With a successful career in higher education spanning over 40 years, Susan Leigh is the founder of SLC, and author of the SLC Service Excellence Certification curricula. Prior to serving as AVP for Enrollment Services at Cal State Long Beach, Susan was an Associate Professor and AVP for Enrollment Management and Marketing at DePaul University in Chicago for 22 years. Over the years, Susan has made significant contributions to the advancement of student service standards at multiple institutions across the US and Canada through consulting and teaching, restructuring, reorganizing and retraining staff, while leveraging technologies to harness the “big data” resident within student information systems. Always keeping students at the center of the discussion, her goal is to accomplish customer-centric business process redesign in higher education.
While at DePaul, Susan led the creation of DePaul Central, an award-winning one-stop built as a cooperative model of Intake to Expert integrating the Registrar, Financial Aid and Student Financial Accounts offices at two redesigned campus locations. In response to student demand for channel-focused improvements, Susan then created the DePaul Central Contact Center that serves students by phone, email, chat and CRM channels using the same two-tiered service design. Deploying a full suite of telephony products including call recording and screen capture, Susan also implemented speech analytics and work force management, displaying team stats on desktop dashboards for agents and their managers.
Expanding on these successful university experiences, Susan developed SLC, using as the company cornerstone the idea of dynamic data-driven decisions for efficient staffing and streamlined service delivery based on the realities of affordable solutions. Susan holds a BA from Rhode Island College and an MFA from Temple University in Philadelphia. A popular speaker at national conferences, Susan is published in ACCRAO and other journals.
Dr. Stephen Gray is Senior Consultant for SLC. Before creating the company with wife Susan Leigh in 2014, Dr. Gray spent more than thirty five years in higher education as a faculty member and administrator with universities on both east and west coasts, and the mid-west including Temple University, New York University, Webster University, California Institute of the Arts, the Ohio State University, DePaul University, University of Illinois Chicago and Elgin Community College.
He has been a professor, administrator, and conservatory director with non-profit organizations such as South Coast Repertory, La Jolla Playhouse and American Conservatory Theatre. He has built extensive course curricula, created academic programs, recruited and advised students, hired and managed faculty, as well as produced festivals and conferences. As the supervisor of education and outreach programs at La Jolla Playhouse in San Diego, in partnership with the University of California, San Diego and the San Diego Unified School District, he administered education programs with service to approximately 25,000 students a year.
Designing curriculum as a department chair at Elgin Community College near Chicago from 1999 to 2014, he continued teaching, education and outreach activities including travel courses to New York and London, touring performance programs, and international workshops that brought teachers and students from Europe, Canada and the U.S. to study on the community college campus. Dr. Gray holds a BA from the University of California Santa Cruz, an MA from San Diego State University, and a Ph.D. from the Ohio State University.