Are eLearning chatbots worth it? Do they really help your students? Should your institute invest in one? Well, if you really care about your students and want to help them learn in the most effective manner during these unprecedented times, you should consider investing in an intelligent eLearning chatbot. Here’s why!
Why should you use eLearning chatbots?
With remote learning becoming the norm and students taking courses from all over the world, Edtech has become extremely important. Student engagement tools like eLearning chatbots help students find all the answers they seek, wherever they are at any time.
What are the benefits of eLearning chatbots?
1. Instant answers
Artificial intelligence chatbots will allow your students to get answers to their questions instantly. They won’t need to wait for ages, hoping to get an answer to an email. They won’t even need to bother getting on a phone call with your institution and waiting on hold till they manage to reach your representatives.
An eLearning chatbot will be able to answer around 80% of your students’ queries without any hiccups. And guess what, if your bot can’t answer a query, you can train the bot with great ease so that it is able to answer questions like that whenever they are asked in the future.
2. 24/7 support
Some students prefer studying in the still of the night or early in the morning when no-one can disturb them (speaking from experience here). It’s an effective way to study without distractions, but there is one tiny issue — it’s quite hard to get answers to their questions at those hours because professors and administrative staff would not be available to help them at that time. And that gets frustrating. It could also make students feel anxious.
This problem is even more pronounced because, due to the pandemic, your students are studying remotely, spread all over the world. Their timings might not match your staff’s schedule.
The good news is that you can fix this issue without forcing your staff to pull all-nighters throughout the year.
Those instant answers that your chatbot provides won’t be limited to your working hours. Your students could ask a question at 4:45 in the morning and still get an answer in less than a second.
3. Increased student satisfaction
When you students get answers instantly around the clock, their level of frustration goes down and their satisfaction levels start to rise. The anxiety of not having the answers they seek simply disappears.
Students feel better about your educational institution or eLearning platform. They’ll spread the word about you in a positive way, becoming evangelists for your institution and providing you with free word of mouth marketing.
The accessibility of information and the reduction of anxiety would also help your students learn in a more effective manner and perform better in their evaluations, thus creating powerful social proof for your institution and attracting more prospective students.
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4. Staff gets to focus on higher value work
As I mentioned earlier, intelligent chatbots can handle about 80% of the queries coming in from your students. Only the most complex ones would be passed on to your staff.
This means that your staff would not have to waste their time monotonously and mechanically answering the same repetitive questions over and over again.
This would allow your staff to focus their attention and energy on tasks that are more fulfilling and matter more. It would even give your staff the opportunity to take the time to prepare more thoroughly and deliver lectures that are more insightful and engaging than ever before.
7 eLearning chatbot usecases
1. Admissions
Chatbots are very powerful and effective tools for driving admissions and enrollment campaigns. They allow you to reach prospective students on the channels they would prefer engaging with you over, and deliver information about courses, the institution, etc.
In fact, the bot could make the admissions and enrollment process much easier for your students by allowing them to sign up and apply for courses directly over the bot. Instead of having to navigate through your website or even downloading your app, your prospective students could fill forms within the chatbot or just provide their information in a conversational format by answering the questions that the chatbot asks.
Your chatbot could even be integrated with your database, CRM, or Google Sheets to store the information collected from prospective students.
Your prospective students could even submit necessary documents by uploading them to your chatbot.
2. Administrative queries
Have the lectures been rescheduled? Is the college open or is it a holiday? When will the next examination cycle start?
Your students have a lot of administrative queries on their minds and you should seek to resolve them as fast as possible. Chatbots can help here, since most of these questions are repetitive in nature, have answers that have been pre-decided, and your chatbot can be trained in advance to answer them.
3. Notifications and reminders
Yes, it’s normal for your students to forget about assignment submissions and other deadlines. No, it’s not excusable for your institute to say, “We told you once 3 months ago and expected you to remember the submission deadline.”
You can use your chatbot to broadcast notifications and reminders to your students about assignments, exams, events, etc. And to make it even better, you get to broadcast these messages on the channels your students prefer using, like WhatsApp.
Pro tip:Use WhatsApp message templates to broadcast messages to your students.
4. Assignment submissions
Your chatbot does not need to stop at simply informing your students that they have an assignment to submit. Your intelligent Engati chatbot can actually make it possible for your students to submit their assignments directly over the chatbot.
To make that possible, you’d just have to add a file upload node in your chatbot flow.
5. Notifications and reminders
Go back to a student studying late in the night or before daybreak. There’s no way they’ll be able to get in touch with a professor for a quick doubt-solving session at that time. And if they’re cramming right before an exam, not getting the answers they need could frustrate and worry them to the point where they might not be able to study effectively and the anxiety could hamper their performance in the actual exam.
An eLearning chatbot could fill in for the professor here, clarifying doubts and providing students with all the answers and information they need.
6. Sharing additional information
Got extra reading material that could be helpful to your students? Share it with them over an intelligent chatbot. Deploying your chatbot on channels like WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger makes this even more effective because of the very overt notifications that your students will receive when they get a message from your bot.
You can use your education chatbot to send documents as well as links for further reading.
7. Doubling as an HR chatbot for your institute’s staff
Your bot does not need to be limited just to your students. You could even use it as an HR chatbot to help your staff. It could help them apply for leave, check your policies, request payslips and do much more with minimum effort.
eLearning chatbot best practices
1. Speak the language your students are comfortable with
You’ve got students from all over the world and you got to make them feel at home. Forcing them to only engage with your chatbot in English is not the best idea, especially because only 26% of netizens even understand English.
You need to be able to communicate with your students at scale in their own language. Your Engati chatbot can help you reach, engage, and educate your students in 50+ languages.
2. Reach students where they want to be reached
Do your students have to keep visiting your website and navigating through it to reach you? Maybe they have to email you and wait for a response. Or are you forcing them to call your up and deal with their worst nightmare — an IVR?
Do better.
You know that your students are spending around hours on social media (28 minutes a day on WhatsApp itself). Why aren’t you reaching them there?
Use your Engati chatbot to engage and educate your students over WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, Telegram, and 10+ other channels, delivering an omnichannel experience.
3. Use a Oneview inbox
You can’t have an omnichannel experience without context flowing across all these channels. When you use Engati’s chatbot + live chat solution, you get a Oneview inbox for all your customer conversations, even the ones coming in via email.
Our conversation stitching feature allows your representatives to look at past conversations that they, other agents, or even your chatbot had with particular students, so that they always have context across all channels and never have to repeat questions and frustrate customers.
4. Pay attention to analytics
Your chatbot is a goldmine of data and you need to use it right. Explore the analytics dashboards and even integrate your bot with Google Analytics to understand what your students are asking questions about what what their main concerns are.
5. Keep training
You’ll even be able to see the amount of student queries that your chatbot was actually able to answer and which ones it could not answer. If you see a pattern and find out that a lot of students are asking a certain question, you might want to train your chatbot to answer it.
Training becomes even easier when you don’t have to upload answers to individual questions. With our DocuSense technology, you could just upload a document to the bot and it will parse through it and pull all the answers that your students need — extremely useful for training your bots to answer doubts regarding course material.
6. Use chatbots and live chat
Your bot’s are not here to replace your representatives, they’re here to make their lives easier. Your bots can answer the simple, repetitive questions, but you’d want to transfer the complex, situational ones over to your live agents using live chat. And the best part is that with Engati Live Chat, your bot can route these queries directly to the agent most equipped to handle them, instead of sending your students hopping across departments.
University of Rochester’s student wellness chatbot
The University of Rochester Medical Center is one of the best academic medical centers in New York. They wanted to make OBGYN and mental well-being information more accessible for students as well as faculty.
They built an intelligent chatbot with a go-to-market time of just 14 days using Engati’s no code chatbot platform.
Their bot helps students take a break during the pandemic and travel (virtually) to museums and other attractions. It even helps them with guided meditations and much more.
This article about “Why do you need to deploy an eLearning chatbot” was originally published in Engati blogs.
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