Engage More Students With Unibuddy’s AI-Powered Enrollment Assistant

At Unibuddy, we know the challenges enrollment teams are going through in attracting, engaging, and converting students. We hear that nearly three-quarters of you are facing higher growth targets with a quarter of the budget. We understand why the majority of you are feeling overstretched – even to the point of complete burnout.

We want to help your team carry the load. 

And, considering 72% of students visit your website for initial research into your higher ed institution, we feel this is a good place to start. 

That’s why we’ve added Assistant, our AI-infused higher ed enrollment assistant, to Unibuddy Chat. We’re ensuring we deliver on our purpose to make student attraction, engagement, and conversion not only faster and more cost-effective – but better. 

Here’s what you can expect from Unibuddy’s Assistant capability in Unibuddy Chat:

Not just another chatbot

Data from our 600+ higher ed institutional partners tells us that there are two types of questions that students ask: basic objective questions and subjective nuanced questions. While the latter generally requires direct human interaction, students expect the former to be answered immediately. 

But how do you determine which questions require additional attention? This is where Unibuddy’s Assistant helps – and where more traditional chatbots can’t. 

We’ve all encountered traditional chatbots. Sometimes they’re helpful. Often they’re not. They treat us like strangers. They dismissively push us away to contact forms or generic pages as soon as they can, without making an effort to understand our queries.

Experiences like these can leave us frustrated, unappreciated, and longing to speak with a real human being. This is something higher ed enrollment teams might keep top-of-mind when determining where and how AI can help scale student engagement without losing that human touch. 

When developing Unibuddy’s Assistant, our team considered all these factors. We knew that only 7% of students find chatbots helpful. We knew that 94% of prospective students wanted to speak with students currently enrolled at a school when conducting initial research. We knew we needed to build an AI-powered enrollment assistant that would enhance student engagement – not replace human-to-human interactions. 

An enrollment assistant purpose-built for higher ed

Unlike a traditional chatbot, which seeks to mimic human interactions or direct queries to generic forms or pages, Assistant is built to immediately triage student needs and match them with the right information or enrollment, admissions, academic advisory and student ambassador team members who can help. 

In this sense, rather than displace a human connection, Unibuddy’s Assistant helps facilitate and enhance it. Instead of searching for the right student ambassador to speak with in the Chat interface, and guessing who can answer their question best, Assistant can automatically match prospective students. This, in turn, speeds up the matching and answering process to facilitate meaningful engagement faster.

More ROI for higher ed enrollment teams

By offering quicker answers to basic questions, or redirecting more nuanced questions to student ambassadors and staff, Unibuddy’s Assistant helps your higher ed team capture higher volumes of leads. And, by shouldering high amounts of repetitive questions, you can ensure student ambassadors are compensated for more meaningful conversations with prospective students. 

In an industry where authenticity, timeliness, and personalization are currency, Assistant enables your enrollment team to operate at scale. By facilitating instantaneous, personalized engagement with any student who arrives at your site, from anywhere on any device, you can unlock the true power of peer-to-peer, student-to-student, technology.

Handling student queries in a timely and efficient manner not only saves your enquiries team time, but also enables your recruitment and marketing teams to gain new insight. Triaging and understanding student questions, and delivering that data to your team in your Unibuddy Dashboard, provides a window into what different students are asking as well as helping you see how the content of your website is supporting students. Better quality data about your website content can help marketing teams prioritise, doubling down on content and messaging which is resonating, and refining areas which students aren’t currently referencing during their decision making.

And, for existing users of Unibuddy Chat, Assistant is included. This makes leveraging the power of AI into student engagement strategies substantially more cost-effective than investing in yet another standalone product. In this sense, Assistant is just another way we continue to innovate our best-in-class student engagement solution.

More AI-infused capabilities available with Unibuddy

In addition to Unibuddy’s Assistant, we’ve packed a bunch of AI-infused capabilities into our student engagement platform. On the backend, your enrollment team can access AI-sourced conversation insights, short one- to three-sentence synopses of the chats prospective students have with your team, to help you gain instant viability into who these students are and what matters most to them. 

Unibuddy also leverages AI to provide your enrollment team with sample questions of what prospective students are asking. These data-backed questions can help you understand what is driving trending topics and what types of queries you can anticipate in the future. These capabilities are designed to render tasks that normally take hours into seconds.  

Learn more about Unibuddy by booking a quick demo here.