Actionbot for the University of Silesia – case study: a chatbot for the education sector
The University of Silesia in Katowice is most dynamically developing university in Poland, educating almost 22,000 students and Ph.D. students in four university towns: Katowice, Sosnowiec, Cieszyn, and Chorzów. The University offers innovative solutions in education and a friendly space for research. It has recently implemented Actionbot, an advanced digital assistant, in order to provide students, candidates, and employees with a straightforward solution to navigate through the university website’s vast resources.
Main challenges
The University of Silesia’s mission for the Actionbot team was to propose and implement a solution that would support current, former, and future students, staff, and academics by providing them with a single, common point of contact on existing websites. Furthermore, the implementation was supposed not only to facilitate access to information but also to create a new, bilingual (Polish and English) communication channel for the University, help users navigate the site and support processes such as recruitment, applications, filling in, and sending documents or information about the educational offer.
The cooperation with the University of Silesia included launching a cloud-based Actionbot on all websites, along with adapting the product to the visual layer of the university. This also includes preparing the virtual assistant to comply with WCAG requirements (six different contrast versions and three colours). The Actionbot team also took care of designing dialogue paths, launching mechanisms encouraging users to interact (e.g. in the form of simple messages) or navigate through the University’s channels, including redirecting to subsequent pages and subpages. Users can also use a simple menu, suggesting topics that Actionbot can talk about.
A chatbot for the education sector – results
During the first two months after the implementation, the University of Silesia’s virtual assistant conducted over 3780 conversations. Most of them were inquiries from university candidates (39.7%), students (36.1%), and employees (14,6%). In total, the virtual assistant found answers to approximately 94% of the questions asked.
Actionbot proactively reacts to the recipient’s behaviour, offering support in communication processes. Acting as a virtual assistant to University of Silesia website visitors it is able to provide information and successfully help in providing the employees, students, and candidates with correct information.
Our newest chatbot for the education sector has been implemented as part of the “Level up↑ – increasing the communication efficiency of the University of Silesia and shaping attitudes of openness in the environment” project.
