How Chatbots Are Transforming The Admission Process

Chatbots for admissions can help students understand the admission process in a simple way by answering their repeated queries regarding course details, syllabus, entrance exams, eligibility criteria, and more.

These chatbots are primarily powered by AI which helps answer complex user queries with personalized responses. In addition to helping with student admission queries, these chatbots can be instrumental in education marketing initiatives and can assist in managing admissions seamlessly.

Why Do Educational Institutes Need Chatbots Now More Than Ever?

As COVID-19 continues to disrupt operations for universities across the world, an increasing number of institutions are turning to AI to help provide timely and accurate updates to their students seeking admissions.

Here are some of the reasons why universities and other higher education institutes need to implement a chatbot service for their students –

Real-Time Updates

Students need to access all admission related information in real-time from a trusted source to be in a position to make the safest decisions for themselves and chatbot makes it easy to navigate the situation.

Eliminate The Need For Campus Visits

AI-enabled chatbots can provide up to date information and the latest admission guidelines without requiring students to physically visit the campus to make enquiries.

Enhanced Student Satisfaction 

Chatbots can personalize every single message sent based on the specific needs and characteristics of students. This kind of personalization increases applicant satisfaction and helps universities secure a much higher number of student registrations.

Benefits Of A Chatbot For Admissions

In a COVID-hit world, where both students and teachers are emphasizing on knowledge sharing through digital platforms, AI chatbots can play a significant role and have rightly entered the college admissions space in a big way.

Let us explore some of the ways in which educational institutions can benefit from an admission chatbot –

Streamlined Admissions Procedure

The university admission procedure can be an overwhelming experience for students. Typically, there are multiple procedures and formalities to complete including registration, filling up of details and updating of personal information. Students usually have a tough time navigating admission details, course fees, and registration deadlines.

Chatbots for admissions can automate this entire procedure and make it simple for students to enter their data for college admissions. They also allow you to scale up your registration rates by solving student queries instantly, round the clock.

Consistent Support For Student Queries

A chatbot for higher education is an excellent way to instantly connect the student with the university. During the process of admission, students often have multiple doubts and questions about the university that play a crucial role in their decision to enrol.

With a large number of applications and emails coming in during admissions, universities generally find it difficult to respond to every student promptly. In such cases, a chatbot can step in to offer all the required details related to admission procedure, campus facilities, IT services, and much more.

Automated Lead Generation Process

AI Chatbot for educational institutes can capture relevant information from prospective students and can even send them admission/institute information via email/contact details provided during the online interaction.

Further, this also allows the education institutes to simplify their lead management process as these automated chatbots can initiate personalized messaging to the website visitors based on the profile, location and other provided filters.

Detailed Campus Guide

Unlike earlier when a campus guide was used to handle all the questions from new students, admission chatbots can simply handle the task by providing instant answers to queries with GPS-located maps, updated schedules and virtual views of the campus.

Things To Consider Before Buying A Chatbot For Your Institute

Right from contextual understanding and pre-built integrations to sentiment analysis, ready-to-use AI-powered chatbots have an extensive list of features.

How to make your pick then?

Here are some of the most important features that you should look for when selecting an education chatbot platform for your institution –

Backend Integration

One of the most important considerations while choosing a chatbot platform for your institute should be how well it can integrate with your existing business systems such as CRM, HRMS, databases and more.

Your systems must connect well with your newly acquired chatbot so that it can extract and update data from your institute’s database.

Built-In NLP

The chatbot platform you pick should feature basic support of natural language processing (NLP). Leveraging a chatbot platform that provides NLP and speech support will give you best results in terms of understanding of user intent and replying with relevant content.

It is important to note here that you don’t need to build your APIs to understand user inputs. What you should look for in your chatbot is language support, and how many different languages the platform can support.

Integration With Live Chat

Make sure to pick a chatbot platform that can effortlessly integrate with live chat and can assign issues to a live agent whenever human intervention is needed. Choose a platform that can set up the conversation flow in ChatBot visual builder so applicants can quickly talk to the right agent.

Dialogue Flow Design

The chatbot development platform you choose for your institute should allow you to design the dialogue flow or the conversation model. What this means is that you should be able to define different conversation paths and enjoy exception handling capabilities with the platform.

For instance, it is best to pick a chatbot platform that allows you to filter all the junk leads with an OTP verification (via email & phone) feature. The idea here is to focus only on queries with high chances of conversion and filtering out the ones that are irrelevant.

Easy To Learn/Update

It is also important to check how easy it is to introduce new flows in your conversation model or if the platform allows you to integrate a new backend or update/make changes to existing intents. To be able to keep improving your chatbot, you need to have a completely user-friendly platform.

To Wrap

To effectively navigate the post-COVID world and still remain a front runner in the education space, educational institutions need a great deal of innovation, interaction and round-the-clock availability. This is especially relevant during admissions when a large number of applications and inquiries come in from students.

Implementing chatbots in education is an excellent way to help applicants in the admission process as well as students in the onboarding process.

Deploying a robust education chatbot platform can help your education institute with the overall admission process. It could help you reap a range of other benefits – securing a higher student enrollment being the most significant one.