Chatting with Bots within Education

The Young Adult Demographic

Independant research shows that 18-25-year-olds prefer conversing via text-based messages in comparison to traditional contact methods such as telephone and email. The best live chat solutions have been proven to:

• Reduce waiting times
• Provide quicker answers
• Increase first contact resolution rates
• Reduce language barriers
• Lessen anxiety or apprehension in interacting with an organisation

Being a more convenient communication channel to the enquirer ensures that customer satisfaction already meets certain expectations. The chat experience then needs to exceed these.

Enter the Chatbot

Using a chatbot to qualify the student when they initiate a chat can reduce any frustration the enquirer experiences when seeing long forms to complete. This can improve chat uptake rates, as lengthier prechat forms requesting lots of information can deter individuals continuing into a chat session. Simply asking for a name can get the conversation started, where the bot can more successfully gather personal details such as contact details, nature of enquiry and student/UCAS number, depending on whether they are already enrolled or are applying etc.

48% of millennials are open to receiving recommendations or advice from chatbots. Depending on the level of service a university requires the bot to provide, it can either transfer the student to a human advisor or can begin to answer questions.

For the latter, the bot can be trained to answer frequently asked questions. This can vary from department to department as admissions will be dealing with course applications enquiries, accommodation will receive questions regarding the Halls and international will be approached by non-UK residents. The benefit is that the bot can learn questions regarding all areas of the university, and therefore reduce the involvement of specialised representatives. It also has the potential to answer the student’s enquiry at first contact.

Should the bot come across a question it cannot answer, it can simply transfer the chat if a human operator is available. Alternatively, it can provide options to try again at another time or arrange a call back if the representatives are busy or it is out of hours.

Configuring Your Bot

Before your bot can start prequalifying students or answering their questions it needs to be configured. When enabling the functionality, the bot will be created as a new user; its name can be amended to suit your organisation, alternatively it will remain as its default ‘Chat Bot’.

It will be situated within it owns unique routing group which enables your organisation to direct enquiries to the chatbot in the first instance. Should the bot not be available for any reason or the chat needs to be transferred, a secondary routing group containing human representatives can be nominated.

A tone of voice will be defined for your bot, allowing your organisation to match your human operators’ approach; this can be set to formal, informal, professional or friendly etc.

The bot will also need to be taught what questions to ask and / or how to respond. Our team will liaise with yours to gather the relevant information and input it into the brain of the bot which uses IBM’s Watson to provide natural language processing. Thorough testing will commence to ensure it is working and responding correctly.

Analysing the Bot’s performance

An operator will be able to view the bot’s chats in real-time, allowing them to see at a glance if the chatbot is responding as expected, if they understand the questions being asked and the likelihood of the enquiry being transferred.

A more in-depth review is possible with the advanced reporting suite. This allows your university to run data for certain time periods and analyse how many enquiries have been handled by a bot, how many have been transferred, and if the responses are accurate. Alternatively, Our AI team can run this analysis and provide suggestions of improvements to you.

The bot can be retaught at any time should a response need changing due to inaccuracy or the answer changes for the university or a new reply needs to be included. 

Click4Assistance has been providing communication software for 15 years. We chose to partner with IBM’s engine as they are experts in AI and have over 20 years of experience. This ensures that we can provide a reliable and secure chatbot that matches our ethos of developing technology as far as possible whilst remaining robust and beneficial to customers.

We currently work with a quarter of the universities located in the UK, to find out more about our company and/or solution contact our team on 01268 524628 or email theteam@click4assistance.co.uk.