How Queue-it helped Conestoga College improve the course registration experience

Conestoga College is one of Canada’s top research colleges and a leader in polytechnic education. Established in 1967, Conestoga is a distinctly vocational and career-focused college, with programs designed to prepare its tens of thousands of students for meaningful work right after graduation.

“In recent years we transitioned to offering staff and student services entirely digitally, which was a big goal and lift for us” says Tom Graham, Conestoga’s Associate Registrar for Systems and Technology. “But we had to use the system infrastructure available to us. And this rapid digitalization put immense strain on our legacy systems, causing issues throughout the college that we struggled to solve—until we found Queue-it.”

“Our biggest struggle was handling demand on our course registration and timetable release days, when thousands of students would log in at once to check scheduling and classes,” says Graham. 

“Because the same portal is used by students and staff, the peak load was harming both the student experience and our staff productivity,” continues Graham. “We obviously don’t want to give students a sub-par, frustrating experience on an important day for them. But also, the students would overwhelm our support centers with requests, and staff struggled to access the portal for administrative work, so productivity was taking a big hit too.”

Several attempted fixes fell short. “Our technical team tried to scale our systems, but they’re legacy systems with architecture that couldn’t scale for the level of demand we need. We are updating our systems, but it’s a monumental, multi-year project, and we needed a solution quickly. So then we considered releasing the timetables in batches, but we didn’t feel like that was fair for students.”

The outages and slowdowns were unsustainable. “At multiple levels of the college, we were aligned that the status quo was unacceptable—we couldn’t let these outages continue.”

To address their challenges with peak traffic, Conestoga implemented Queue-it’s virtual waiting room, which gave them full and fair control over the flow of traffic into their systems.

“After looking into several options, we decided Queue-it would be the best way to solve this problem,” says Graham. “We wanted to offer first-in-first-out access and tell people how long the wait would be, so they could decide how early they want to check, and how long they want to wait around to check—rather than making them just randomly try and refresh and get in all throughout the day.”

“We considered building our own virtual waiting room, but recognized the design, development, and ongoing maintenance would drain resources from our key needs. Going with a managed SaaS like Queue-it made much more sense.”

The Conestoga team set up a Scheduled waiting room and activated it on the morning of course registration day. All visitors arriving before the registration start time (8:00 AM) were collected on a pre-queue countdown page on Queue-it’s infrastructure, before being randomized for fairness and flowed to the branded queue. 

For the rest of the day, the queue operated in first-in-first-out order, sending visitors to Conestoga’s portal at the rate it could handle. As the day passed and the systems were performing well, the Conestoga team slowly increased the outflow of visitors from waiting room to the portal. 

“With Queue-it, the system stayed online, we didn’t hear complaints from students or staff, and everything ran smoothly. It made our biggest day feel just like any other day, which is exactly what we were hoping for.”

Tom Graham, Associate Registrar for Systems and Technology

“Students are familiar with the experience of Queue-it from big ticket sales and online events like that, so they knew how it worked,” says Graham. “It created a predictable process and set expectations for them. Before, students didn’t know hour-to-hour, day-to-day, what state our systems would be in. Now they get clear info and a consistent experience.”

Alongside the detailed wait information, the Conestoga team took advantage of Queue-it’s visitor experience features, tailoring their waiting room to their branding, including the option for staff to send real time messages to students and for students to get notified by email when it’s their turn. 

“A lot of people really liked the email notification feature, because it meant they weren’t tied to their computer waiting,” Graham said.

With the informative and familiar user flow, Conestoga’s support staff saw a dramatic 50% reduction in helpdesk requests from students throughout course registration day.

Staff members, meanwhile, saw the same benefits as students: fair, reliable, and informed access to a system that’s critical to their work and productivity. 

With the help of Queue-it, Conestoga College has overcome its struggles with peak traffic during high-profile course registrations and is prepared for future enrollment growth. The virtual waiting room helped Conestoga:

• Ensure uptime during peak traffic
• Reduce support requests
• Extend the life of their legacy systems
• Boost staff productivity
• Deliver fair, predictable student access

“Queue-it has helped us restore stability to our systems, improving both the staff and student experience. It allowed us to extend the life of a legacy system while we work to implement new systems, saving us time and money.”

Tom Graham, Associate Registrar for Systems and Technology