How a young dynamic university increased students satisfaction online

How a young dynamic university increased students satisfaction online

Increase students satisfaction online is nowadays really important. Globally, the spread of COVID-19 has led to the closure of schools and universities, thereby accelerating the expansion of the online services environment. As a leading University in the South of Italy, Unisalento realised the importance of online real time communication with students through Tiledesk live chat for education. They increased students satisfaction online. Do you want to know how?

Background: need of enhance the efficiency of the support staff to increase students satisfaction online

Università del Salento (“Unisalento”) is a young dynamic university, keen to expand and to prove itself at a national and international level.
Since 1955 the Università del Salento has had the aim of promoting knowledge, skill and merit and has offered a large range of educational opportunities. Please find below some figures about its online presence.

Unisalento main figures - increase students satisfaction online

Unisalento already had a ticketing system that provides asynchronous support to students and candidates. But they started looking for a software that would enhance the efficiency of their support staff by providing an advanced customer service experience via live chat for education. After their research later in 2018 they decided to select Tiledesk open source live chat.

Very proud of this choice, we supported their technical staff to solve all the architectural issues coming from the adoption of a live chat.

Live Chat Authentication

First of all they would separate the types of users coming into their live chat:

1️⃣Anonymous, unauthenticated Users

2️⃣Students, already registered into their Portal.

The first kind of users, Anonymous, are eligible to ask for general information, not privacy-sensible.
The second kind of users, the Students, are already signed up in the Unisalento Portal, and can ask privacy-sensible informations.

Agents, on the other end of every conversation, must be aware of the authenticity of the communication and must have a way to trust a user who declares himself to be a Student.

We achieved this task with Tiledesk custom authentication and JWT token technology. Please check Widget Authentication in Tiledesk Developer Hub for further technical details.

live chat widget univalent

A custom widget asks for users credentials. Users are authenticated on a custom Unisalento service that returns a JWT used by Tiledesk widget to verify user’s identity.
Agents on the dashboard will see a shielded profile icon for authenticated users.

Unisalento users dashboard

With a shield on the profile now the Support’s Agents can talk with trusted Students, safely exchanging privacy-sensible informations.

Live Chat Business Hours

Fundamental to accomplish a real time service was the possibility to edit the agent’s availability hours in the business day.
Here came the Business Hours Tiledesk’s feature. The Admin can easily setup the operating hours of team.

Tiledesk operating hours setting

Do you need help with the operating hours? Check Define the Operating Hours quick guide for admins.

Departments, Agents and Groups

Support Agents are actually organized into different teams based on specific skills and competencies. Setting up Tiledesk Departments and Agents groups has allowed Unisalento’s students to always find the most suitable answers to their questions.

See the Getting Started for Admins section of Tiledesk knowledge base for further details.

Rating

Unisalento evaluates overall customer satisfaction by using Tiledesk’s chat-rating feature. Receiving both positive and negative feedbacks helps to increase the overall quality of Unisalento’s support representatives. It gives to supervisors an overview of who is performing well. Receiving positive feedback after a chat session motivates their support staff as well.

Mauro Merico, Unisalento IT Manager, explained:

“Being close to our students is our priority. We were looking for an innovative tool to provide direct online contact with the Unisalento administration offices that would also improve the efficiency of the support staff. After a careful market analysis we found two interesting live chat solutions: Zendesk and Tiledesk.

Following the comparative analysis of the two solutions, Tiledesk has been identified as the most suitable platform. This is thanks to its useful functions designated for human operators as well as innovative chatbots. The latter will automate some admin tasks with a view to both speeding up the processes and increasing the student satisfaction rate.

Moreover, as an open-source solution, it is perfectly in line with Articles 68 – “Comparative analysis of solutions” and 69 – “Reuse of solutions and open standards” of the Code of Digital Administration for Public Administration”

Michele Pomposo
Michele Pomposo
In the 30's club. Italian in love with LatAm. Passionate about #innovation, #mobile, #customerexperience, #martech, #conversationalmarketing, #conversationalAI, #conversationaldesign and #opensource. Currently COO @ Tiledesk, a first-class open source AI conversational platform. You can connect and engage with me on Twitter (https://twitter.com/MichelePomposo) or LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/michelepomposo/)

2 Comments

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