Major UK University Saves 0.76 Full-time Agent Cost with Comm100 Live Chat & Chatbot

As one of the largest universities in the U.K. by student population, the institution is primarily comprised of off-campus undergraduate students, as well as on-campus postgraduate students. The university has more than 1,000 members of academic and research staff and over 2,500 administrative, operational and support staff.

11 – departments using live chat
0.76 – equivalent full-time staff member saving
1000 – queries a day resolved by Comm100 Chatbot

In 2017, the Student Services department within a major UK university recognized they had fallen behind in digital communication innovation. More than ever, today’s students favor digital support for its convenience and speed, but the university was still relying heavily on phone and email. These traditional channels were failing to meet their students’ support expectations and were damaging their key KPIs across the student lifecycle, from usage rates and student satisfaction to retention and graduation rates.

The university recognized that live chat and chatbots could help them to directly tackle this challenge. Comm100 came to their attention for several reasons. Firstly, they found the platform “incredibly easy to use, very intuitive and easy to learn”. Comm100 Live Chat and Chatbot can also be hosted on the cloud which was crucial to their organizational shift to cloud-based solutions. While technical requirements were key, so too was the belief that Comm100 would be partners helping them to succeed, rather than just a software vendor with a customer base too large to support them.

In 2018, the University partnered with Comm100 and launched Comm100 Live Chat within its Student Services department. The positive response from students was immediate as they took to the channel for its speed, convenience and personalization.

Comm100 Live Chat hasn’t just proved exceptionally popular among the university’s younger student demographic. As a non-traditional university that focuses on distance learning and adult education, the school has a wide spectrum of ages and needs. Despite this, they have found that live chat is equally popular across their student population. What’s more, live chat has helped them to offer accessible communication to students with disabilities.

As word soon spread about the effectiveness and popularity of live chat within Student Services, more and more departments launched live chat. Eleven departments across the university now offer Comm100 Live Chat including student support, IT helpdesk, admissions, disabled student services, and student counselling, with 20 to 30 agents working in a shift pattern every day.

Once the university had seen the positive results of live chat, they looked to add automation to their operations by integrating Comm100 Custom Answers Chatbot. The university has built two chatbots for two different goals:

1. Automate form requests to increase support capacity

Because the university has a large volume of students all at different points in their careers, they receive frequent requests for references of study. Before they set up the bot, the support staff spent considerable time in back-and-forth conversation to collect the necessary information. Now, the Comm100 bot collects all this information from the student without any human involvement. In the month of April alone, Comm100’s Chatbot saved the full-time equivalent (FTE) of 0.76 staff member.

While these savings could have led to a cut in headcount, the university instead chose to redirect these savings into improving the quality of support, giving their agents more time to focus on complex and sensitive queries that require more care.

2. Manage support volume during peak periods

Like most universities and colleges, the university’s ceremony team faces significant peaks in support volume shortly before the graduation season. The sheer number of questions often overwhelmed the team during this period. With Comm100 Custom Answers Chatbot, all of these common queries can be resolved without any support staff involvement. In 2021, over 1000 queries a day were managed by the bot that would have otherwise had to be resolved by support staff. If the chatbot cannot answer the student’s question, then they are smoothly passed on to a support staff.