Challenge
Seeking a Platform to Connect Students and Tutors
Educational institutions often find it difficult to streamline class scheduling and coordinate meetings between students and tutors while ensuring staff availability, enrollment, and engagement. Automated omnichannel scheduling software can help universities establish a consistent time table for each department, automate courses, secure classroom availability, and effectively connect students and instructors.
A top leader in postgraduate education, recruited SUMO Scheduler to address communication and appointment coordination challenges head-on through the implementation of cloud-based software. The technology has enabled the university to connect over 14,000 educators with students and faculty across 2,800 schools and resulted in significant improvements in the course scheduling, student engagement, and academic planning processes.
Solution
Flawless Academic Planning With SUMO
For a long time, faculty and administrators struggled to build a consistent schedule of classes. Time, space, and program constraints made it hard for the departments to prepare their schedule for the upcoming semester and ensure consistent progress. While existing rules and procedures were meant to alleviate some of the complexities, they lacked the ability to effectively distribute course sections and reach optimal enrollment goals.
The university administrators struggled to keep up with the manual assignment of courses, rooms, and individual meetings between students and tutors which lead to appointment conflicts and an inability to effectively organize students and resources. Implementing an automated scheduling software seemed like the best way to move forward.
SUMO Scheduler was selected by the organization’s leadership committee due to the platform’s balance of features and intuitive user experience. Together with its implementation partner, SUMO built an automated solution that allowed students to schedule meetings and classes with coaches straight from their community.
Faculty and staff were impressed by the platform’s ability to seamlessly pass contact details from the school’s CRM platform and to link them with participants’ calendars in order to establish common availability based on appointment type, dates, and times. This highly configurable, yet simple, system turned a previously tedious scheduling process into a well-functioning workflow.
The organization experienced first-hand a tailored approach that provides students with a summary of their appointments along with the number of times they are allowed to book a meeting with a specific faculty member, coach, or panel. Scheduled participants are automatically nurtured with regular email communication and reminders – a key functionality that tremendously reduces manual tasks and saves time.
Automated scheduling also provides transparency into the appointment status as well as the number of missed and completed meetings. With the newly implemented system, admins have no issues tracking absentees, rescheduling meeting times, or finding available classrooms.
Results
A Fast Track to Results
Since partnering with SUMO, the organization has achieved impressive results. Faculty members and administrators can easily streamline their internal scheduling process and keep students on track with the fully customized workflow which includes features such as custom fields and templates, calendar integration, and multiple location support.
SUMO’s innovative technology not only allows students to keep track of their scheduled appointments, receive timely updates and notifications, and stay connected with the tutors but it also dramatically reduces the number of missed meetings due to scheduling conflicts. Additionally, faculty members can easily see all of their appointments and assigned students from a single calendar view.
The software helps faculty members stay on top of their priorities by automating processes and eliminating scheduling errors which, in turn, leads to improved productivity and operational efficiency. With SUMO, academic departments can easily avoid double-booking classrooms to ensure meeting space availability at any given time.
The organization has a strong vision for future growth and plans to continue partnering with SUMO to fulfill them. It will continue working on various initiatives to enhance collaboration across departments and campuses to improve productivity, increase efficiencies, and enhance engagement by standardizing scheduling systems from a single multi-device omnichannel platform.
