ACUHO Award Submissions

During fall 2023, University Housing collaborated with the university's central marketing team to make changes in our communications to prospective students to clarify nomenclature and execution of marketing. The most significant project was to relaunch our website before Decision Day in January 2024. Housing's website traffic is consistently one of the highest in the uc.edu domain.

With the assistance of the university web team, the website was completely reimagined for ease of use: locating information, consistency of language, removal of superfluous content, and more.

Our team had also been hunting for a chat tool to add to our robust email/call center to provide more efficient responses to student/family questions. Less than two weeks prior to the web relaunch, our team was introduced to a chat solution (Ocelot) being implemented by Enrollment Services. In the interest of institutional consistency, we decided to use that tool as well. The chatbot was built to include a live agent option during business hours to enhance its value to our audiences. It can respond to over 100 questions, or provide information about comparable topics. The chatbot launched on Decision Day in January along with the web launch.

Earlier, in fall 2023, another significant change to the website was the addition of fully accessible virtual tours of rooms in our residence halls. This gives prospective students an idea of what to expect in various room types in a "vanilla" state, so they can imagine how they might decorate their own room.

The website's top pages have over 375,000 views since its launch on January 22, 2024. With the website and bot, the housing call center has seen significant improvement to its operations. The combination of the relaunch of web navigation and content, as well as adding the chatbot and the live agent communication options, has resulted in a significant improvement in call center and efficiency and availability. 

Thanks to the relaunch, with topics and content easier to find on the website, people are more readily able to find information without needing to contact the office to help them with each step along the way. 

The chatbot and live agent options have also significantly increased the call center's total bandwidth for incoming inquiries. In previous years, where there may have been an hours-long wait to receive a callback, no one has waited for a callback for more than 6 minutes since our January launch. Where it may have taken upwards of a week to receive a response to an email, with 1,000s of unread at any given moment, we are consistently at inbox 0.

The chatbot alone has taken on approximately one-third of all incoming inquiries made to us, as shown by the graphic below, comparing outreach to our department via all channels. 

The time between submitting a housing application and room assignment to move-in can seem very long, especially for first-year students. Although they receive ample communications from us during that time, it doesn't feel as welcoming as one-on-one attention. We bridge that gap by touching base in early July with a gift flag and a mailer to remind them of services and contacts. Also included is a sheet of pre-addressed labels so families understand how to send mail and packages to our locker center for residents.

Clients: Alex Smith, Neighborhood Operations Coordinator, and Anthony Robinson, Neighborhood Operations Manager, University Housing

Desk Assistants (DAs) are students who provide customer service to the residents, guests and visitors who approach the residence hall service center desks in campus core properties, primarily housing first-year residents. They are vital to the operations of the residence hall communities.

Typically, applicants for Desk Assistant positions are about 95% graduate and international* students, with just 5% undergraduates. The hiring pool is then highly skewed towards individuals with dissimilar University of Cincinnati and its campus life experiences, and limited knowledge of life in the US + Cincinnati. Further, many international students’ limited US English language speaking skills are not ideal for clear communication and understanding.

Recruiting takes a significant amount of time each semester to fill roughly 150 positions, and training adds even more time. Turnover makes it even more complex.

*International students are only permitted to hold jobs on campus; therefore, they tend to apply for every open “student worker” position posted. It is thought that among the international student community that the DA position is a good opportunity, which may also account for the high percentage of applicants.

Through targeted marketing and communications, recruit more undergraduate applicants for the position, generating a more balanced pool of candidates. This will create an increase in recruitment (and ideally, retention) semester-over-semester.

• Recruitment email sent via StarRez
• Below:
  • Poster
  • Flyer
  • Social
  • Digital signage
• Website, including student testimonials
  
• YouTube video

Within the first week of the Desk Assistant position opening, there were close to 200 applicants. After the application closed, nearly 300 interviews were scheduled.  

Altogether, 479 applications were completed, with 93 new hires in total. Of those new hires, 44 were undergraduate students and 49 were graduate students. Previously, 90% of new hires were graduate students, but the team was thrilled to see it drop to about 50%, exceeding the ultimate goal of about dropping 30%!

Prior to spring 2024, year end/semester end checkout had to be done one-on-one with a Resident Advisor (RA), creating scheduling inefficiencies. We require move-out appointments to help manage traffic. The concept of the Express Checkout provided residents with and alternative to waiting for a RA, or being charged for improper checkout.

Additional details about move-out were housed on our Departures and Move-out web page. The information on that page may change before submissions are judged.

Our team agreed that Express Checkout was a great success saving time for both residents and staff. Of our 7,400 spring checkouts:

• 31% completed Express Checkout
• 28% completed Traditional Checkout
• 41% did something else
  • Improper Checkouts
  • Signed up for Traditional, did Express
  • Signed up for Express, did Traditional

The residents who replied to our move-out survey rated the entire process as 4 out of 5.

Room checkout can be super quick if you follow instructions in the procedures explained below, and then follow the instructions in the video below. The QR code can be found at your community's Service Center.

Our team was thrilled to know that just over a week after the job was posted, over 200 applicants applied for the Desk Assistant position, with the majority of them being undergraduate students! The following month, about 300 interviews were taking place over the course of a week. 

In total, an impressive 479 new Desk Assistant applicants applied, resulting in 93 new hires! 44 of Desk Assistants were undergraduate students, and 49 were graduate students. 

Comparitively, 90% of new hires were previously graduate students, but it has been improved to being about 50%. The team was proud of the successful campaign and very happy to see the increase in undergraduate Desk Assistant new hires! 

To summarize, these changes have resulted in a significant improvement in call center responsiveness due to information be more readily accessible via self-help. The resulting increase in capacity to dispense information has resulted in a drastically improved perception of our department as a whole, due to quicker responses to students, families, and other stakeholders.