Episode 101: BamaBots with Kristy Pritchett

in this fall term, we got so many phone calls that we actually blew up the phone system. Welcome to Focus, a podcast dedicated to the business of higher education. I'm your host, Heather Richmond, and we will be exploring the challenges and opportunities facing today's higher learning institutions. In today's episode I caught up with Kristy Pritchett, director of student account services, at the University of Alabama. We'll discuss how her team is leading the charge on implementing AI bots to support their student account services and their vision for rolling out bots campus-wide. Thank you, Kristy, for being our guest today to talk about bots versus bodies. Heather, I'm really glad to participate in this conversation and thank you for having me. Absolutely. Well I know that you are super excited about incorporating BOTS into your business, but since BOTS are still pretty new technology, can you give us an overview of the different types of BOTS that you researched? Yeah, I'd love to. So just to start with BOTS can take a lot of different forms and they can do a lot of different things. So when we talk about BOTS on our campus, what we're really talking about is robotic automated processes. And we're looking for technology that can help us with the well-defined, routine tasks like extracting data, loading data files, answering simple questions, etc., and we're doing that in my department. So we're also looking to use BOTS for both automated processes and to better serve students by helping answer questions and reduce the volume of phone and email messages. And a project that I've been most excited about recently is our new chat bot. Particularly, in the fall term, we get a lot of phone calls and emails. I'm sure lots of offices are like that. Meaning your very routine questions, they're easy to answer for our staff, but it takes staff time to touch all of those questions. And a lot of schools have gone to one-stop shops to deal with those types of questions, but those shops also take extra staff to run. And we're really looking for a more automated solution to address these questions instead of having to hire extra people. And I do want to be clear that I don't see automation replacing people. I don't see any of our staff being displaced by BOTS, but what I do see is BOTS relieving extreme burdens on time and allowing staff to be focused on the more complicated questions and to focus on some of the other projects that we need to be working out. Yeah, that makes complete sense. You're really just shifting roles and responsibilities and allowing those BOTS to do those kind of tasks that happen on a regular basis. It's the same question over and over again. Right, that's exactly right. Right, so you kind of touch on that, but what made you first start looking into BOTS? What was the university struggling with that led you to look for this new solution? So just to give you an example of what we deal with in my office, in this fall term, we got so many phone calls that we actually blew up the phone system. In that day, we had over 500 voicemails and the system could not take anymore. The calls started rolling to an overflow line. We didn't have staff to answer them because everybody in our office was already on the phone and we had 70 people waiting in our phone queue all day long. We just couldn't get to everybody.So we get a lot of calls in our office. We also get a lot of calls for other offices on campus. So that doesn't even factor in the emails that we received. We're guessing that we got over 2,500 calls in one day. And clearly we need to be able to handle the volume and answer the questions that we're getting, but we also need to be able to do that with the staff we have. So we were looking for solutions that could address that need. And the other thing that we think a lot about is how students communicate. You know they really don't read their emails anymore, they don't answer the phone call when we make the phone calls. So they also need help at times when our office isn't open. We all know students may be up at 2:00 in the morning, We've gotten voicemails at 2:00 in the morning. So we needed solution that could work with the students when the student want help. Do you mean you're not there at 2:00 in the morning to help answer those phone calls? I do sometimes I answer emails in the morning, but not very often. So really you know you were looking to improve efficiency, not only in your office, but also really have the bot helping you to improve that student experience, right? Absolutely. That's great. So I have to ask does your body have a name? It does. We branded our chat bot as BamaBot. That's clearly associated with the University of Alabama. We worked with our strategic communications team to develop that branding and the name, and we wanted to make it clear that it wasn't a live person. So having BOT in the name was important. Oh that makes a lot of sense. That's really cool. So how have you marketed BamaBot? Our bot is pretty new. We just turned it on in late August. We haven't done a lot of marketing yet, but the things that we have done include adding it to our email signatures. Both our central student email account, as well as, our personal email signatures, it's obviously on our website, and we have just recently added a comment to our waiting message in our phone system. So that when people call our office they know they don't have to wait in the queue. They can try using the BOT. Well, I'll tell you that adding it to your email signature definitely worked because I clicked on BamaBot from your email signature. I just asked a couple of questions to see what it was like And I tell you what, I was so amazed at how fast the response was. What all do you have the bots helping you with? We primarily have BamaBot answering what we consider to be repetitive - kind of tier one type questions - that are easy to answer. That's the stuff that's really well-defined and consistent like how do I set up a payment plan, when is the bill due date, how do I sign into my students account. And we have a lot of those answers on our website. So they're out there, but this is a really convenient way for people to find that information. But we also have really big dreams. So we plan to hook it Banner, which is our ERP system. It can go through single sign-on to verify students identity. And then it can answer specific account questions like what's my balance, what is this charge for and other types of questions like that. Oh wow, sounds like it's much more efficient way for you to do business. But so what are your students think of BamaBot? So as I mentioned earlier, it's fairly new to us because we did just turn it on in August. So we haven't been through a full billing cycle yet, but we are seeing a lot of interest. Already we've had over 3,000 interactions and we're getting questions for areas all over campus that don't have a bot yet. So I think we're seeing a lot of interest. They seem to really like it and I only see that growing. Wow that's a lot of activity without a lot of promotion. That's right. Yeah so this sounds like really a great investment, but I'm sure there are a lot of requirements that went into making a decision on the bot. So can you just help others figure out what should the questions they be asking when they're exploring the option of using a bot. Absolutely, there were a lot of things that went into the decision to get a bot, and even into the decision of which bot to get. So some of the things that we thought about were does the vendor we partner with understand higher education? This is kind of a unique market so we really wanted someone who had other strong partners in that market that understood what we do and how things work. Another question that we asked ourselves was what schools do they currently work with. We talked to a couple of different vendors. One was not shy at all about showing who they work with, which schools and how many. There was another vendor that we looked at that really wouldn't answer that question, and that was pretty much a red flag. You know every school that purchasing something as big as this, wants to know that the vendor has had success in this area. And then something else that we wanted to know was how they how the bot handle questions if it can't answer that question. So for instance the product that we're using can send the question to a live agent or it can direct it to a ticketing system. And so that's the method we're currently using. We have those questions go into our central email account. So that we can respond to the student or parent with the correct answer if the bot doesn't know it. And then behind the scenes, we can feed the bot those answers so it learns and knows how to answer the questions going forward. That's cool. Another thing, yeah, another thing that we thought about was what kind of staffing does this require. Is it a live chat agent, do we have the staff to do that? My office currently doesn't. So it was important for us to use artificial intelligence. Also technical staff, what kind of technical staff do we have to have? And we were lucky because the product we're using doesn't require any. The vendor provides all of the heavy work and we have minimal work that we have to do in terms of really just answering some of the questions that it can't answer yet. And we do see that it's continuing to learn. So that's important. And since we do have to feed it information for questions that it hasn't learned yet, how easy is it to work with. And as we think about how students want to use technology, what channels does the bot use to communicate. Can it hook to Alexa, Siri, Facebook Messenger, or is Live Chat an option if we wanted to use that. So those are all things you need to be thinking about. And then as a higher education institution we're all concerned about branding we want it to be associated with our school and look like it belongs to us. So can you custom brand so that it looks like your school and its affiliated with your school? Can it integrate with other systems like your ERP system, maybe your enrollment management system. You should ask your vendor those kinds of questions. And then what kind of data and reporting can you get out of the system because it's important to be able to see what your students are asking your bot. As well as, how its answering those questions. So you know, do you need to add more information somewhere? Is it providing the right answers to the question. Is your partner open to new ideas, and are they constantly advancing? Because we all know technology is changing, and it's changing faster and faster over time. So are they going to be a partner that's going to move forward with you or they kind of stagnant and not advancing? You know I see this technology in its infancy and that it will continue to grow. So we definitely want someone we can partner with over a longer period of time. And then there are the obvious things like cost, bid requirements, etc., that are gonna vary from state to state. Oh sure, absolutely. So it's interesting you talking about the reporting. Are you able to see where the bot is answering the question like on Alexa or Siri, etc? Or what kind of reporting do you have? So there's a dashboard inside our chat bot on the administrative side. And I can log in and see how many interactions the bot has had. What the accuracy percentage of answering questions is. Ours is currently running around 93%, which I feel like it's very well. That's really good. And then it gives you some statistics like what time of day do you get most of your questions, what day of the week do you get most of your questions, and probably more important to me, I can log in and see the actual transcripts from every conversation that the bot has. So I can read the questions that it's being asked. I can see the answers that it's providing and there's also a box where we get questions that our vendor doesn't know how to answer. And that's kind of where we go in and feed the data. That's really cool. So it sounds like you are really able to train your bot if you want to. Absolutely and that's really important because as your data changes and we you know we have tuition rates that may change from time to time or the process that we followed may change from time to time. So it is important that you can go in and update some of those things. Change answers as information changes or provide more information as information changes. And that's important to be able to do that with your vendor. Yeah it sounds like it really gives you some good insights to even know for yourself how to staff at different times of the day or different days of the week based upon some of that data. Absolutely. That's really cool. So of course like anything getting something new, what was the process like that you went through to get BamaBot up and going everything from contracting to implementing. So we're a state school. So there are bid requirements that we have to go through, but you know one of the things that we also thought about was we wanted a cohesive experience on campus. So we didn't want one department having one bot in another department having a different kind of bot. So that's not good for our customers. It's not a good experience. It just looks disorganized. So we've really pulled in several other departments that are heavily involved in student facing service. And we all participated in a number of discussions and demos. So that we could make sure we were all on the same bit on the same page. And that took a bit of time. I'm sure everybody has those experiences. And every department has something different that they're looking for. Then getting funding was an important decision. So once you've all made a decision, you have to kind of go together to work out the the pricing and the money aspects. But once we had those pieces in place, we worked through our procurement department, our legal office and our compliance office to make sure we had the proper documents and disclosures in place. And with all the data security requirements that are in place today, we wanted to make sure we had all those faces covered. So that's really where our compliance office stepped in and helped us with some of those things. Once we got the contract signed, then we worked with our strategic communications area for the branding aspects. We provided that information to our vendor and for what we're doing our vendor actually did most of the work. It was about a four week turnaround time from the time we signed the contract until they had the initial stages of the bot ready and we could turn it on. And really let it start learning. Okay Kristy, so how'd you get campus leadership on board to commit to this level of investment? So for us it was really a process of explaining the need and explaining how having a tool like this could potentially make the student experience more positive. And it would save us money in the long run. So we actually got a lot of support at high levels of leadership very quickly. That's great. So is there anything that you would do differently in terms of choosing your bot and going live with your bot. Probably the only thing that I would like to have seen happen differently was the timeline. It took us about nine months to get all the pieces in place from the time we started talking to the vendor about what they could do until the time we got the contract signed. Gotcha, and so how do you see BamaBot evolving throughout the whole campus beyond your department. So I think this product can really improve the overall student or customer experience. I think every department on campus gets calls for other areas and having to send those students or parents around campus can get really frustrating for them. So if implemented correctly, I think a chat bot can answer all of those questions, without the student ever getting directed somewhere else. So I really see it vastly improving our relationships with our students and parents, And as I mentioned earlier I think it also allows those students to communicate when and how they want to. We all know they like to text more than they like to talk. And as I mentioned the student that wants to ask us a question at 2 a.m. can do so on a chatbot really 24 hours a day 7 days a week, without us ever having to be in office. Yeah, I think that's great, and I know that we talked in the past that you mentioned chat bots have really given back time to your staff numbers. How are you reallocating those hours? say we plan to reallocate those hours to spend more time in dealing with the more complicated issues. The chatbot's never going to be able to answer every question. There really are things that our staff need to be touching but it'll give them time to do that while reducing some of their frustration and having to answer the repetitive stuff. And then we will also work on projects that we haven't had time to get to in the office. And we'll probably do more proactive outreach. So there's plenty of work to do for all of our existing staff and no one really needs to worry about a bot replacing people. Yeah I think that's great. I know we hear a lot of again if you can shift because you're being more customer service focused and have your staff of people or bodies be able to take those types of questions and let your bots take the everyday questions that they can find on the website, but just do it quicker, it's just really a win-win for both. That's a hundred percent correct and that's really what we're aiming for by implementing this chatbot. That's great. So any other advice that you would give other institutions who are researching BOTS right now? Well I would just say not to be afraid to use new technology and don't worry about your people losing jobs. I really don't see that happening, I do see it improving job satisfaction, as well as, student experience. I know our staff can get frustrated when they have to answer the same question 20 times in an hour. So it really should take that out of what your staff do on a daily basis and make them happier with their existing jobs. And I would also encourage others to be thinking about what a bot can do for you and your campus. I think that's great. Thank you so much, Kristy, for sharing your insights on BOTS and how they really improve operations and provide a great student experience on your campus. Thank you so much, Heather, I enjoyed participating. Thanks for tuning in to this episode of Focus. Don't forget to subscribe so you can stay up-to-date on the business of higher education. For more information, check us out at www.touchnet.com.