What to Consider for the Best University Chat App

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Whether you’re looking for a student chat app that bolsters conversation between students or ambassadors and prospective students, you need to be sure that you’re choosing the app.

With so many on the market, it can be intimidating when trying to choose.

Here are a few things to keep in mind that will allow you to choose the best university chat app:

Chat apps should be safe for all users

The sad reality of any digital chat platform is that misconduct is common – and fighting it effectively is challenging.

Not only does subtlety make misconduct difficult to detect, but context is also important. Just because a message doesn’t contain anything explicit or obviously offensive doesn’t mean that it’s not.

Further, it’s difficult to monitor this type of content while trying to strike a balance between personal and professional. Students – prospective and current – want an interface that allows them to be themselves without it becoming inappropriate.

Because it’s the university’s job to safeguard users, this was at the front of Unibuddy’s mind when developing our chat app, Unibuddy Chat. We’ve created a host of powerful moderation tools, including templates, word flagging and verification processes. These allow users complete control and safety – and less than 1% of users have reported misconduct.

Choose an app that provides relevant data

Gen Z students prefer content that’s well-tailored, engaging, cost-effective and smart. For most of us, creating that is a challenge.

To do so, you need to underpin the student journey to inform your marketing efforts – and to do that, you need the right insights. That’s where data comes in, though most are flawed and plagued with methodological problems.

We’ve created a digital chat solution that provides authentic data without those problems. Using Conversation Insights, you’ll easily learn about what matters to your students, including fears, motivations and interests. You can even highlight the distinctions between demographics.

Built directly into the product, the tool uses powerful machine-learning technology that allows for filtering and viewing of the most frequent topics by course, country of origin, and time period.

The things you learn can – and should – inform your higher ed marketing strategies. Go even further by allowing it to inform every aspect of the university experience from enrollment to graduation and beyond.

Make sure your chat app is built for higher ed

It goes without saying, but you wouldn’t rely on something like Facebook Messenger for peer-to-peer communications. Instead, any university or college chat app should be built specifically for higher ed.

That’s because higher ed is a sector unlike any other. You don’t have customers, you have students who are facing the biggest decision and investment of their lives thus far. That means their decision-making process is unique and comes with its own set of challenges and concerns.

When you choose a chat app built for higher ed, you’ll receive support from others in the sector and provide the type of language and experience that prospective student users are familiar with.

Students need conversation, not inquiries

A chat app for universities is not an inquiry management tool and shouldn’t be treated as such.

That’s because things like generic chatbots provide automated answers, but the goal of a chat app is to have students visit more than once to pick up where they left off. That kind of engagement is what will increase your yield and drive success.

Plus, most prospective students don’t know what to ask – and a chatbot can’t help with that.

When developing our chat app, Unibuddy Chat, our machine learning team created a Question Suggestion System (QSS) to point them in the right direction. The QSS database includes 400 questions that span 100 topics, each individually written by our team.

Questions might include:

What’s the transition like?
Is the program difficult?
Which part of campus life do you enjoy most?

During the conversation, they’re displayed based on what the prospective student is most likely to be interested in based on data from Unibuddy processes.

Just like prospective students, the QSS tool is always learning and evolving. Over time, it will continue to collect data about the use and impact of different questions and allow for even more effective conversations.

Relevance to Different Audiences

Though Unibuddy is built primarily to support students in their journey by connecting them to one another and leveraging the experiential knowledge of your current students, there are many different audiences who have a stake in how a chat app can help them.

Administrators, for example, can use Unibuddy to get information on the demographics of their students and prospective students, which can guide what kind of communication and marketing efforts they put forth. Unibuddy is AI-integrated, so administrators can have one-sentence summaries of chats that would otherwise be tedious and time-consuming to read through. This can give administrators a sense of the hot topics that students are concerned with, and how to reach them with solutions.

Faculty can also make use of a chat app, keeping connected with their students and ensuring that everyone is on the same page for their courses. It can also be a more informal place for discussions, study groups, and Q&A with students, TAs and professors without needing a lot of moderation since Unibuddy is constantly working to ensure communication is safe and appropriate.

Chat App that Provides High Quality Support

When you get started with Unibuddy, you’re taking on an app that comes with a lot of built-in support. Its ease-of-use is evident right away as all you need is a single line of code, anywhere on your website, in order to start working. Integrating logos, colours, administrative contacts and anything else you want to personalize can be done before you even launch so it is an on-brand addition.

Training staff and students to be ambassadors, or even just familiar with the product is another piece that Unibuddy has covered. With an hour-long seminar from Unibuddy and customer success representatives to support training, staff and students are ready to build their profiles and start providing support to prospective and new students. Profiles are designed to give interacting students a clear idea of the person they’re chatting with, what their field is, what experience they have, and what things they have in common.

Onboarding and implementing support are part of the Unibuddy experience, so you can have a live call with an Onboarding Manager who can help you get ready for Unibuddy and address any questions that you have during this fairly quick and simple process. We also help get you started with metrics to assess and outline a success plan. And if you get stuck? Just reach out to our training and customer success representatives for support.

Real Life Example of Successful Use Case

One university to boast the successful implementation and use of a chat app is the University of Leicester who added Unibuddy to improve their enrollment rates. They specifically set out to boost student confidence and reduce their anxieties around attending university, and found that the particular stressor that emerged was around accommodations. In the middle of a student housing crisis, fears were put to rest as prospective students were reassured by current ones that the University of Leicester had it under control and was able to provide the accommodations that students were hoping for.

They noticed a 23% increase in enrollment, simply from implementing Unibuddy and letting students connect with each other before showing up for their first day, which eased anxieties, and set up new students for success.

What’s the best chat app for universities?

Thanks to how simple it is to implement and how naturally it adapts to the look and feel of your website, Unibuddy is the best university chat app on the market.

Because it provides such a safe space, it also allows current students to share their own content and engage prospective students in an authentic, impactful way.

Learn more about Unibuddy Chat or see our university chat app in action.

Why you should add live chat to your university website

1. Live chat is more authentic

We’re currently living in an era of slick advertising and glossy materials. That’s all well and good, but people – especially prospective students – crave a more authentic experience.

Studies show that prospective students’ interest in rankings is waning. Instead, they’re increasingly turning to reviews written by current students to inform their decision-making process. That’s why universities must find a way to bridge the “authenticity” gap.

Immediate responses have never been more important, especially in our efforts to recruit Gen Z students. Further, those responses need to be personal – automated, canned responses won’t cut it in today’s recruitment landscape.

Live peer-to-peer, student-to-student, chat marries authenticity with fast, personalized responses to bring enormous value to all of your prospects, regardless of where they are in their higher education journey.

2. Discussions happen in real-time

Prospective students want to know about what the food in the dining hall is like, which dorms have the best views (and rooms!), and what’s happening on campus at any given moment.

They have a million questions – and it’s your job to answer them quickly.

As we mentioned before, Gen Z wants – no, expects – quick, personalized responses. What better way to engage them than by offering those responses in real-time? Be sure to promote this within the messaging on your website so every prospective student can take advantage of this unique offering.

Don’t forget to prep the students on the receiving end of the questions. When adding a live chat app to your university website, ensure that your student ambassadors understand how important authenticity is and are ready for the kind of communication your prospective students want.

3. Chat transforms lead generation and conversion

When universities offer applicants and offer-holders the ability to connect with a current student, they see their lead generation and conversion efforts skyrocket.

It’s no surprise, really. For prospective students, your current students and student ambassadors are among the most important resources they have when making decisions during their higher education journey. And they use them!

Just take a look at the Queen Mary University of London. When they added a “chat with a student” functionality using Unibuddy, they found that the prospective students who used it were nearly 35% more likely to enroll than those who didn’t.

This is the case stateside, too. After adding Unibuddy to their site, St. John’s University in Queens saw that 28% of users went on to put down a deposit – nearly double the institution’s 16% average.

4. It’s easy to add a chat feature

You have enough going on – adding the ability to chat with a student in real-time to your website shouldn’t be time-consuming.

At Unibuddy, we’ve made it easier than ever by creating a product that can be embedded with a single piece of HTML code. Each of our elements is easily embeddable – it’s exactly the same as embedding a YouTube video or pin from Google Maps.

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