Students admissions will be touched by intelligence, too
Frequently asked questions on admissions and student’s term.
Rectories, dean’s offices or departments have been facing repeatable, simple questions from candidates and students for ages. Thousands of phone calls, e-mails or live chats are sent from candidates seeking information on issues such as:
- Where are my application forms?
- What’s my exam session schedule?
- Will I be entitled to a dormitory this year?
The answers are there: on university websites, portals and leaflets, but students have many issues with finding the exact answers. This is either because they have very precise questions relating to specific dates, documents and other data, or traditional search engines do not work efficiently.
Offices are then simply flooded with phone calls, which causes waiting times to prolong.
Such challenges have been known to e-commerce for years, and new intelligent automation technologies are deployed to resolve these issues.
Chatbots – Intelligent responses, employed by universities
Leading universities are deploying Chatbots (Virtual Assistants) as innovative informational solutions which support and apply the highest quality service to the admission process or serving students. Their key feature is the intelligent automation of repeatable questions from candidates or students, which helps to provide precise, instant answers, with no engagement from university staff.
Chatbot is a computer software; a combination of intelligent search with the knowledge base, with 100-200 pre-determined, automated answers to the most frequent student’s queries. Staff’s precious time is saved: only when chatbot’s Artificial Intelligence cannot understand overly complex questions, they are forwarded to the employees of dean’s or university offices.
Moreover, in the era of strong competition between universities, many of them seek to attract exchange students. Even though communication between departments and exchange students is usually done in English, it puts a lot of additional effort on department’s staff. Intelligent software helps institutions to handle exchange-related inquiries in virtually painless fashion, leaving translation and answers in foreign languages to algorithms.
Modern Chatbots have already proved to be effective in areas covering: admissions, dormitories, terms and sessions. There are already couple of functional deployments in medical and business universities, where virtual assistants handle hundreds of questions a day, with very few of them requiring staff’s attention.
Implementation is nearly effortless. Deployment takes less than 2 weeks, then the system is ready for immediate evaluation.
What’s more, the implementation does not require any changes in university’s website or IT infrastructure. The solution is simply added to existing web code of portal for students.
Obviously, one of the first questions department’s employees might ask is “will artificial intelligence cause us to lose work? ” – and that’s understandable. But as of today, similarly to other areas in which AI grows more and more present, vision of it replacing human staff is still far away.
It shouldn’t, however, stop universities from being the vanguard of a giant change, which is about to come.
If you are interested in a discussion concerning intelligent automation support for candidates and students, please contact us.
