Proposal

Narrative

Florida Atlantic University (FAU) is driven to continuously improve service and communication delivery to current and prospective students, faculty, staff, families, and more. Concurrently, FAU New Student Transitions & Family Engagement seeks to improve the operating efficiency of its units, reducing costs and re-deploying human assets to more value-accretive activities. New Student Transitions & Family Engagement would like to implement Ivy Chatbot, 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 "chatbot" to colleges and universities. Ivy is like Siri/Cortana in that it can answer questions, schedule appointments, and direct people to resources; however, Ivy Chatbot is custom-trained to serve specific knowledge domains. Ivy’s intelligence can live in chat form on FAU New Student Transitions & Family Engagement website, at an email address, text, Facebook messenger, and in live chat.

Facilities

New Student Transitions & Family Engagement. Ivy is hosted on Google’s Cloud.

Hardware Requirements

None.

Software Requirements

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 important deadlines or school codes but also can connect students to university resources such as videos or third party resources. Ivy would be custom implemented for FAU to support New Student Transitions & Family Engagement 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. Student Benefits: Ivy.ai creates a unique communications platform with seamless bot and human engagement to provide exemplary service to our students, including online, out-of-state resident, commuter, and international. With a highly configurable set of modules, 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 will deliver key statistical insights into student behavior that have never before been analyzed, such as highest frequency intentions, n-gram analysis, interaction analysis etc. It is our belief that these insights will extend and further demonstrate the value proposition FAU delivers to its stakeholders. IVY FACT: 70% of interactions with Ivy occur outside the hours of 9am-5pm! In addition, 22% of all interactions occur on weekends and holidays.

Personnel Costs

None.

Other Costs

None.

Timeline

New Student Transitions & Family Engagement would like to implement Ivy.ai chatbot technology as early as January 2020. However, the team is reliant on the technology fee as an initial funding source.

Sustainability

New Student Transitions & Family Engagement believe that FAU’s investment in Ivy.ai 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. New Student Transitions & Family Engagement will be reducing its workforce due to fee decreases that run the unit. The department is slated to go from one graduate assistant to two in the coming months and following that individual’s graduation, there will be no more graduate assistants and a necessary decrease in OPS expenses (due to the previously mentioned fee decreases scheduled for summer/fall 2020 and onward). Graduate assistants currently manage frequent questions, respond to emails, voicemails and other traffic that would be less ended (ideally) due to the introduction of this chat bot. A chatbot would enable New Student Transitions & Family Engagement to be more responsive and better manage the load coming in from our list of email accounts and other methods of inquiry we respond to. This three-year, reoccurring request is an add-on to the already approved funding for Student Financial Aid. FAU Onboarding Teams want to maximize the overall customer service experience in a streamlined and cohesive manner. The three-year period will allow sufficient time to develop a sustainability plan university wide.

Resource Matching

None.

Implementing Organization

New Student Transitions & Family Engagement will implement the software with guidance from University O.I.T. and Division of Student Affairs & Enrollment Management O.I.T. leadership.