Bedfordshire – 5 February 2013 – Croydon College has selected Qmatic’s browser-based Solo Virtua software to manage physical queuing during student enrolment weeks and wait times have been reduced by a more efficient queuing process.

Student registrations during August and September every year can be an extremely busy and demanding process. During the first week of enrolment alone, the College can expect 1,200 people to queue on site, each waiting for between 30 minutes and an hour to be seen. Now, streamlined, with students better able to manage themselves, the large LCD screens helped as they were more distinguishable and provided much clearer information to the students.

The College’s course registration process takes place in one large area. Students enter, take a numbered ticket and wait to be called forward to one of up to 22 desks where they are seen. LCD screens and speakers are used to communicate progress.

Matt Dow, Network Analyst at Croydon College explains, “Our old system had become cumbersome. Hardwired, it required extensive cabling, which meant a lot of grappling around to get it installed and ensure that cables were safely routed and fixed into place. Also, it would sometimes crash and reset the queue number. This would then create additional delays while we manually reconfigure the numbers on the system. Also due to the extent of the wiring, we were restricted to using this in one area. The Solo Virtua is IP network based and we plan to use this across the campus outside enrolment periods.”

For just a few thousand pounds, Croydon College installed a Solo Virtua system from Qmatic. The software manages the flow of students right from their first contact, through to the final service delivery. This means that Croydon College can co-ordinate and automate arrival, check-in, waiting and calling procedures to better serve its students as well as track staff productivity and service levels. It gives a true, real-time view of its operations.

Now, if the technical team needs to reset the system during busy enrolment periods, it has a system capable of remembering the last queue number it was at. Importantly, because Solo Virtua is a software solution that works across the College’s own network, it negates those unwieldy cabling issues. It is simply plugged in and run via a standard web browser.

Not only is the new queue management system significantly easier to set up, it is far quicker to get up and running. It used to take the College’s technical team up to five days to move and tuck away the cabling. It now takes just a few hours to get the Qmatic software live, and less than two days to install the hardware and furniture, which frees them up to work on more pressing college projects.

For the first time, Croydon College has management reporting as a standard feature of its queue management system. Dow explains, “We are able to report on just about anything we like which is just brilliant. We now have a precise insight into footfall, how many people were waiting and what their wait times were. This has been very valuable in reporting back to the management teams and planning further service enhancements.”

With more than 8,000 students choosing to study from its range of 350 qualifications each year, Croydon College is one of the largest providers of further and higher education courses in the South East of England. It is now looking to extend its use of Qmatic into areas such as the brand new library and Learning Resource Centre.

To read more about the queue management at Croydon College visit www.qmatic.com/uk/Sectors/Public-sector.