Why do Universities & Colleges Choose Comm100 Live Chat?

Today’s students have sky-high support expectations, but with a reliance on phone and email, many higher education institutions are failing to meet these needs. Students want fast and convenient digital support that matches their lifestyle and expectations, and that is why live chat for universities and colleges is becoming so popular.

The likes of McMaster University, Montgomery College, and California State University have turned to Comm100 Live Chat to help them achieve this. Not only does Comm100 reduce operational support costs, but it’s also increasing enrolment, engagement, and satisfaction.

With so many institutions choosing Comm100, it’s clear that Comm100 Live Chat’s security, features, and integration possibilities are perfect for higher education. In this blog, we’ll look at the top reasons why universities and colleges are choosing Comm100 Live Chat and understand why live chat for universities is so effective. 

1. Security & compliance 

With sensitive records on hand and industry security requirements to follow, when higher education institutions select live chat software, privacy and security is essential. Comm100’s complete security compliance is one reason why many universities and colleges choose to use its live chat software. 

Comm100 has data centers located in the US, Canada, and Europe for auditing compliance with the highest range of certifications. This is a must-have for universities and colleges that need to have their data stored in-country. Even if you’re not planning to use to use live chat for financial transactions or other sensitive data, selecting a fully compliant live chat solution provides greater flexibility to introduce new features and services later. 

Comm100 has all the security and privacy compliances that university live chat needs, including:  

SOC Type II– The highest degree of excellence in security, availability, processing integrity, confidentiality, and customer data privacy.  

ISO 27001– The highest international standard for network security and data protection.  

PCI DSS– The standard regulating payment processing to keep credit card data secure.  

HIPAA– The security standard for the healthcare industry, protecting personal health information.  

GDPR– The EU standard for data security, regulating the processing of personal data.  

PIPEDA– Canadian federal law dictating how businesses collect, use, and disclose personal information.  

To offer the ultimate in security compliance, Comm100 also supports multiple deployment options. In jurisdictions that allow remote data storage, Comm100 can be hosted on the cloud for a setup that only takes minutes. Where data needs to be stored on site, Comm100 can be hosted on-premise so that all data is handled in-house. 

2. Personalization 

Today’s students expect highly personalized experiences from the organizations they interact with. In fact, 57% of Gen Z surveyed said that they want websites to intuitively know what they want, and 45% said they’ll leave a site if it doesn’t predict what they like, want or need. With Comm100’s live chat for universities, offering personalization to your students is easy.  

Comm100 enables personalization using the following tools and features: 

Visitor monitoring – Visitor monitoring offers information on your visitors from within the live chat platform, allowing for more personalized interactions. This includes insights like account information, navigation behaviour, interests, history, and more. With CRM integration, Salesforce or another CRM can be connected to recognize even more about visitors to your website. 

Custom variable mapping – With custom variable mapping, it’s possible to read visitor information and display the information in your chat console. Like visitor monitoring, this allows you to understand your visitors, but adds additional customization like automated actions based on a visitor’s actions. 

Chat routing – Comm100 Live Chat allows you to route chats based on a students’ location, source, behavior, navigation history, and more. With chat routing in place, every student gets the right support from the agent best suited to understand their problem. 

Real-time translation – Real-time translation allows students to speak their native language with every one of your agents, as conversations are translated on the fly. Agents can also respond in their native language, removing barriers to providing excellent support for all, and helping you engage with international students. 

Audio & Video Chat – Audio & Video Chat allows colleges and universities to remove barriers to a personalized chat experience while delivering remote support. During the COVID-19 pandemic, Dawson College used Audio & Video Chat to host an open house virtually that reached 950 students. 

Read more: Dawson College Holds Virtual Open House with Live Chat & Video Engagement 

3. Integrated chatbot  

The use of chatbots for customer service is growing rapidly every year. In 2022, 58% of customers surveyed said they’ve used chatbots for simple customer service, compared to 43% just two years prior. Acceptance and even preference for chatbots is also growing quickly among Millennials and Gen Z in particular, with both saying that they prefer self-service when available for simple cases. Colleges and universities are uniquely positioned to benefit by introducing chatbots, and Comm100’s integrated chatbot software makes introducing automation easy. 

Unlike many customer engagement solutions, Comm100 offers a chatbot fully integrated with live chat, meaning that you don’t have to source a bot from another vendor. With simple chatbot deployment, you can easily see the benefits of automation: 

Automating the response to common questions 

Comm100 AI Chatbot can handle as high as 91% of chats without any human intervention. This allows students to get answers more quickly and conveniently, while freeing up agents to handle more complex questions or other tasks. 

Reducing wait times 

With bots handling unlimited chats simultaneously, students can get answers to simple questions without waits. With more agent availability, students will also have reduced waits for complex problems. 

24/7 support 

With most common questions handled without human intervention, chatbots allow universities to offer cost effective around-the-clock support without hiring more agents. After success over a year and a half with Comm100 Live Chat, Cambrian College introduced Comm100 Chatbot for 24/7 support. Cambrian’s chatbot now handles over 70% of chats. 

Read more: Cambrian College Improves Recruitment with Comm100 Live Chat & Chatbot 

4. Uptime Guarantee 

Choosing university live chat comes with many considerations, and availability should not be overlooked. Schools need to know that their live chat is available when students need it, and Comm100 comes with an uptime guarantee. 

Comm100’s Uptime Guarantee means that live chat is always available — even during scheduled maintenance or unexpected downtimes. You won’t lose data or experience service interruptions, And with redundancy at the data center level, if the service is ever down in one location, a redundant server automatically takes over without interruptions.

Rigorous backups and disaster recovery planning mean that we’ll take care of your data in the event of natural disasters or any possible data loss events. All of this infrastructure is monitored by the Service Maintenance team 24/7 to detect and immediately act on any potential risks. 

Read more: Live Chat Reliability – Uptime guaranteed. Period. 

5. Reporting and analytics 

With access to a wealth of data, live chat for universities and colleges can transform student support and efficiencies. Comm100’s comprehensive reporting allows schools to get a clear picture of what’s happening in every department. 

Comm100 offers live chat reporting that can show everything from the volume of inquiries to the most common issues. On the agent side of things, these tools can provide insights on resolution times and agent efficacy to indicate service quality and team performance. These reporting tools can even be used for insights into recruiting efforts. Popular live chat reports offered by Comm100 include: 

• Chat Source and Chat Volume Report 
• Queue Length and Wait times 
• Visitor Segmentation 
• Rating Report 
• Efficiency Report 
• Conversions Report 

Read more: Comm100 analytics convert conversations into data, and data into insights. 

Wrap Up 

With the benefits we’ve looked at, it’s not surprising that Comm100 has become the go-to live chat for colleges and universities. Top institutions like Stanford University, San Jose State University, and Brock University have all chosen Comm100 to meet the needs of their student support, recruitment, and engagement. 

As organizations that are often funded by public money, colleges and universities need to maintain a high level of public trust, and that starts with choosing the right partners. To learn more about how Comm100’s live chat for universities and colleges, book a live chat demo today.