It’s been a while since our last blog post, but we wanted to let you know what we are currently working on and have accomplished. Over the past several months, we have been busy keeping up with the demand for our services and working towards our goal of automating transactional processing by 80% or more.
Office of the University Registrar (OUR) went live with SalesForce on November 10th. SalesForce allows us to manage our customer service experience and operations. Sandra Colfer (project lead for OUR) along with James Mundie, and Lori Thompson from OUR collaborated with Computer Services during the implementation. After 10 weeks spent on implementation, the hard work paid off in the form of insights gained from our contact with our customers. The first surprising insight showed that our customer contact is about evenly distributed between email, phone, and walk-in. Another fascinating insight we gleaned from the data was that more than 50% of our customers are former students or alumnae. With the implementation of SalesForce, the Office has begun transitioning to a modern method of customer service delivery.
In an earlier post, we wrote about our archiving project. In fall 2014, we completed archiving 100% of academic records dating back to the late 1890s. Maria O’Clair, Office of the University Registrar project lead, collaborated with Computer Services to have the digital images of the documents stored in the University’s imaging system. The scanning function was outsourced to Scantek, and the original documents are now stored at University Archive.
New changes were announced for our PA Residency application process. Formerly, students mailed, faxed, or dropped off their petitions in person, a method that had the potential to expose sensitive information to others. In our new process, we only accept in-state tuition application documents via TUsafesend to ensure sensitive information is not compromised. Additionally, Akiyah Baugh, Office of the University Registrar Lead Software Developer, collaborated with the Portal Team to develop a PA Residency management application. The web based application helps our office track applications, render decisions, and automate communication.
In fall 2014, we experimented with two very cool processes through collaboration with the Banner Student Competency Center. The first process we sandboxed was on automating registration setup. When the process is fully developed, it will reduce many hours of data entry tasks to minutes. The second project we sandboxed was a customized communication related to priority registration. The emails messages were tailored to each student informing them about their priority registration date, holds, Fly in 4 comments, and other pertinent information related to registration. For the Spring 2015 priority registration cycle, custom emails were delivered to over 28,000 undergraduate and graduate students on Main Campus and undergraduate students at Temple Japan.
In late fall 2014, we implemented another communication process where students receive an email when an OUR staff member processes a registration transaction stemming from a petition or a schedule revision. The registration transaction emails are automatically sent to students at 3:00 AM and include any administrative registration activity processed the prior day.
Finally, an update on electronic transcript: We received many inquiries from current students, alumni, and former students about the availability of an electronic transcript. We are making great progress towards electronic transcript implementation. Darnay Campbell, Maria O’Clair, and a team from Parchment will begin end to end testing very soon. Electronic transcripts will allow nearly instantaneous secure delivery, with the option to track delivery and opens. We are very excited about our next big step into e-transcripts.