How To Enhance The Room Selection Process

The university housing option incoming freshmen and other students choose has a huge impact on their college experience. It can influence how well they sleep, how comfortable they feel at home, and how easily they’re able to make new friends, among other things.

That’s why it’s so important for housing administrators to help students make the most informed decisions possible. You can do that by enhancing your room selection process. Keep reading to learn how to improve your active housing.

Streamline The Room Selection Process

You can start by taking a high-level look at what your room selection process looks like today. Try to examine the steps that current students go through when choosing campus housing. 

Doing this will help you see which parts of your current system can be frustrating for students. You can also ask for feedback from university roommates to figure out what they dislike.

Once you've gathered your information, you can make informed changes that streamline your room selection process. This could mean consolidating a few steps, simplifying instructions so your students don’t get bogged down with detail, or even redesigning your process from the ground up with an eye toward simplicity and convenience.

Improve User Experience

University housing applications rarely emphasize the user experience. Your school may be able to stand out by doing exactly that. The specific steps you should take to improve user experience can vary based on current processes, but here are a few ideas to get you started.

One option is giving students more ways to state their housing preferences. For example, you can add questions like whether a student plays sports, has an emotional support animal, or is looking for a specific type of living environment. These questions make it easier for you to match students with compatible roommate profiles and preferences. They also help students feel like your department cares about their preferences.

You could also start offering real-time availability notifications. When a new housing option is available, the right housing software can send out alerts to keep your students informed. This can minimize frustration caused by missed opportunities.

Even choosing the right technology impacts user experience. If your housing platform is constantly down, slow, or difficult to use, it will harm your department's relationship with the student body, even if you do everything else perfectly. 

The key here is looking at your processes and technology and figuring out where your biggest opportunities for improvement lie. 

Ensure Fair Allocation Policies And Procedures

Fairness is an underrated component of a successful room selection process. You don’t want some students to have a great experience while others feel cheated. Using a uniform selection event process can help to keep that from happening.

One way to keep the room selection fair is to use a lottery to pick room selection dates for your more popular buildings and units. This random selection process assures students that your department isn't playing favorites and helps to decrease building resentment when students note their hall preferences and preferred spaces.

It’s also possible that your department is already using fair policies and procedures that students don’t know about. Increasing transparency can be the answer in these situations. Simply sharing the rules and procedures you follow when assigning student rooms can help people feel better about the housing selection process.

Provide Comprehensive Room Information

Part of improving your room selection process is making sure current residents have access to all of the information they need to make an informed decision. That starts with a comprehensive overview of each room they can choose from.

You’ll want to include as many details as you can to account for the varied preferences of your study body. Details you should provide include:

• Room dimensions

• Included furniture and amenities

• Lease and meal plan details

• Lighting information (such as the presence of natural light or the absence of overhead lighting)

• Storage space

• Internet information

• Community atmosphere

• Details about safety and security

• Information relevant to specific groups, such as transfer students, female students, and those worried about housing eligibility

Facilitate Communication Across All Parties

Good communication can solve most issues, while poor communication tends to create new problems. That’s why it’s also a good idea to focus on improving communication between your department and students, as well as communication between students themselves.

There are numerous ways to facilitate communication. For example, you can ask students to include their preferred contact method with their application. That way, when your department or another student needs to contact the person, you know you’ll be able to do so quickly and via the person’s preferred method.

You can also choose a housing software with built-in communication features. This can give everyone involved in the room selection process a single, straightforward platform to use for housing-related conversations.

Leverage Technology For Seamless Operations

Technology is a huge factor in the room selection process, but it’s something a lot of housing departments don’t begin thinking about until the tools they use no longer work. That’s an approach that can create issues during peak times of demand, such as the room selection process at the start of a new semester.

That’s why we built Housing.Cloud. Because it's on the cloud, Housing.Cloud can handle peak times of demand without any problems or downtime. Your students will all be able to access your housing system at the same time if they need to without fear of it crashing or lagging.

This doesn’t just lead to a smoother process for students, but it can also open up new avenues for fairness. For example, with a powerful housing platform, you can let all students begin the room selection process at the same time instead of staggering access, which can lead to favoritism or at least the appearance of it.

Simplify Your Room Selection Process With Housing.Cloud

The room selection process plays a massive role in your student’s well-being on campus. You owe it to them to make the experience as great as it can be. 

Housing.Cloud can help you create an ideal room selection process by providing a better housing portal, more user-friendly features, and value pricing on a housing license that even small schools will be able to afford.

But don’t take our word for it. Sign up for a free demo today and we’ll show you what Housing.Cloud can do for your department.