Transcript

Robert, please tell us a bit about your role at UCNJ.

My name is Robert Deverona. I am the Director of One Stop and Advising Career and Transfer (ACT) here at UCNJ, Union College of Union County, New Jersey. Our One Stop office is our department where students come in, and they come in for anything. So advising, registration, bill payment, and financial aid. It’s an all encompassing one stop shop.

What student services does your One Stop offer?

The One Stop is built for walk-ins. That’s the primary function. It’s kind of like, hey, come in and we’ll help you whatever you need. Our advising staff is definitely welcome to make an appointment. Or if a student needs to speak to a specialist, maybe an associate director, someone a little bit higher, they’re more than welcome to make an appointment.

We’re able to accommodate that, but generally speaking, the way we function is I have a question. I’m going to the One Stop and we will tell you where to go. We found that most students don’t necessarily know where to go for their question. It could be an admissions question, but they’ve shown up at the advising office, and they’re told to go across campus.

It again is also up to the student if they want to do an in-person or virtual appointment, those are offered to them.

What do you look for when searching for a new digital tool? 

My main box is does it match with what we already have? I really strive not to change any of our procedures or protocols or anything like that to match the technology and sitting through, you know, countless number of technologies, meetings or onboardings and a lot of things I’m like, okay, so we would have to do it this way. And the person says, yes, this is how we do it. So if you want this product, you will also do it this way. Or they’ll say, no, we match you. And that’s really what I’m looking for, our product will match whatever you need it to do.

How do you measure the success of the newly implemented digital tool?

Yeah, like twofold. So after a student checks in or meets with us and remote student services, we send them a student satisfaction survey. It’s able to tell us what’s working, what’s not working mostly, or if students are having issues with certain things. And we kind of parse through that. As long as what I’m reading back in terms of critiques of a system isn’t, you know, the system didn’t let me in, or I was waiting 20 minutes because my mic wasn’t working. The microphone didn’t like, you know, the technical aspects. I count that as a win. Like technology, that’s the kind of stuff that. If the student doesn’t realize, doesn’t notice it, that means it’s good.

Using WaitWell

How would you describe the implementation experience of WaitWell?

It is generally across the board, it’s a very easy system. I thought it would take, we onboarded it or we launched it, I want to say in a week. It went from purchasing to getting the base shells up, in probably like a week and then I was actually in the background going through and putting in like the extra services that we offer, extra departments, and the fact that that was so easy and it was, and you guys were so responsive. I don’t know if that’s necessarily a feature, but that is a huge benefit.

Which WaitWell report is your favorite, and why?

One of my advisors does the weekly report on all of the campuses, and she uses the, I think it’s the by location. Yeah, it’s the by location report. Because again, we have our 3 locations and it just gives that great snapshot of how many students we’re seeing during that week. And then, how many were seen in each department or software.

What service? and then we use that and we compare it to a year to year comparison in every report. Just so we can see, was there an uptick? Was there a downtick? And it also tells us for future planning. If we go back a week, at the beginning of the previous week, we look forward and say, okay, great job.

What’s it looking like for peak registration last year? What did it look like two years ago? Do we need more staffing? Do we need more people on one campus was the beginning of registration really crazy in Cranford versus Elizabeth that that data is just, it’s so valuable. Like we, we, we really rely on it.