Admissions and student services for a private university

The problem

The academic calendar imposes a curve that no fixed headcount handles well. The admissions and enrolment period concentrates most of the year's contact, and an enquiry left unanswered then is not deferred: it becomes an enrolment somewhere else. For the rest of the year the same team is underused. International recruitment adds a time-zone problem, because an applicant in Bogotá or Mexico City makes contact outside Spanish office hours. Meanwhile the registry accumulates repetitive administrative work, with documentation that arrives incomplete and that somebody has to chase.

What we did

• Size against the academic calendar, with a surge band contracted for the enrolment period and a stable core team across the rest of the year
• Cover Latin American time zones from the corridor, so an applicant in Colombia or Mexico is answered within their working day rather than the following morning
• Separate the admissions enquiry, which is commercial and has competitors, from file administration, which is procedural
• Take on the chasing of incomplete documentation as a defined process with structured follow-up rather than ad hoc reminders
• Work inside the university's own student management system, without creating a parallel record

What would be measured

The indicators the service would be run against, with their definitions. No values are attached: a numeric target set before anyone has seen the client's data is a promise, and the definition is the part that is true before the work starts.

• Response time to admissions enquiries, measured in the applicant's time zone rather than Spanish office hours
• Share of applicant files completed without registry intervention
• Median time from first enquiry to a complete file
• Drop-off rate through each stage of enrolment, to identify where applicants are lost
• Cost per file handled during enrolment against an ordinary period