. "What people really desire are not products but satisfying experiences"