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Editorial: ASUCLA needs to interact with students to better meet consumer needs

By Editorial Board

Sept. 21, 2016 11:43 p.m.

Every business, even university stores, must adapt to consumers’ ever-changing tastes and preferences.

Associated Students UCLA is no stranger to this fact. It has had to deal with instances of revenue loss for reasons ranging from from the Great Recession to the weather affecting its beverage sales, and has changed its merchandise and restaurant offerings in response.

As the new academic year begins and remodeling efforts are being planned for the A-Level of Ackerman Union, ASUCLA must implement a reliable system to solicit students’ feedback on the quality and availability of its services.

ASUCLA’s board of directors, which is made up of UCLA students, faculty and alumni, make administrative decisions reflecting the student body’s interests. However, as with any consumer service, it is difficult to gauge consumers’ tastes and preferences without asking what they are. Board members can more effectively make those decisions if they know what students want to see from their student union.

While college students’ educational supply needs, such as pens and notebooks, aren’t likely to drastically change year-to-year, students’ consumer interests, like restaurant and service preferences, are. Every year, thousands of students join or leave the student body, and such fluidity notably alters ASUCLA’s customer base. Certain restaurants and services that were popular before may not be so a year or two onward, and ASUCLA needs to key in to these changing interests.

For example, for nearly all of the spring quarter in 2015, ASUCLA reported that the Wetzel’s Pretzels store on Ackerman’s first floor performed above its budget expectations. However, almost consistently throughout the 2015-2016 academic year, ASUCLA reported that Wetzel’s Pretzels performed below its budget expectations – a stark contrast to the previous year. Rather than having to guess if Wetzel’s was underperforming because of short-term market fluctuations or a long-term downward trend, ASUCLA could have surveyed students early on in the fall 2015 quarter about which businesses they were more likely to visit and which they were likely to avoid. In this sense, surveys can provide insight about consumer preferences that revenue data cannot.

ASUCLA should interact more with the student body to see what they think about ASUCLA facilities and services. Since students are ASUCLA’s primary customers, polling can help it understand how students feel about current Ackerman services, which services they need and which services would make students’ visit to Ackerman more productive and enjoyable. A better interaction can also help students better understand how ASUCLA works and have a voice in administrative decisions.

Thus, it is in ASUCLA’s best interest to implement a system to regularly survey students about their interests, so as to not only allow it to plan and budget accordingly, but also change its restaurant and merchandise services to fit any changing student interest. A reasonable goal for the system could consist of quarterly surveys sent out via email to the student body, and also include customer surveys given to those who make purchases at Ackerman.

Such a customer-feedback system would, at worst, reinforce that what is already in the Ackerman is satisfactory, and at best, give ASUCLA good insight into what it can do to keep students from looking elsewhere to satisfy their needs.

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