The Client
CSU DOMINGUEZ HILLS
Who is PCE?
The College of Extended and International Education at California State University, Dominguez Hills sits just south of Los Angeles in a fast-paced, urban setting. With a number of competitors both locally and online, CSUDH’s team considers every student to be a customer with a choice – and wants to give them an incredible experience to match. Whether it’s broadening a skillset, finishing a degree or starting something new completely, helping students reach their educational goals is its mission.
And CSUDH has impressive metrics to match its aspirations – the unit is 100% self-supporting through tuition dollars, adding up to more than $17 million annually with 15,000 unique enrollments.
From CPE’s Website:
The College of Extended and International Education at California State University, Dominguez Hills provides degree, certificate, and credential programs and individual credit and noncredit courses to students in Southern California and worldwide via distance learning. Our mission is to expand the resources of the University to better serve the communities of which we are a part.
The Challenges
There was a lot of ambiguity around the processes that helped work happen at CSUDH, and many times these processes existed solely in the brain of whomever was responsible for their execution.
This lack of documentation meant that when a team member was out for an extended absence, others in the division weren’t quite sure what next steps were. Furthermore, there were no shared timelines attached to each step in the journey, and it was slowing down registration (especially for new students). Staff members were becoming frustrated by being sent on a daily paper chase to uncover murky, ad-hoc and inefficient steps in each process.
This issue was especially important to address because the team was about to undergo a major technology conversion to a new customer relationship management (CRM) registration. That meant they needed workflows that were well-aligned and thoughtfully considered in order to build them into the CRM at a later date.
In the client’s own words:
“It was a great benefit to leverage SpurCG’s experience. They truly put that knowledge to work for us while centering our project around relationships. Because as a valued mentor once shared with me, “Progress moves at the speed of trust.”
J. Kim McNutt, Dean, College of Extended and International Education