Chatbot for University — 4 Challenges Facing Higher Education and How Chatbots Can Solve Them
Besides their core function of providing higher education, universities and colleges spend a significant percentage of their resources on maintaining their visibility and relevance. The fact that they cater to the younger segment of the population automatically implies that their approach to sales, marketing, and management needs to be on point. This is precisely why building university chatbots for websites has emerged as an effective strategy for universities and colleges. This article outlines the four key challenges that the higher education sector is currently presented with, and how university chatbot development serves as an effective solution.
1. The target market for higher education institutions is primarily on mobile.
Offering relevant courses and exciting programs is a solid start, but colleges and universities can miss out on new enrollments if their brand message fails to reach or resonate with their audience. At present, the target market for higher educational institutions consists of mobile-oriented millennials, who evaluate the quality of an interaction in terms of the promptness with which they receive their responses. This automatically makes instant messaging their preferred channel of communication, even when it comes to seeking support with an issue, or information about a program they would like to join.
The average millennial’s preference for instant messaging makes it highly beneficial for universities and colleges to create a chatbot to boost interest and enrollments in their courses. Building chatbots gives university websites the same advantages as successful ecommerce sites. Prospective applicants can interact with them round the clock, get helpful and accurate information about programs and courses, and useful guidance throughout their application and enrollment process.
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2. Lack of information deters prospective applicants.
From a potential applicant’s point of view, the recent surge in the number of universities and colleges worldwide can be a boon or a bane. It does give them the safety of more options, but at the same time, it makes their initial research tedious, time-consuming, and often confusing. Potential students can be deterred by a lack of information about a university, its campuses, staff, fee payment mechanisms, etc. Building university chatbots can help ameliorate this problem.
The best chatbots for university websites are able to put potential candidates at ease by providing them with accurate, sales-oriented answers even before they’ve spoken to a university representative. University chatbot development is, in fact, the ideal communications solution in this context, because almost all interested applicants have the same set of basic queries and doubts at the outset. Answers to these can easily be added to the chatbot’s script, and instantaneously dispensed to hundreds of applicants.
Information gaps can be a matter of concern even after students have enrolled in a program and started attending their classes. They may have doubts about the subject matter in a particular class, queries about assignment submission and evaluation, and general questions about campus life. Student portals are slated to be the place where they go to get answers to all these questions. But these portals are often inundated with inconsistent information, making it difficult to find the right answers. Again, online chatbots can step in and help students find specific information and answers using their own words.
1. Online courses are becoming the norm.
More and more students are taking courses and even entire degrees online, bypassing the considerable non-academic expenses that most universities impose on their students. Chatbots have a major role to play in online courses. They can serve as the point of contact for all students, simultaneously playing the role of ‘e-campus’ guide, administrative staff, and program coordinator. Universities that offer both online and on-campus programs, often create a chatbot to ensure seamless integration of their remote students with the larger ecosystem of their campus.
2. University websites are too big to be updated in real-time.
The average university website hosts a lot of information, and optimizing it in real time based on changing student needs is unrealistic. Most universities undertake website development as a standalone project, and plan for periodic updates at suitable times during the year. A number of student preferences and issues may get overlooked in this process, and only some of them may get addressed depending on the timing of the next website update.
Building chatbots for websites of universities is an effective alternative. On the one hand, the online chatbots can be programmed to dispense the latest news and updates through the chat window. In addition to this, their chat histories with students become a valuable source of information for the university, as they contain direct evidence of the issues and complaints that the students have at a particular point in time. As such, university chatbot development facilitates website optimizations and improvements throughout the year.
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