Welcome to “Lessons from our Voice Engine,” a series of blog posts by members of our Engineering and Speech Tech teams that explain, at a high level, how our voice engine works.
This first lesson comes from Nick Parslow, a Computational Linguist and member of our Speech Tech team at SoapBox Labs.
What is NLP?
Natural Language Processing (NLP) is about the interface between human language and machine language. This can mean taking a written sentence — just like this one — and extracting the key information from it, such as the semantic ideas, or the intent in the case of a command like left, right, open, close, for example. Going in the opposite direction, NLP can mean taking data and generating a human readable text from it.
In speech recognition systems like the SoapBox voice engine, NLP is used to build what are called language models — statistical models of language that can predict the next word based on the context. Language models are essential to help disambiguate similar sounding phrases. A great example of this is “white shoes” and “why choose.”
Building a language model requires “normalization” of text — taking, for example, all instances of “ice-cream” and “icecream” and converting them to the same form. Without that normalization, the computer thinks of them as completely unrelated words.
Another use of NLP in speech recognition — in particular for English — is to work out the pronunciation of a word. This may be difficult for a machine to work out automatically (comparing “though” and “tough,” for example), so it may involve a mix of manual and automatic estimation.
What role does NLP play at SoapBox?
NLP plays a critical role at SoapBox because it links the spoken version of language with the written form, thereby allowing our voice engine to better understand and assess what a child is saying — their intent, their pronunciation, and much more — beyond just the words themselves.
A collaboration between ExxonMobil, Fiserv, Amazon Pay, and Alexa has made possible the launch of voice payments technology. Who would have imagined the possibility of paying for gas just by using a simple voice command like “Alexa, pay for gas”. Let alone having it available at thousands of Exxon and Mobil gas stations all around the US.
However, it is a feature available for more than 10 months for every Amazon Alexa user, along with all the conveniences it includes.
How does “Alexa, pay for gas” work?
Every Amazon Alexa user can use this feature with the Alexa app in their smartphone, vehicles with Alexa built-in, or the Echo Auto devices to complete the payment for fuel with just their voice.
It is available in nearly 11,500 Exxon and Mobil gas stations across the US and everyone can use it assisted from the Amazon Pay services.
Once you go near a gas station, you will only need to ask Alexa with your voice “Alexa, pay for gas”. Alexa will then confirm the pump number, station location and prepare for fueling. Now you can select the fuel type and start fueling.
After completing your transaction securely through Amazon Pay services and powered by Fiserv’s payment platform, your car will be filled up and back on the road in no time. There’s no need to pay inside the station or insert your credit card at the pump.
Convenience vs Security: is it worth it?
“Say, pay, be on your way!” is a phrase that has defined the future of filling up your vehicle at the gas station. What Amazon has done with its virtual assistant recently is truly innovative. You can see how this will be popular for drivers — getting them to fill up their tank without having to stand in line at the pump. Instead, they can make the process frictionless with a single voice request asking Alexa to pay for gas.
What about security and protecting your account from unwanted payments?
You can limit access to your account information by requiring a 4-digit code before you can make a purchase. If your personal information is already protected with a Voice Code, “Alexa, pay for gas” will work as expected. You can also use the same Voice Code for voice shopping.
In order to be able to use the Voice Code, you must first have a Voice Code, if not already. You can enable the feature in your Amazon Alexa account. From the Alexa App, go to “Account Settings” and then to “Voice Purchasing.”. Here you can create a new four-digit Voice Code.
Considering these details, we can conclude that “Alexa, pay for gas” is a convenient and simple way to refuel your car, yet very safe and secure since it goes through Amazon Pay services and Fiserv’s platform.
Ok so I’m trying to find a chat bot for either a text app or the Facebook messager app. Both would be preferred. Does anyone know any websites I could check? Or any chat bots I could use? Plz I need to find 1!
When you visit any website, you may have noticed that a pop-up usually appears at the bottom right of the screen. It greets you and welcomes you, and offers assistance while you surf the site. This popup is a Chatbot, also known as a Conversational Marketing Chatbot.
These Chatbots are one of the best marketing strategies adopted for enhancing the user experience and business growth. Today’s Chatbots are powered by cutting-edge technologies like NLP (Natural Language Processing) and ML (Machine Learning) that enable businesses to leverage automation to conduct smooth interactions with customers in a more human way.
Many brands often use regular Chatbots. These bots are built based on decision trees, but fail to impress the consumer, resulting in poor customer experiences. In addition, people sometimes complain that Chatbots don’t understand what they’re trying to say.
For such problems, Natural Language Processing and Machine Learning prove invaluable. Chatbots based on NLP and ML can efficiently determine the appropriate context for the suitable applications. This way, it offers a user–friendly interface for consumers. Moreover, these technologies give the appearance to end-users that a human is answering on the other side.
Aside from these, NLP-ML bots can do a variety of other things, such as document analysis, machine translation, and differentiating contents. We’ll explore why NLP and ML are needed in these bots in more detail.
Chatbots and its Types
Chatbots are software programs commonly known as “bots” that interact with end-users through an automated chat interface. For example, a programmed Chatbot interacts like an online customer service executive giving you instant replies.
Chatbots are used for different purposes, but primarily, they are used in customer services.
Chatbots are generally divided into two types, fully automated and semi-automated.
A decision tree or rule-based
ML, NLP, or AI (Artificial Intelligence) based
A decision tree or rule-based bot works based on predefined keywords or scripted actions. Simple customer service requests are handled by rule-based Chatbots in e-commerce applications. They are easy to build, simple to use, and accomplish routine tasks.
On the other hand, ML and NLP-based Chatbots use the latest techniques to converse more naturally.
Machine learning chatbots learn from the input they receive. By utilizing natural language processing, it achieves intelligent learning that considers any interaction between computers and human language.
Let us find out how ML and NLP make your Chatbot experience better-
The task of NLP Engines — NLP engines comprehensively employ Machine Learning for parsing user input to extract the required entities and understand user intent. Chatbots powered by Natural Language Processing can parse several user intents to reduce the failure rate.
Intent Recognition — User inputs from a Chatbot are segmented and compiled to user intent through little words. NLP scrutinizes complete sentences by understanding the meaning of words, placing, conjugation, form, etc. Hence, it converts a sentence or paragraph into a simpler one.
Handling Entity — Entities are made up of fields, data, or words depicting an object like date, time, place, location, description, etc. The chatbots identify words from users and match with the available entities or collect other entities for completing a task.
Capitalizing Nouns — NLP-based Chatbots remove capitalization from common nouns and identify proper nouns from speech/user input.
Increasing Vocabulary — NLP continuously adds new synonyms to the bots and uses Machine Learning to improve the chatbot vocabulary, also transferring vocabulary.
Understanding Tense of the Verbs — NLP-MI Chatbots can learn different tenses and conjugation of the verbs through the tenses.
Contractions — These bots expand the contractions and remove apostrophes in between the words.
The Context behind Customer Data Lacks Generalization
Each customer interaction is unique, holding its own connotations and intents. As a result, marketing teams are under pressure to understand customer requests accurately.
Many businesses use generic Chatbots that use NLP techniques. Yet these Chatbots fail to convert potential customers, acquire them, and deliver precise, intelligent responses.
It is where NLP-powered Chatbots come into play.
These bots can identify specific contexts and understand customers with different intents.
Powered by Machine Learning, the bots can be trained to make better predictions that align with appropriate responses.
NLP-powered Chatbots help in recognizing the essential parts of your customer’s responses.
They match the intent in those messages with product lists and content feeds to offer better recommendations.
Identifying Context And Intent Will Increase Conversion Rates
Generalized natural language processing is helpful in generic contexts such as finding a location or checking the weather, etc. However, it will not be able to answer any specific queries made by customers.
Domain-specific NLP is best suited for intelligent identification and learning how a customer of a particular brand enquiries.
Every business has different customer intents and purchases records. Refined data is hard to find and analyze. There might not be a lot of examples of data for training the bot initially.
Generic NLP solutions fall short of offering mechanized solutions that can automate point-to-point conversations with your consumers.
Advanced machine learning through the power of conversational intelligence techniques will help you in achieving a human-like approach.
ML creates context and intent for the niche markets. These are categorized by examining each scenario and conversation.
Issues Faced By Marketers and Its Solutions
One of the primary concerns for many businesses and marketers while launching a marketing Chatbot is the absence of useful information or data. There is no data to start with, and even if there are some, it lacks variations. Therefore, it becomes difficult to develop a Chatbot that understands how the customer interacts.
Solutions — This is where Machine Learning comes to the rescue. ML helps with generating variations and offers a better solution.
It offers a way out by classifying contexts and intents followed by creating more precise data in less time.
ML techniques coupled with Domain-Specific NLP help in creating Intelligent Chatbots.
A specific Machine Learning technique known as generative adversarial networks helps in achieving the objectives mentioned above.
Automated systems based on ML are designed to train each other.
It can take a brand’s limited data as input, predict over one million variants, and match it to the most appropriate responses.
ML-NLP-based techniques generate useful information from a limited set of data in less time.
It means your chatbot will respond accurately with the best suggestions to your customers.
Advantages of NLP and ML Based Chatbots
It reduces the false-positive rate due to accurate interpretation.
Identifies failures in user input and offers a solution by resolving conflicts through statistical modeling.
Uses comprehensive communication when dealing with user responses.
Has the capability to learn faster and address the gaps observed while developing a solution.
Achieve natural language capability through lesser training data inputs.
Ability to reuse or re-purpose the input training data for learning in the future.
It offers straightforward and straightforward corrective measures for false positives.
Not Just Limited To Retrieve Information
Chatbots built with NLP and ML are not limited to CRM (Customer Relationship Management). They also work with back-end systems of enterprises, such as application access, configuration management, service catalogs, workflow management, identity management, etc.
This leads to resolving service requests that require end-to-end integration of interconnected business workflows in a better way.
Using RPA (Robotic process automation) technology, you can troubleshoot email, unlock accounts, create strong and unique passwords, install antivirus software, use anonymous browsers, use two-factor authentication, reset passwords, manage what access your apps have, and resolve VPN connectivity issues.
Businesses are now recognizing the value of AI chatbots in automating processes. Several large companies are silently implementing such technologies globally.
Conclusion
NLP-ML-powered chatbots help improve your business processes and elevate customer experience to a higher level. When you automate the customer interaction process, you indirectly increase your chances of improving overall growth and productivity by manifold.
It provides advantages in terms of cutting-edge technologies that help survive in the competitive market; thus, saving time, effort, and costs that further guarantees customer satisfaction and better engagements in your business.
Customer Experience expert, Dan Gingiss, says that you need to engage with your customers on the channels and platforms on which they are active. With 1.5 billion users across 180 countries, WhatsApp is a channel you can’t miss out on. Here’s how you need to leverage it.
Hint:Use a bot…a WhatsApp bot.
Why WhatsApp?
WhatsApp is now the Go-To messaging platform for most people. It’s come to the point where we’re sending 29 million messages every minute. That’s about 65 billion a day.
This means that people are now more comfortable using WhatsApp than any other platform. So, it makes much more sense for them to be able to interact with you over WhatsApp, rather than forcing them to download your app (let’s face it, we don’t have the storage space or the inclination to get another app).
And interacting with them on WhatsApp has another benefit. The engagement rates are through the roof. While you’d struggle to get a 15% open rate on your emails, WhatsApp messages have an engagement rate of around 70%.
WhatsApp does have certain strategic advantages in some countries. In India, for example, WhatsApp boasts a user base that’s 200 million strong.
Businesses need to engage customers over WhatsApp
Great, but what would I use a WhatsApp chatbot for?
Glad you asked! Let’s say you launched a new product or offered a discount..basically, any major announcement. How do you plan on spreading the word to your customers?
Website announcements and social media posts can be effective, but not as much as WhatsApp.
1. WhatsApp Marketing
According to Harper Reed,
If you get a WhatsApp message, you’re probably going to open it.
So, let’s address the question you have on your mind — “how do I use WhatsApp for marketing?”
Reminders
With WhatsApp, you can send your customers and prospects reminders about events, sales, etc.
Promotional offers
You can use WhatsApp to share discounts and other promotional offers with your customers. You can even personalize these offers to their preferences.
Broadcasts and campaign messages
You can use broadcasts to send a message to all your customers or a campaign message to target specific customer segments with WhatsApp automation.
WhatsApp would send your customers a notification whenever you broadcast an announcement to them. That’s much more effective than posting a simple announcement on social media or even your website. It’s a more powerful way to drive action.
WhatsApp empowers you to collect feedback from customers and understand their preferences. It’s much more effective than a survey form because it involves less effort.
Customers can just send their thoughts directly over WhatsApp without needing to fill a form over even navigate to another application.
Permission marketing
WhatsApp Marketing could very well be the gold standard for permission marketing.
Your bot cannot send messages to anyone who hasn’t opted into them. Additionally, WhatsApp bots can only send messages to users who have chatted with your bot recently. There are time limits in place here.
This means that every WhatsApp message you send is going to a user who has recently demonstrated interest in your business and offerings. You won’t just be spraying and praying.
It’s also more effective than emails because customers are more comfortable with WhatsApp. People might put off reading an email, but we humans are pretty much conditioned to read WhatsApp messages as soon as we get them.
It’s practically Pavlovian Conditioning for us to open a WhatsApp message as soon as we get the notification.
Analyzing campaign effectiveness
You can measure the effectiveness of your WhatsApp messages, with rich analytics, right on the Engati portal. Our dashboards give you all the insights you need to step up your WhatsApp Marketing efforts.
Engati Platform Analytics
Now, you can do some of these things over email as well. So you might be wondering why WhatsApp marketing is essential.
Firstly, it’s because 2 billion people use the app globally. And they love it. People use WhatsApp much more than they use email.
Your customers have associated email with work and stress. They look at WhatsApp as a quicker way of communicating.
Instead of replying with a well-crafted email, they just need to shoot a quick text written in short-hand. Essentially, WhatsApp feels more convenient.
This means results in people checking WhatsApp multiple times throughout the day and only looking at their emails once in a while.
But let’s go back to something we already discussed. WhatsApp Marketing is important because of the way we are conditioned towards WhatsApp notifications.
While we might simply swipe an email notification away from our phones, we are far more likely to open a WhatsApp notification and read the message.
2. Customer Support over WhatsApp
Here’s another reason why you need it. When your customers need help, they don’t want to waste time calling someone up or navigating through your website to find a ‘Contact Us’ section. They want to have their issues resolved in the simplest way possible. If they’re on WhatsApp, you need to be there too.
3. Driving sales via WhatsApp bots
Simplifying sales processes has always been linked to higher amounts of sales generated.
Your customers want you to make it easier for them to buy your offerings. They want to buy your offerings; you’re just making it to hard for them to do it.
And how better to simplify the sales process than to empower your customers to make purchases over WhatsApp?
All you need to do is display your catalog over the bot and integrate your chatbot with Stripe or another payment gateway. Then as soon as they select the product, they’ll be taken to the payment page.
Customers are rapidly shifting towards conversational commerce. That leaves you a choice — adopt it now or get left behind.
4. Order tracking on WhatsApp
As soon as a customer places an order over an e-commerce portal, there’s one thought that constantly plagues their mind — “Will it be delivered on time?”.
Sure, they could track their orders by visiting your website or downloading your mobile app. But that involves too much effort. Besides, who has space for yet another app on their phones?
They’re already using WhatsApp…why don’t you just send them shipping updates right there?
It eases their anxiety with minimum effort on their behalf and creates a better experience for them. But that’s not all.
The transparency that you provide by doing this will even increase their trust in your business.
So, do you need to build a WhatsApp chatbot?
Even if you think you’re a smaller business and could handle your clients without a whatsapp chatbot, you do need to realize that customers today, are spoilt. We want what we want when we want it. We don’t wait for anybody.
So, if you’re unable to interact with customers at odd hours, you could lose out on their business. Besides, your time would be better spent doing something more productive than answering questions mechanically.
With Engati Live Chat, your bot can handle all the routine, monotonous queries and send only the complicated queries to the human agent. Essentially, your employees get to spend their time on more productive tasks that require an advanced, human intellect.
Making it even better
Engati even helps you create your WhatsApp chatbot at an unbelievable price! We’re providing amazing capabilities, detailed analytics, and smooth customer experiences at the lowest price.
Reach your customers on a platform they love and take your business to the next level, with the help of your very own WhatsApp bot.
When Artificial Intelligence (AI) became viable for enterprises, it was only a matter of time before businesses turned to AI-powered IVAs and Chatbots as smarter conversational solutions to meet the ever-growing customer expectation.
Earlier, customers struggled to interact efficiently with brands. There were few pain points like long wait times, inefficient customer service, lack of personalization, etc. But now, the customer experience landscape tells a surprisingly different story. Innovations in artificial intelligence have changed the way businesses used to communicate with their customers.
According to Accenture’s Global Consumer Pulse survey, 23% of US consumers said that their expectations from customer service are now higher than a year ago, and they are expecting faster customer service with more digital options. In contrast to this evolution in digital communication, businesses are preferring to adopt cognitive AI technologies to uphold the transforming standards of customer service and engagements.
Today, many businesses seek to join the AI revolution. Genesys predicted that 60% of U.S. companies will be using AI by 2022.
Why? Because not only have they seen the results of a poor customer service experience, but the fear of losing the market to AI-enabled competitors is a critical factor for business survival.
But, before any business can adopt and implement AI-powered virtual assistants or AI chatbots, this is something to think about:
Why do you need an What can AI chatbots be used for? Or What problems will it solve for your business?What type of customers is your chatbot for?AI chatbot?
Once you know the requirements, feasibility, and your target customers for AI Chatbot, it’s time to start thinking about the best use-cases. Picking the right use-cases for an AI chatbot increases the efficiency of customer service teams and the overall success of AI-enabled customer experience.
In terms of AI chatbot methodology, a Use Case is an action that can be modeled, handled, and accomplished through a conversational interaction between the bot and the user.
Before we talk further about picking the best use cases for an AI chatbot, let’s recap the basics.
While creating appropriate use cases, it is important to identify business aspects of the flow, exceptions, and technical limitations. This process requires the contribution of the whole project team including the project manager, business/product representatives, and developers.
Identifying & designing the first few Use Cases might take up some time for the project team initially, but once a process template is established, it doesn’t take more than 4–6 hours to design the whole set of best-suited use cases unique to a business.
We know that the use cases will vary for businesses and may require industry-specific extensive research. Therefore, a strategic approach to choosing the best use-cases for your AI chatbot is the first step.
Steps to choose the right use-case for an AI Chatbot
While choosing the best AI chatbot use cases for your business, assessment of your organization’s technical capabilities becomes of utmost importance. Once you analyze your requirement to adopt and implement an intelligent AI chatbot, you need to look out for these key steps that can help you decide on the best possible solutions.
For example:
Customer Service: “The average resolution time is reduced to 45 sec because customers now have access to the relevant information through AI chatbots”.
The first step in choosing the best use case is to determine what ROI means for your business. This calculation is based on the unique needs of your business in the context of both brand value and industry reputation. In simple terms, you should have a track of the returns of your AI Chatbot.
Financial Services: “Users struggling to find relevant information or perform specific tasks in their insurance portal. Improving the customer experience with an AI-powered conversational interface will save hours of work for businesses.
Hence, it makes sense to start automating the repetitive processes with an AI chatbot that drives higher ROI. Also, it is crucial to have clear KPIs to constantly monitor the performance of your AI chatbot from an investment perspective. Eventually, when you can describe your ROI in one sentence, you should know that your approach is working.
The next step is defining your target audience. However, you need to research the following W’s to identify your correct user persona:
Who are they?
What do they expect?
What are their preferred languages?
What are their pain points?
How is their experience with AI chatbots?
By having clear answers to these questions, you will be able to build tailored use-cases for your AI chatbot that matches the expectations of your target audience.
It is important to keep in mind that we are building a chatbot for real users trying to accomplish concrete tasks. Depending on the user group that is targeted, the chatbot would have a very specific persona. For example, building a chatbot to help sales representatives in their daily tasks (e.g. updating meeting details, creating new opportunities in the CRM…) is not the same user persona as building a chatbot to help finance teams manage their cost centers.
Next, it’s time to decide how your AI chatbot will interact with your customers. In simple terms, the next step is to determine the personality of your chatbot.
For Example: Siri or Alexa, have a well-defined inbuilt personality to make the interaction user-friendly and engaging.
Similarly, to decide on the best chatbot personality while communicating to customers, here are some of the key aspects that need to be considered by businesses looking forward to adopting AI chatbots:
Who is the name and character of your chatbot? (neutral, formal/informal).
What is its avatar? (If any)
What languages, tone, vocabularies, does it use?
What capabilities would the user expect your chatbot to have?
What are you trying to achieve with the help of AI chatbots?
The efficiency of an AI chatbot is directly related to the way it starts, transits, and closes a conversation. Although the use cases can be different across industries, your AI chatbot should be domain-independent when it comes to delivering a superior customer experience.
AI Chatbot Use Cases for Business
While we know how to pick the best AI chatbot use case, let’s take a look at these common chatbot use cases across different industries:
Customer Service:
Instant answer to customer queries
Handling common repetitive questions
Guiding visitors through their journey
Payment Processing
Collect customer feedback
Healthcare:
Collect patient information
Book consultations
Schedule tests and diagnosis
Healthcare Tips and Safety Guidelines
Report Generation
Retail:
Lead generation
Order management
Product delivery
FAQs
Instant buy option
Finance:
Answer finance-related queries
Troubleshoot account related issues
Process online payments
Generate leads by engaging visitors
Detect Fraudulent transactions
Key Capabilities AI Chatbots Should Have
1. Sentiment Analysis: An AI chatbot helps you peruse extensive datasets and continues to build its own knowledge base. Powered with the Sentiment Analysis feature, AI chatbots help businesses understand the behavioral patterns of their customers and detect customer sentiments while addressing their issues. This helps chatbots respond with empathy and keep the conversation more human.
2. Intent Prediction: One of the key significance of AI chatbots is to predict the intent of the user during the conversation. The NLP algorithms at the back end process the user’s query in addition to the underlying trained data which enables the chatbots to understand the user intent and sail the conversation accordingly.
3. Omnichannel Communication: To drive higher ROI, businesses can leverage AI chatbots to automate customer interactions across a wide range of customer-facing digital touchpoints and help divert queries seamlessly to live agents without any break-in the conversation experience.
4. ISAT Calculation Capability:Intelligence Satisfaction score is calculated by taking a deep dive into the conversations handled by an AI chatbot, identifying the ‘positive’ and ‘negative’ chats, and analyzing what use cases were efficiently handled by the chatbots. It helps businesses gather insights on the overall performance of an AI-powered customer journey and drive ROI at scale.
Wrap Up
To pick up the best use cases for an AI chatbot, businesses can adopt different strategic approaches when it comes to deploying AI-powered technologies. A simple, generic chatbot may not deliver superior CX due to limited capabilities; however, an AI-powered chatbot can help your business increase customer engagements significantly. Also, an efficient AI Chatbot should not be confined to a single use case but to expand and add more, in an attempt to deliver the best solutions for industry-wise business use cases. With the increasing adoption of powerful AI technologies and evolving customer expectations, finding and designing the best-tailored use cases for AI chatbots is now an imperative and essential element of the customer service strategy.
Interested to explore more or want to try out a chatbot of your own?
Every year, nearly 20 million students enroll in universities across the United States. Given how important the choice of a college can be for a person’s academic and professional career, students understandably have a lotof questions about majors, eligibility, tuition, campus life, faculty, and more, while going through the process of selecting a university. And as universities compete to get on board students who are the right ‘fit’, it is important for them to not only provide the right answers to prospective students’ queries but also to effectively communicate precisely what they have to offer.
Colleges invest a lot of time and resources in engaging with prospective students — with US universities spending billions of dollars annually on admissions. But the COVID-19 pandemic has thrown open new challenges for universities, as they now have to find ways to engage with students at a time when in-person interactions, including visits to university campuses and college fairs, will likely not be possible.
The good news is that there’s a solution to this problem — a proven technology that has already helped organizations across the globe automate customer engagement at scale through personalized human-like interactions.
Two words. Conversational AI.
Here are four reasons why your university should implement a Conversational AI solution to give a much-needed boost to your admissions process during this challenging time.
Resolve Routine Queries End-to-End
“I want to know about majors”, “How do I get started with my application?”, “What are the tuition fees for this program?”– these are some of the common queries you will be getting on a daily basis. Your support staff and admissions officers will have to manually answer these questions over and over again on phone calls or over e-mail. And given the sheer volume of queries that you will be receiving on these mediums, especially in the absence of in-person discussions and events, it will be extremely difficult, if not impossible, for your staff to handle all of them properly.
This is where Conversational AI comes to the rescue. An AI-powered Intelligent Virtual Assistant can resolve these routine queries and FAQs end-to-end, with no human intervention required. And it does so in an engaging, conversational manner that simulates the experience of speaking to a human being and getting personalized attention.
As you can see in the examples above, the AI Assistant answers the student’s questions about majors, and can also direct him to relevant sections of the website or other additional resources if required. It also guides the student with regard to the university’s application process.
Conversational AI thus enables your university to scale up its ability to offer support to prospective students, while also freeing up your human staff and allowing them to focus on more complex tasks that require their attention.
This reduced dependency on your human support staff is also very helpful at a time when many of them will be unable to make it to work, or face logistical difficulties that may arise from working remotely.
Conversational AI makes it possible for your university to engage with students 24/7.The AI Assistant instantly responds to their queries and offers them the support that they require at any time, day or night.
Being able to provide students with quick and timely answers is a great way to keep them engaged and ensure a positive experience, by preventing the frustration that could arise from not being able to get hold of a human agent in time. The 24/7 availability of an AI Assistant is particularly useful when it comes to engaging with international students across time-zones.
Offer a Virtual Campus Tour
Picking a college is of course, not just about majors or eligibility for a program. The campus plays a major role in this decision for any student — understandably so, given that they will be spending a major chunk of the next four lives of their lives there! The beauty and aesthetic appeal of college campuses is certainly a factor, as is the infrastructure and facilities available.
It is for this reason that many students visit campuses for a tour while in the process of selecting colleges. Unfortunately, such physical campus tours may not be possible in the near future due to COVID-19. But even under normal circumstances, there may be students (particularly international students) who will find it difficult to make the trip.
With an AI Assistant, you can offer a virtual campus tour to interested students. Through photos and videos, a student can explore the campus and get a feel for the place, as well as learn about its amenities and attractions. The assistant serves as a virtual ‘campus tour guide’, answering students’ questions about the campus and its facilities, interesting facts and trivia, and more.
It may not be quite the same as actually being there, but it’s certainly the next best thing you can offer your prospective students!
Facilitate Personal Interactions
While Conversational AI can do wonders, ultimately, a prospective student would, at some point in the process, like to speak to an admission counselor, an existing student, or even a faculty member.
Fortunately, an AI Assistant can help with that as well.
A good Conversational AI platform would include anAgent Chattool, which can seamlessly transfer a conversation from the AI Assistant to a human agent.
So, if a prospective student asks to speak to an admissions counselor, and a counselor is available, he/she can take over the conversation and have a ‘live chat’ with the student.
Similarly, a student can use the assistant to learn about the faculty members associated with various programs and majors of the university and request a ‘live chat’ with them to get a better understanding of the programs. They might also want to chat with existing students in order to get an insider’s perspective of life at your university and a ‘feel’ for the kind of peers they can expect to meet there.
Of course, it may not always be possible for these stakeholders to be available for a live chat. But you can offer students the option of scheduling a phone call or video call with a counselor, faculty member or student representative through the AI Assistant.
These conversations will not only help with your efforts to engage prospective students (particularly those who are seriously considering applying to your university) but will actually go a long way towards influencing their decision to apply to your university, as well as decide which programs or majors to apply to.
To sum up
Choosing a university is an important decision for any student, which makes it crucial for universities to be effective in showcasing what they can offer, and helping them with the information they need to make an informed choice. Conversational AI enables your university to do this at scale, instantly and round-the-clock, while also reducing your dependency on human support staff.
Apart from boosting your engagement efforts during a challenging time, there can be no better way to position yourself as a tech-savvy university of the future than by making an AI Assistant your virtual ambassador!
Want to develop an Intelligent Virtual Assistant solution for your brand?
