using online facilities to improve customer service & communication an australia street infants...

Using online facilities to improve customer service & communication

An Australia Street Infants School Experience

Bernard Cheng

Australia Street Infants School

Some interesting points to consider …

Schools are very good at considering and delivering continual improvement to:

• Teacher Quality

• Student outcomes and achievement

• Building positive and productive relationships with parents

However until recently ….

• Rarely have we considered how our school offices operate and how the administrative services they provide could be more effectively delivered

Why provide online functionality to parents?

In regard to the school office we understand and acknowledge that:

• School Administration Managers are required to simultaneously manage a multiple tasks accurately and efficiently in a busy and unpredictable environment that include:

- School finance activities

- The phone

- Walk in traffic (Parents and Prospective Parents)

- Teachers and students


However have we considered that …

• The average continuous time a SAM spends on a task in a day is approximately 15 minutes.

• Most financial tasks undertaken have on average 4 interruptions prior to being completed from disparate sources.

• Continued Interruptions lead to inefficient workflows with high unnecessary error rates.


In regard to parents we know that they are …

• Increasingly time poor

• Find it difficult to interact with schools during operational hours due to increasing work commitments

However our administrative systems generally have not addressed these as issues for consideration and generally operate on the premise that:

• Parents are required to come into the school office to complete administrative tasks or if they can’t, expect students to be able to interact in their behalf either directly or via a teacher.


These are critical issues for to be solved in a school office context.


Schools need to respond to:

• Parent difficulties in accessing the school office during school hours

Whilst introducing:

• Administrative systems that introduce work flow efficiencies.

That is to:

• Increase productive on-task time for the SAM through common task automation whilst reducing the need for parental face to face contact in the school office.

What is the solution?

Web delivery of administrative and e-commerce functions to parents via functional websites.

Web delivery of administrative functions

• Web delivery of administrative functions is an opportunity to provide a dynamic and scalable solution that can be developed to meet these conflicting needs…

Through the development of:

• An online information and financial management system built on a self service client based information ownership model.

• This allows users to freely interact and maintain their own information online via self registration and secure log in.

Online services and information ownership

User Interface

data creation, access & self management

Data access & user management

Admin Interface

Input Access

User Data held in a remote hosted SQL web server

Data

Online services and information ownership

This model effectively manages:

• double handling of information

• input data error (School Office)

• Information loss

Most importantly:

• Relieves the SAM of common tasks that can be automated and consolidated for management at more opportune times freeing up time for other more complex concentration intensive tasks.

Australia Street Infants School

What we have done at Australia Street Infants School

School Context

School Size

• PP5

School Programs

• Lennox House – Schools as Communities Centre (400 registered families)

• Pre-School (20 Enrolments)

• K- 2 Infants School (110 Enrolments)

SASS Allocation

• 1 x SAM

• 1 x 0.4 SAO (2 days per week)

School Population Demographic

• Inner city families with one or more parents working in a combination of full and part time capacities.

• Average of 2 children per family.

• 50% of children in Pre-School to Year 2 attend before and after school care 5 days per week with another 30% of children picked up and dropped of to schools by other families by arrangement.

• Parents indicate that they are time poor with considerable work and financial commitments making visiting the school office to settle accounts or hand in notes very difficult.

School Office Issues

• High loss rate of notes going home and school activity fees being payed chronically late due to parents not being able to get to school.

• Limited SASS assistance for the School Administration Manager.

• Consistent interruptions from parents, teachers and students throughout the day prohibiting concentration intensive tasks from being successfully completed during school hours.

• Maintenance of an effective communication strategy with the wider community especially with non enrolled casual attendees of Lennox House programs.


• Manage / Reduce financial and clerical errors

• Implement an effective strategy for communication with non enrolled families and the wider community.

But most importantly ...


Reduce the stress levels of the

School Administration Manager

Another interesting issue to consider…

The phone will always ring

and

Parents work during school hours

The development of our e-commerce services

Phase 1 – March 2008

• Developed a scope and plan for a website that would be able to provide Secure e-commerce functionality to parents 24 hours / 7 days per week.

• This required an understanding of key stakeholders that would interact with our website and their particular needs:

Website stakeholders and functional use (Parents)

School Office

New FamiliesCurrent Families

Provision of financial services to parents 24/7

Increased access to school office functions whilst reducing face to face and phone contact as primary means of interaction

Automation of information gathering, manipulation and storage

School policy access management (downloads)

Email as a strategy for developing effective relationships with our enrolment waiting lists and registration lists

School promotion

Provisional enrolment management (User managed)

Program registrations (User managed)

School information access (downloads)

School shop

News & current events

Student learning support and image galleries

E-forms for parent RSVP / Notifications

Key functionalities that were identified

Capacity to:

- Submit provisional enrolments and registrations online

- Pay school activity fees and Pre-School fees

- Purchase School Uniforms online

- Access school policy information and news on demand

- Electronic return of notes to school were possible

- Maintain effective communication with families that attend school programs on a casual basis

- Maintain an effective relationship with our waiting lists

All functionality to be remote managed and monitored via a Blackberry / PDA

Our main page … All services immediately accessible


• School Shop

• Online Self managed enrolment & registration databases with user login

• e-forms for student note returns and RSVP to school functions

• Structured download database

• News Blog

• School Calendar

Online School Shop

For Parents

• Provides a service to parents to pay school activity fees and/or purchase school uniforms and other school related items outside of school hours

at a time convenient to them.

• Receive email updates in regard to the status of their order including generation of receipts sent via email.

Screen Shots :: Online Shop (Client side)

Online School Shop

For the school

• Generation of payment certificates that allow for easy input into an EFTPOS terminal and receipted into OASIS (presently).

• Generation of order invoices and delivery slips.

• Email notification and online tracking of order status.

• Automated stock control.

Screen Shots :: School Shop (Admin side)

Online enrolment and registrations Servers

For Parents

• Allows parents to submit provisional enrolments or registrations for our community programs directly to the school server outside of school and office hours.

• Parents are provided with a log in to self manage their submitted information over the life of their record being held on the server.

• Parents receive regular enrolment emails as well as previous and current sent message automatically being added to a recent mailings page on the website

• 100% accuracy of information and 0% loss.

Online enrolment and registrations Servers

For the school

• Provisional Enrolment and Lennox House Registration information is submitted to and stored on the web server in a SQL database ensuring 100% accuracy of client information and 0% loss.

• All records held on the server can be emailed allowing potential parents to receive regular enrolment news and updates.

• School is notified via email of any changes made to an enrolment record or when a new record is submitted.

• All applications submitted can be sorted and downloaded as an excel spread sheet eg: date submitted, local/non local, siblings etc allowing for efficient and accurate determinations for enrolments to be made.

Screen Shots :: Sample enrolment form (Client side)

Screen Shots :: Self service log in page (Client side)

Screen Shots :: Sent mailings page (Client side)

Screen Shots :: Database Login (Admin side)

Screen Shots :: Database Management (Admin side)

Screen Shots :: Student records (Admin side)

E-forms

For Parents

• Development of “e-forms” that allow parents to submit returns for any school activity.

• Provides a mechanism to submit an online student absence explanation, and enrolment into parent workshops as well as RSVP’s to school

functions.

E-forms

For the school

• Significantly reduces the number of hand written or return slips that are required to be physically sorted by the class teacher and submitted to the office for collation.

• Provides a mechanism via dropdown fields for e-forms to be either emailed to the school admin area or directly to the class teacher.

• High percentage of notes returned on time as parents again are able to access and return required RSVP’s, permissions slips outside core school hours.

Screen Shots :: Absence e-form (Client Side)

Screen Shots :: Parent workshop e-form (Client Side)

School download database

For Parents

• Implementation of a structured download database that allows for all of our school documentation and multimedia files such as podcasts. MP3 files and streaming movies to be accessed 24 hours / 7 days per week.

• Access to important school information eg: enrolment policies quickly and easily leading to an enhancement of understanding of school

policy based decision making.


For the school

• Provides an easy and accessible repository of important and regularly requested information leading to better communication of school policy perspectives to parents.

• Allows the capacity to stream multimedia files of school events to the school community and around the world

Screen Shots :: School download page (Client side)

Other functionalities

School Blog page

• School Newsletters and current event news is posted to this page weekly

School Calender

• merges multiple stakeholder calendars via colour coding for keeping track of all school events.

• Both of these functionalities allows parents to subscribe to RSS feeds direct to their browser each time a new event is added.

Screen Shots :: School Blog Page

Screen Shots :: School Calendar


• Phase 2 – April 2008

Website launch, training and encouragement of parents to interact with the school online

• Phase 3 – May 2008 onwards

Gradual increase of uploading school information online with a gradual cessation of providing printed information.

• Phase 4 – Where we are now!

Continued solicited user input for refinements and enhancements of the service

Overall Success … Some statistics as at 22/9/2008

• 51, 899 hits per month (321,995 to date).

• 1046 actual visits to the school website per month.

• All families in the school visit the website 5.7 times per month.

• Average time spent on our site is 10 minutes with 4 page views

• 60% of the school has completed an online payment via the school website purchasing uniforms and paying school fees.

• In 6 months $19,845.00 worth of online transactions have been processed.

Overall Success … Some statistics

Lennox House Community Program registration server:

• 400 registrations at a rate of 5 – 10 per week.

• 25% of the database log in and interact with their information in a monthincluding parents un-registering their record from the server when required.

• Bulk emails sent on a monthly basis to 400+ families.

• 100% of families registered to attend our program online.


School Enrolment Database:

• 150 Provisional Enrolment records held for Pre-School.

• 120 Provisional Enrolment records held for Kindergarten.

• 100% of provisional enrolments submitted online for 2009.

• Quarterly enrolment news emailed to 270 families including weekly updates during the period in which offers were made.

• Offers for placement in the school was done solely by email.


Interesting fact:

During the period that student enrolment offers were made, 97 families downloaded a school enrolment policy!


Parent Comment on their experience of being part of our online approach to enrolments …

“Whilst we were not successful in gaining a place in Pre-School, we appreciated all of the email communications providing regular updates on the enrolment

process. This enabled us to understand the decisions that were made taking the mystery out of the whole process”

Subsequent impact on the school office

• 90% reduction in walk in traffic.

• 80% reduction in phone calls.

• An estimated 2 hours per day / 10 hours per week of productive time has been gained that would be otherwise spent dealing with parent requests.

• As a relative costing this represents a saving of $240.00 per week or $9400.00 per year in productive time.


• 80% increase in Parent return of notes and timeliness of payments.

• 90% of interactions of the school website happens between 7pm & 11pm.

• 45% of families have logged in to modify their submitted information over 12 months on our enrolment database.

• 100% accuracy of information has been achieved through the provisional enrolment service.

• Recurring monthly financial tasks take 50% less time and with significantly less errors being reported.


This has led to one huge change ….

SASS Staff, teachers and the principal have more time to socially interact with parents to discuss students and broader

educational issues!

Future directions

Ideally if the opportunity exists we would like to:

• Link our online enrolment database to ERN to populate pre-enrolments that would otherwise need to be manually entered.

• Link our school shop to our school financial system (Oasis or ??).

• Provide further user enhancements as identified needs arise.

Key considerations

• Your school website is the most effective tool for interacting with your school population in a focussed, flexible and cost effective way.

• Parent uptake is largely determined by how relevant the services you provide are to the demographics of your community.

• Online service provisions allow parents to interact with the school at a time that is convenient leading to increased efficiencies in the office during the day and more focussed service provision to parents.

Visit our website …

You can visit our website at:

www.australiastreetschool.com

or

www.australist-p.schools.nsw.edu.au

A more complete version of this presentation can be downloaded from our website at:

www.australiastreetschool.com/downloads

…. Follow the links to school publications

http://www.australiastreetschool.com/



http://www.australist-p.schools.nsw.edu.au/

http://www.australiastreetschool.com/downloads

using online facilities to improve customer service & communication an australia street infants...

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traffic parents

school office context

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