Major US College Automates 49% of Potential Advising Meetings with Comm100 to Serve More Students

– 49% – Meetings booked
4.26 – Live chat CSAT
89% – Students agreed live chat and/or bot helped them

This higher education institution is a major public college in the U.S. It represents students from over 155 countries, serving more than 43,000 students every year through credit and non-credit programs.

Like many other schools, the college’s Advising and Counselling department faces a very high student to advisor ratio with limited resources. With such a large student population and growing requests, the team was struggling to manage the support volume. Students were facing long wait times, while agents and counsellors were overwhelmed by the workload.

This situation was worsened by the fact that most of their support offering came in the form of in-person and virtual meetings. These meetings were very time-consuming and so the department was struggling to serve all their students. They knew that this was harming a range of factors, from lowering graduation rates to deterring underrepresented students.

In 2020, the Advising and Counselling team began researching live chat and chatbot software to solve this challenge. Comm100 was identified as a potential solution and so a one-week trial was arranged. This was a great success and firmly passed the proof of concept, particularly highlighting the platform’s:

• flexibility
• intuitive user interface
• industry-leading security & privacy compliances.

Once Comm100 Live Chat and Custom Answers Chatbot were set up, the college immediately saw meeting requests plummet as students could get their queries resolved by bot or chat agent.

This has significantly increased the team’s support capacity, allowing them to serve more students. It’s also improved the student experience because 1) students can receive instant and 24/7 help via live chat and bot, and 2) students who need to speak with a counselor face much shorter wait times. This was achieved in 2 core ways:

1. Reduced time-consuming meetings with live chat

With the adoption of Comm100 Live Chat, students can now fast and helpful support from a chat agent, rather than booking a meeting. This has resulted in a sharp drop in meetings, allowing the college to serve more students. In 2020, before Comm100 was live, the team received 8735 meeting bookings. One year later with Comm100, this has dropped by 49% to 4459.

The reason for this drop in meetings after launching live chat is due to the speed, personal connection, and popularity of this solution:

• Speed: The real-time nature of live chat allows for students to quickly and conveniently ask a question and get an answer. Many queries are simply in nature and can be easily resolved without in-person meetings.
• Personal connection: Live chat retains the personal, one-to-one quality that is vital to the nature of this support. Agents can build connections with students and recreate the feeling of face-to-face communication.
• Popularity: Live chat is the most digital support channel among students. In 2021, the live chat team achieved an impressive 4.26 customer satisfaction score (CSAT).

When asked in the post-chat survey – ‘the live agent and/or virtual assistant (chatbot) helped me to get assistance with my question/concern’ – 89% of students agreed or somewhat agreed.

2. Increased support capacity with chatbot automation

Alongside Comm100 Live Chat, the college launched Comm100 Custom Answers Chatbot to increase support capacity so they could serve more students.

The chatbot greets every student to collect information about them and their query, and where possible, resolve the question. With a high percentage of these queries now automated 24/7, the team can serve more students.

If the student still needs more help, the chat is directed to the appropriate agent who has visibility of the previous chat, allowing them to seamlessly and efficiently continue the conversation.

As well as reducing agent workload, the bot is also reducing monotonous and time-consuming tasks. For example, the bot can schedule appointments with counsellors. With this time saved, agents can devote more of their time to students who require more complex help.

The ability to streamlines processes and drive efficiencies across the department has firmly made the Comm100 platform part of the college’s future. There are ongoing plans to expand capacity and leverage Comm100’s NLP technology to build more bots.