Westchester Community College Student Management

Westchester Community College, is a New York-based state university that offers more than 60 associate and certificate programs in 36 different subject areas. It was founded in 1946 as the Institute of Applied Arts and Sciences and since then has grown into the county’s largest educational institution.

With a total number of 24,000 students each semester, it’s only natural that Westchester Community College experienced some growing pains — especially in terms of student service.

Their commitment to student success made them rethink their service strategy and try out new approaches.

Before: Slow, Inefficient Handling of Student Issues

For a long time, Westchester’s student service center would go about student management the old-fashioned way — with sign-in sheets and manual registrations.

Students wanting to resolve some matter would first go to the secretary, fill out the forms and then would have to wait for student counselors to receive them. At a first glance, this wasn’t a complicated setup, though its flaws became apparent rather quickly.

Namely, there was no way for counselors to know how many students required their service and for what purpose. The problem was further exacerbated by the sheer volume of different services and counsellings offered by Westchester Community College:

• Educational plans and courses.
• Assessing abilities and interests.
• Career planning and job placement.
• Financial programs and emergency aid.

Additionally, in the interest of accessibility, Westchester Community College maintains special disability services aimed at impaired students.

With a huge number of students coming in to receive a wide array of different services, it would often result in crowded waiting area, mismanaged wait times and, naturally, a lot of complaints.

Needless to say, things needed to change. That’s why Westchester Community College decided to ditch its inefficient queuing system and opt out for a more elegant queuing solution — Qminder.

How Qminder Changed Queuing at Westchester

Despite adopting the Qminder queuing system — which is a significant upgrade from sign-in sheets — the queuing process at Westchester Community College did not change that drastically.

The basics remained the same; what changed is the use of everyone’s time. Now, students are not expected to fill out the paper forms themselves. A secretary wielding an iPad collected all the necessary information in but a fraction of the time: a student’s name, their ID, and reason for visit.

Each counselor at Westchester is in charge of a specific service. When a secretary registers some student for their service, counselors receive a notification via Qminder Dashboard. This is perhaps the greatest departure from the way it used to be.

As mentioned before, previously there was no way of knowing when, and how many, students signed up for a certain service. Effectively, counselors could not properly anticipate their workload — they had no means of preparing in advance.

This changed with the adoption of Qminder. A counselor gets all the necessary information beforehand and can quickly adapt to the inflow of students.

As a result, the queuing process stops being a time-sinker and students get to resolve their matters efficiently and quickly.

Service Data — the Main Benefit of the Qminder Solution

The biggest advantage Qminder brought to the table, however, is its Service Intelligence aspect.

In stark contrast to their pre-Qminder period, when Westchester counselors were pretty much in the dark in terms of service statistics, implementing Qminder shed some light on these numbers.

With Qminder, the managers at Westchester Community College get access to such service stats as wait time, service time, visitor history, etc. The ability to measure these vital stats means the administration finally knew how well they were doing.

And thanks to Qminder, they were doing better than ever — average wait time went down as a result of smoothing out the queuing process.

Service data makes it easier to gauge performance, find weak spots in your service strategy, and make quick changes on the fly. If wait or service times are too big on some service line, Westchester College administration can readjust their resources to adapt to the situation.

Perhaps more crucially, the employees of student service center now know the demands and needs of their students. Qminder tracks every interaction, and with stats on how many students require a specific service or want to resolve a certain issue, the administration can introduce much-needed changes.

Happy students are the best testament to Westchester’s service success.

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