Your students do not want to wait hours for answers about admission processes, academic courses, and deadlines. Instead, students now seek 24/7 access to accurate and instant replies. If your university or college still relies on office visits and lengthy emails, you lose students, their time, and patience. Here enters higher education chatbots.
These are AI-based virtual assistants that most higher educational institutions use to automate tasks. Since these chatbots run entirely on digital automation, many of you may question their accuracy and authenticity. In a journal, researchers revealed that these higher education chatbots are 91% accurate. Besides, the satisfaction level of these chatbots accounts for 97.1%.
In this blog, I’ll share a detailed step-by-step process to create an effective higher education chatbot using Copilot.Live. I’ll also talk about the chatbot features that matter and some of its evaluation parameters. So, let’s dive in.
Why do higher education institutions need a chatbot?
Most students come up with the same questions: What’s the application deadline? What’s the payment process? When can I get my examination admit card? How do I set my LMS password?
Imagine hundreds of such questions daily via phone calls, walk-ins, WhatsApp, and emails. Things get even worse when your human resource agent faces such questions even after working hours. The educational administrators are buried in work. The IT department is busy with technical support. And the students? Still waiting for answers.
This is where your higher education chatbot comes in. Here’s how these chatbots clear the clutter:
- Instant replies 24/7: The higher education chatbots are always ready to answer. Whether it’s 2:00 a.m. or noon, these chatbots always attend to students on the website, WhatsApp, or a mobile app.
- Fewer support tickets: Each query your chatbot handles indicates one less human resource addition to the IT or support team. This works best during peak seasons, like admissions and examinations.
- Smooth admission process: The chatbot can give your students a detailed walk-through, from explaining the admission criteria to collecting student documents and notifying them about deadlines.
- Intelligent self-service: Chatbots end the era of ‘please-contact-the-admisn-office.’ Instead, they help students with the exact link, the PDF files, and forms.
- Saved staff time: Since chatbots take care of repetitive tasks, educational administrators and other team members can focus on other issues, such as planning onboarding and scheduling examinations.
Step-by-step guide to creating a chatbot for higher education using Copilot.Live
Now, it’s time to develop your interactive chatbot in Copilot.Live. One significant benefit of Copilot.Live is that you don’t need any coding or technical knowledge for this. Here are the steps you must follow:
Step 1: Define Objectives and User Needs
.webp)
Before you log in, figure out what tasks you want the chatbot to perform for your higher educational institution. For this, you can get real-time inputs from the students and the department administrators. Enquire about their pain points. This is where you should position the chatbot as a problem-solver.
Step 2: Signing in
.webp)
Now, sign in Copilot.Live. This will lead you to the dashboard. It has a list of customization menus. Use them to craft a unique chatbot that aligns with your institute’s style and tone.
Step 3: Crafting conversation flows
.webp)
This is where you use your creativity to create a custom chatbot. Choose a chatbot name and personality. The drag-and-drop feature lets you add data sources to create an extensive knowledge base.
Step 4: Chatbot Integration
.webp)
Now, it is time to reach out to students at places where they exist. For this, Copilot.Live lets you deploy your higher education chatbot on the website, WhatsApp, voice calls, web widget, and mobile devices.
Step : Monitoring and Testing
Your chatbot is ready now. But before launching, monitor its performance thoroughly, as you don’t want to push your students to confusing workflows and outdated information.
Key features to include in your higher education chatbot
The success of your higher education chatbot relies upon its capabilities. To stay ahead of your competitors, these are the key features you must include in the chatbot:
- Natural language understanding: Your university students won’t type perfect and grammatically correct phrases. This is why your chatbot needs a natural language understanding feature to trigger accurate responses.
- Smart fallback and human handover: If your chatbot doesn’t understand a human query, it should be able to say clearly, “I didn’t get you. Let me connect you with a human agent.” The chatbot should not put your students into an awkward loop.
- Multilingual support: Your university has students coming from all over the globe. The chatbot should be able to communicate with students in their native language.
- Analytics: After creating the chatbot, you must know what’s working. Track the chatbot's performance - unresolved queries, response time, drop-offs - to find its strengths and weaknesses.
- Personalization: When students log in, the chatbot should greet them with their name and show them all their personal details, such as grades, dues, and deadlines, to offer personalization. In short, the chatbot should function like a virtual assistant.
Real-life examples of universities with chatbots
Chatbots are no longer trendsetters. They are the need of the hour now. Several universities and colleges have understood the problem-solving capacity of these higher education chatbots. Here are the top three universities that have implemented chatbots and have achieved brilliant results:
1. Georgia State University - Pounce
Georgia State University experienced summer melt. This situation occurs when colleges and universities face a sudden drop in the enrollment of new students even before the classes begin. Georgia State University introduced Pounce to fix this issue.
Back then, Pounce was a message-based chatbot. It helped the students with immediate answers to all kinds of last-minute admission-related queries. In the first year, the chatbot could interact and solve students' queries 1,85,000 times.
To justify the success of Pounce, Scott Burke, the assistant vice president of undergraduate admissions, noted, “Every interaction was tailored to the specific students’ enrollment task. We would have had to hire 10 full-time staff members to handle that messaging volume without Pounce.”
2. University of Murcia - Lola
The University of Murcia faced a different challenge. The university administrators couldn’t manage the flood of student queries during the admission process, which came in mainly in Spanish and some in English. To tackle this, they built Lola.
The primary purpose of building Lola was to address student queries during the admission process. Back then, Lola had real-time conversations with the students. It adapted an informal tone to guide students in a stepwise format.
Lola successfully handled and responded to more than 38,708 questions. The chatbot's accuracy rate was 91% while answering.
3. Deakin University - Genie
The purpose of Deakin University in creating a chatbot was not just answering student queries, but to provide them a digital companion to help students stay organized. This is when the university implemented Genie in late 2018.
Since Genie is available on mobile apps, students get a hands-free experience. They can ask Genie about campus events, class scheduling, and upcoming academic assignments. Further, the chatbot is integrated into the university's LMS to help students with updated responses.
When Genie was launched, more than 25,000 students downloaded it. At the beginning of the Deakin trimester, the chatbot handled 12,000 conversations in a day, as mentioned by Mr. Confalonieri, the Deakin Chief Digital Officer.
Common mistakes to avoid during chatbot development
Even if you build a higher education chatbot to serve the best purposes, it might fail because of the way it is planned. Here are the common mistakes you must avoid while developing a chatbot:
- Trying to do everything: Your higher education chatbot doesn’t need to serve every department in the university, as most confusions occur from this. Instead, start small. Pay attention to solving student queries and nail it first. Let your chatbot give the best directions with clarity.
- Building in isolation: Your chatbot must solve all kinds of student problems. For this, get inputs from students and staff members. Check with the support teams as well.
- No fallback option: Since the chatbot is a tool, it will get stuck. Your students will bounce back when they notice that the chatbot hits a dead end and fails to answer. Instead, your bot should connect the user to a human agent.
- Forgetting to update: Building a chatbot is not a one-time job. Its performance depends on the way you update it. Students will stop trusting your chatbot if it delivers last year's admission norms. So, set up regular updates and align them with the academic cycle.
To Wrap Up
By now, you must have already figured out the steps you need to follow to create a higher education chatbot. Looking at the real-life examples shared here, you must have already understood how chatbots transform the entire education system. If you’re ready to build one.
Copilot.Live has you covered. Right from automating tasks to building healthy relationships with students and staff members, chatbots are built to offer personalization that addresses issues individually. Create the chatbot to solve one pertinent issue first, and then expand gradually. After all, more than a perfect chatbot your students need an effective one.
