ELVIS Team
From Business Intelligence
Contents |
[edit] Project Contact
If you have questions or would like more information, please contact Doug Levy (douglevy@umich.edu).
[edit] Project Description
By effectively leveraging the in-house-developed application, ELVIS (ELectronic Visitor Information System) along with other software, tools and techniques in conjunction with M-Pathways data, the Office of Financial Aid (OFA) has been very successful in managing the volume of activity related to the administration of financial aid at the University of Michigan. To quantify some of the challenges OFA has met during the past year:
- 20,000 -- student applications for aid
- 60,000 -- phone calls received
- 15,000 -- walk-in visits
- 250,000 -- document pages received
- 500,000 -- e-mails and/or letters sent
- 650,000 -- hits by students on financial aid self-serve Wolverine Access transactions
- 50,000 -- view-only hits by parents on financial aid self-serve Wolverine Access transactions
[edit] Business Need
- Satisfy the high customer service expectations of students, parents and others, and achieve OFA's high standards for operational efficiency.
- Provide comprehensive records of current and previous contacts between OFA counselors and student and non-student visitors.
- Enable better resource planning in terms of scheduling counselors assigned to walk-in consulting duties.
[edit] System/Application & Data Sources
ELVIS is a Microsoft Access-based automated student sign-in, queue management, and reporting system that uses student records and financial aid data from M-Pathways. In-person and phone contact data are uploaded nightly to the M-Pathways system as communication records, which automatically include the visitor's name and uniqname if available, the date of the visit, the name of the counselor who advised the student plus any comment or other information the counselor enters. These records are included in the various monthly reports, and they are available for ad hoc analyses as well.
[edit] Project Purpose, Scope, & Deliverables
- Streamline, automate, and document OFA counseling sessions.
- Provide counselors with convenient access to a visitor's record so they can personalize their greeting and customize their service to suit the visitor's needs.
- Provide counselors with historical information regarding a visitor's contacts with OFA to make advising sessions more productive.
- Generate monthly management reports and trends analyses, that enable managers to determine appropriate staffing levels and assign staff accordingly
- Simplify the process for assigning more or fewer counselors to walk-in advising based on the number of visitors waiting.
- Evaluate walk-in and telephone counseling services by collecting and analyzing data such as volume, average wait times, peak wait times, average advising time, and so on.
- Combine metrics from the management reports, such as average counseling time, with the student-specific data from M-Pathways to identify trends that indicate the need for additional training, either generally for the entire staff or more specifically for an individual.
- Replace the publicly available visitor sign-in sheet with an electronic sign-in process, which increases visitors' privacy.
- Eliminate issues related to the sign-in and waiting-room experience for visitors, such as names inadvertently crossed off, students attempting to put their names ahead on the list, illegible handwriting, and so on.
[edit] Audience/Users
- OFA administrators
- OFA counselors
- Other OFA staff that support the counseling process
[edit] Project Sponsors/Partners
- Office of Financial Aid
[edit] Duration/Timeline
OFA developed and implemented the Electronic Visitor Information System in Summer 2005, and the office extended its functionality to support phone contacts in September 2006.