Proposal

Narrative

Chat Bots creates a unique communications platform with seamless bot and human engagement to provide exemplary service to our students, including online and Study Abroad. With a highly configurable set of modules, Chatbots will help FAU students answer questions, locate resources, provide an instant, appropriate solution, or find university web pages - 24 hours a day. Admissions answers thousands of calls per year, and we know that families try to call us when we are not open. 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. It 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. Chat bots would be custom implemented for FAU to support Undergraduate Admissions underlying objectives - providing better customer service, increasing marketing impact, and simply extending the hours of operation. Ivy is highly data driven and the bot is optimized to target the most meaningful metrics for our office. Furthermore, Ivy gets measurably “smarter” over time as it learns new content areas, driving even better results.

Facilities

Chat Bots are cloud based, no facilities or equipment is needed.

Hardware Requirements

NONE. Chat Bots are cloud based.

Software Requirements

NONE, Chat Bots are cloud hosted.

Personnel Costs

NONE

Other Costs

NONE

Timeline

Chat bots can be purchased, programmed and implemented within 6 months time.

Sustainability

As the chat bot learns through Artificial Intelligence, and gets smarter, it is possible, that in 1-2 years Admissions could realize some savings in staff salaries. Admissions will plan to incorporate ongoing costs after 2022 into the annual budget.

Resource Matching

The Office of Admissions would like to partner with Financial Aid in purchase and implementation. Financial Aid was awarded tech fee dollars in 2019. There is also the potential for New Student Transitions to add on, and or other departments in the future.

Implementing Organization

The Office of Admissions will collaborate with Financial Aid, and keep OIT informed on the status and project timeline. 24/7 coverage - when an advisor is signed in, it functions like live chat. When no one is present, the automation takes over. Mobile first; more than 20% of all interactions are initiated from mobile devices. Ability to rate the chat experience empowers students. Ability to view rich content inline (within the chat) including videos, files, charts, lists. Zero manual input of data (ability to configure and send forms). Easy management of multiple simultaneous conversations. Reports and Dashboards to review and measure chat performance of the team.