University of Phoenix Students Give High Marks to Intelligent Chatbot

For the call centers of the world – frequently overburdened and understaffed – automation technology has been a blessing. While automation won’t solve all customer problems, they can offload some of the simpler requests, leaving human agents free to deal with more complex problems, and help customers/subscribers/patients/students help themselves.

Recently, the University of Phoenix began to share the student support service record and evolution of its Phoebe chatbot, a virtual assistant implemented three years ago that was designed and implemented to serve as a 24/7 point of contact for students seeking information regarding their educational journey. In the three years since its launch, the chatbot has catered to over 500,000 chats coming from over 124,000 unique students, leveraging artificial intelligence (AI), natural language processing (NLP) and conversation design to answer some of the most frequently asked questions from students around the clock. Phoebe was launched at full scale on June 16, 2021, and since then has fielded an average traffic of 1,700 chats per day.

“Here at University of Phoenix, we understand that today’s busy students are multitaskers – juggling work, family, and higher education,” said Jamie Smith, chief information officer of University of Phoenix. “Our chatbot team created Phoebe to understand that as well and continues to evolve its function to center student experience and priorities so that students can make efficient use of their time to quickly access resources or information at any point in their day or night.”

The chatbot team has created scenarios based on a student’s lifecycle and to give students responses specific to them. Quick questions like “What is my account balance?” can be accurately answered by Phoebe today. The team also leverages AI to connect the student to the right departments and a live agent so that users get to their first agent point of resolution. Students use Phoebe to make queries about GPA/grades, making changes to their schedule, accessing specific information on the student portal and filing their financial documents.

The team aspires to constantly work to add more user-centric capabilities while maintaining the existing quality of conversation, according to University of Phoenix. For example, the team is conducting a real-time experiment to make the AI-based chatbot proactive so that the university can engage with students when they are online and give students contextual guidance to successfully progress in their educational journey.

Edited by Erik Linask