Scaling Student Advising Services With A Virtual Agent

Penn State World Campus, one of the largest universities in the United States with a student database that grew over 55% in a span of five years, wanted to scale its advising services. The full-time advisers collectively spent more than 5,000 hours a year assisting prospects, current students, and alumni across the globe with their day-to-day queries over email. During peak times of the semester, it took advisers longer to respond as they had to access different databases containing student information.

Solution

Quantiphi developed a virtual advising assistant using Dialogflow that resolves day-to-day email queries from 9,000+ students; sorting them into four common categories [i.e. change of campus, change of major, deferment, re-enrollment], automating the quick retrieval of relevant student data to run eligibility checks, and generating templated responses for live advisors to personalize; enabling live advisors to focus on addressing more complex requests. The virtual advising assistant was integrated with Penn State University’s email system.

Result

• Quick request handling/faster response rate
• Reporting & metrics that empower data-driven decision making
• Greater cost savings
• Reduced manual effort – eliminated manual task of fetching data