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Customer Story
Industry
Higher Education
Headquarters
Hamilton, Ontario, Canada
Solution
Comm100 Live Chat
Comm100 customer
Since 2021
McMaster University is a public research university in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada. Established in 1887, the university has over 32,000 undergraduate and over 5,000 post-graduate students. In 2024 it ranked fourth in Canada in the Times Higher Education World University Rankings.
Within this prestigious institution, the Faculty of Health Sciences Graduate Studies Office serves as a critical support hub for graduate education excellence.
Led by George Bijelic, the Program Manager of the Faculty Health Sciences Graduate Studies Office, the department provides comprehensive support to approximately 25 unique graduate programs, with the Medical Sciences Graduate Program being the largest and most complex.
McMaster University already uses Comm100 Live Chat & the AI Chatbot for their University Technology Services (UTS) but more recently rolled out Comm100 Live Chat for students of the Health Sciences Graduate Program.
The department’s scope extends far beyond traditional campus boundaries. Unlike undergraduate programs where students typically remain on central campus, graduate health sciences students are distributed across multiple hospital locations throughout the region, creating unique communication and support challenges.
“We have students that are in local hospitals as opposed to being here on central campus,” notes Bijelic, highlighting the distributed nature of their student population that requires innovative support solutions.
The Faculty of Health Sciences Graduate Studies Office faced distinct challenges that traditional communication methods couldn’t adequately address, particularly around supporting a geographically distributed student population with complex academic needs.
The primary challenge stemmed from the unique nature of health sciences graduate education, where students spend significant time at hospital locations rather than on central campus.
Traditional communication methods like phone calls, emails, and in-person visits, created significant barriers for students working at remote hospital sites who needed immediate academic guidance and document review.
Graduate students frequently needed immediate feedback on academic documents, research proposals, and program requirements. The traditional email-based system created delays and confusion, particularly when multiple document revisions were involved.
The faculty members realized that they needed a more streamlined solution to allow for real-time collaboration on critical documents.
“A lot of students would have the documents that they were working on and be able to exchange it with our agent that we had online at the time,” Bijelic explains, highlighting the critical need for real-time document collaboration and support.
“Resolution time prior, I would say again depending on the complexity of the issue, you’d be looking anywhere from two to four weeks for some of the more complex issues,” Bijelic recalls.
Before implementing live chat, the department struggled with lengthy resolution times for student inquiries that oft-required coordination across multiple university departments.
These extended timelines resulted from the back-and-forth nature of email communications and the need to route students between the program office, the School of Graduate Studies, and other relevant departments, creating frustration for students who needed timely resolution of critical academic matters.
McMaster’s Faculty of Health Sciences Graduate Studies Office selected Comm100 Live Chat based on successful implementations across other university departments. As live chat for colleges and universities becomes more mainstream, McMaster wanted to stay ahead of the curve.
“We went with Comm100 based on the fact that other areas were already using it on campus; the registrar’s office, school of graduate studies, faculty of engineering,” Bijelic explains.
Rather than conduct an extensive vendor evaluation process, the department leveraged the success of other McMaster units that had already implemented Comm100.
This approach ensured seamless integration with existing university technology infrastructure and provided students with consistent communication experiences across different departments.
“One of the big things that we gained especially when we were doing the student advising was file transfers. We used that quite a bit,” Bijelic emphasizes.
File sharing in Live Chat became the cornerstone of the department’s enhanced student support model, enabling immediate document sharing and feedback during live chat sessions.
This functionality completely transformed the student support experience:
The platform’s transfer capabilities enabled efficient routing of complex inquiries that required expertise from multiple university departments.
“We were able to use Comm100 to flip the students via the chat to the appropriate area that they need to speak to,” Bijelic notes.
This routing functionality was particularly valuable for:
“The training was great. We had a few sessions with Maria where she walked us through the system. I recall even getting feedback from the staff at the time. They both very much appreciated the training,” Bijelic reports.
McMaster benefited from Comm100’s higher education experience through personalized training and ongoing support designed specifically for academic environments.
At Comm100, client education is fundamental to successful implementations, particularly in complex academic environments where each institution has unique operational requirements and student support challenges.
For McMaster’s Faculty of Health Sciences Graduate Studies Office, this meant recognizing the unique challenges of supporting distributed graduate students and the critical importance of document collaboration in academic advising.
“Everyone found it seamless. Once actually using the system post training, the documentation that was provided plus the online trainings that were provided, nobody had any hiccups or challenges with the system,” Bijelic notes.
The implementation of Comm100 Live Chat delivered immediate and measurable improvements to the Faculty of Health Sciences Graduate Studies Office’s student support capabilities, particularly around resolution times and service quality.
The most significant impact was the substantial reduction in resolution times for complex student inquiries.
“Post Comm100, once we had it in and we had our advising service going, instead of a two-to-four-week turnaround we could end up having in some cases as short as a week,” Bijelic reports.
This represented a dramatic 75% improvement in resolution times for complex issues, dramatically enhancing the student experience during critical academic periods.
The combination of faster resolution times and immediate document collaboration capabilities significantly improved student satisfaction with academic support services.
“Everyone thought it was about time to be quite frank. They felt it was definitely a positive move forward in terms of student expectations,” Bijelic notes about staff reactions.
The immediate nature of live chat support better aligned with student expectations for responsive academic guidance, particularly for students working at distributed hospital locations.
The file transfer functionality eliminated the time-consuming back-and-forth of email communications, enabling staff to resolve document-based inquiries in single interactions.
This efficiency gain allowed the department to provide more comprehensive support with existing resources while maintaining high service quality. This is well before they have even implemented any higher ed chatbots.
The platform’s intuitive design and comprehensive training program resulted in uninterrupted staff adoption across the department.
The positive staff experience contributed to consistent service quality and sustained platform usage throughout peak periods.
“I would say go for it. I would say absolutely, the support you get from Comm100 is great. The system is easy to use, and I would definitely tell them to take the plunge,” Bijelic concludes when asked what he would tell other institutions considering live chat implementation.
For McMaster’s Faculty of Health Sciences Graduate Studies Office, Comm100 Live Chat proved instrumental in supporting the unique challenges of distributed graduate education in health sciences.
The platform’s document collaboration capabilities and efficient routing functionality addressed the specific needs of graduate students working across multiple hospital locations while maintaining the high service standards expected in academic environments.
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