Proposal

Narrative

Office of Student Financial Aid seeks to improve the operating efficiency of its units, reducing costs and re-deploying human assets to more value-accretive activities. We would like to implement Ivy, an artificially intelligent agent that will improve its online presence, triage customer service requests, extend the hours of operations and enhance the overall quality of services and experience. Ivy.ai, a higher education technology company, provides an artificially intelligent "chat bot" to colleges and universities. Ivy is like Siri/Cortana in that it can answer questions, schedule appointments, and direct people to resources; however, Ivy is custom-trained to serve specific knowledge domains. Ivy’s intelligence can live in chat form on FAU Student Financial Aid website, at an email address, text, Facebook messenger, and in live chat. 70% of interactions with Ivy occur outside the hours of 9am-5pm! In addition, 22% of all interactions occur on weekends and holidays. Student Benefits: IVY creates a unique communications platform with seamless bot and human engagement to provide exemplary service to our students, including online and Study Abroad. Ivy will help FAU students answer questions, locate resources, provide an instant, appropriate solution, or find university web pages - 24 hours a day. Staff Goals: Ivy would be custom implemented for FAU to support Student Financial Aid underlying objectives - providing better customer service, increasing marketing impact, and extending the hours of operation. Ivy will deliver key statistical insights into student behavior that have never before been analyzed, such as highest frequency intentions, interaction analysis etc. We believe that FAU’s investment in Ivy will generate near-instant positive returns as the volume of transactions captured by the chatbot will translate into improved customer service, increased utilization of existing resources, and reduced transactions for FAU staff members.

Facilities

NA - Ivy is hosted on Google’s Cloud.

Hardware Requirements

None.

Software Requirements

Our proposed technology fee project is the addition of Ivy Chatbot to the Office of Student Financial Aid. Using natural language processing and machine learning, the Ivy chatbot interacts with website visitors by understanding the semantics of their asked-questions and providing an immediate, meaningful answer. Ivy can be trained to disseminate information such as deadlines or school codes but also can connect students to university resources such as videos or third party resources.

Personnel Costs

There will be free training for staff. There is no additional staff needed.

Other Costs

The annual fee of the program is $1/enrollment/department (30,000). Current pricing based on estimated enrollment of 30,000.

Timeline

Implementation of Ivy Chatbot is typically completed in about 3-6 months.

Sustainability

NA

Resource Matching

NA

Implementing Organization

Office of the Student Financial Aid will implement the project that will benefit the entire University community.