Chatbot automation is a powerful solution for educational institutions that need to handle a large number of student inquiries. In this customer story, we will show you how one of our clients in the education sector used Tiledesk to implement chatbot automation and enhance their student experience.
The National University of Córdoba (UNC) is one of Latin America’s oldest and most prestigious universities. Founded in 1613, it is also the second largest university in Argentina, with more than 130,000 students enrolled in various faculties and schools.
To make this customer story accurate and helpful for other educational institutions that are interested in chatbot automation, we interviewed Jorge M Finochietto, Secretary of Virtual Education Technology at UNC. He shared with us his insights on the implementation process and the benefits of using Tiledesk for their communication automation.
As you can imagine, a large university like UNC has to deal with a lot of student inquiries every day. UNC used a helpdesk system to support its students by implementing a ticketing system.
Jorge, as the Secretary of Virtual Education Technology, had already deployed a ticketing system called Jira that enabled them to answer student inquiries one by one.
Although the process was very time-consuming and costly, they could manage it. But things changed last year and the number of student inquiries increased sharply.
Last year, we participated in a national program to teach English to the students in the first year. The number of students who joined the program was 80,000. Our helpdesk faced a huge number of tickets every day and students repeatedly asked questions like their timetable, teachers, classes, and teaching materials.
As the support team was not that big, they had two options in front of them.
Finally, they chose the second option. They decided to use chatbot automation for answering questions and sharing materials and information via some triggers for specific events.
Want to see how the chatbot of Córdoba University works? You can find it here.
Chatbot automation means using bots for repetitive and time-consuming tasks instead of using human agents. Some examples of chatbot automation can be answering frequently asked questions, automating conversations, sharing education materials, and integrating with other tools.
For a university like UNC, having chatbot automation would save a lot of time and money. A bot can manage multiple inquiries at the same time without getting confused or making mistakes. It can also share materials and information by email triggers if needed.
A bot cannot completely replace human agents because it cannot solve complex inquiries. But we need to know that more than 75% of questions are repetitive. And bots can handle these repetitive questions perfectly.
Choosing the right tool is one of the most important factors that leads to success or failure in chatbot automation. All the following efforts and integrations depend on this decision.
We at Tiledesk believe in the power of automation. Tiledesk is a conversational automation platform that allows integration with other tools. Making different integrations was always our priority, and we have put efforts into automation since the beginning. And that’s why now we can enable our customers to integrate with other tools and products effortlessly.
Lets get back to our customer story and see what was the needs and decision process.
We needed a system that could automate our communications and help us track how many students had issues. More importantly, we needed an email trigger feature that would send emails automatically in the conversation process to our students based on different events. That’s why we chose Tiledesk, the best solution for Chatbot Automation.
An email trigger is a powerful feature that you can find in Tiledesk’s Chatbot Design Studio. An email trigger can be activated at a certain point based on your conversation design. For example, you can provide some buttons like course description, material, and teacher in your conversation flow. Then, once a student clicks on the material button, the email trigger would be activated and automatically send a pre-built email including the material to the student. You can create different email triggers containing different content for different buttons. This way, you can automate your communication with your students and provide them with the information they need in a timely manner. Email triggers are one of the many benefits of using Tiledesk for Chatbot Automation.
Although the market of chatbots is competitive, Tiledesk stands out as a unique solution that solves all their communication challenges with chatbot automation.
We researched the market of chatbots with some important factors. For us, one of the most important factors was flexibility. We needed a tool that would allow us light integration with other tools. As we had a ticketing system, we wanted to integrate our current ticketing system via chatbots.
Tiledesk allows you to integrate different tools in minutes. You will need just the API for the other tool to integrate it with Tiledesk. You can integrate Tiledesk with whatever tool you are using right now easily.
In the Chatbot Design Studio, among the actions, you can find an action called Web Request. This action allows seamless integration between Tiledesk and other tools.
Another important factor that led us to choose Tiledesk was its open-source nature. We value our data security and privacy, and we want to prevent any kind of hijacking and hacking of our data. Tiledesk is an open-source platform that lets us have full control over our data and how we use it.
As the goal of the Córdoba University was to reduce the number of tickets that should be managed manually, we implemented chatbots as the first touchpoint for student interactions. Chatbots are truly great in answering questions. Chatbots are powered by artificial intelligence and use natural language processing to understand student intent. Then they will try to resolve the problem by themselves.
If a student asks to recover a password or asks for material or course info, the chatbot can manage to solve student inquiries by itself. The process of answering questions might be sharing a URL, video or file inside the chat widget or by sending an email with learning materials.
There is no limit in doing these kinds of automation with Tiledesk chatbots.
We use Tiledesk for integrating with two endpoints. One is Moodle, which is an open-source community for sharing learning materials. When a student asks for learning materials or course info, the chatbot would find the answer in Moodle and share it with the student. This integration would resolve a big part of student inquiries without human touch.The second is Doppler, which is a platform for email marketing. We integrated Tiledesk with this tool as well. Now we just need to ask for the student email, then the chatbot can get all the student info from Doppler and provide answers proactively. This way, we can personalize our communication with our students and increase their satisfaction and loyalty. Tiledesk makes it easy to integrate with various tools and platforms with its integration feature.
The way Jorge has integrated all these tools together to provide a seamless student interaction is fascinating. He could minimize the number of tickets that need to be solved by human agents and take the most advantage of Tiledesk integration.
Having personal interaction with that high volume of students is not possible. At the moment, chatbots are answering more than 20,000 conversations per month which hugely reduce our human agent workload and save on cost.
Inspired by this customer story and want to try chatbot automation? Sign up for free and create your own chatbots with Tiledesk. You can also ask for a demo and get a guided tour of Tiledesk’s capabilities.
