How to Build a For Higher Education Recruitment

1 Who am I? • Higher Education Marketing Consultant • Background - College Textbook Publishing - Educational Software - Institutional Marketing - Strategic and Digital Marketing

• - Recruitment Marketing - Program Administration - Online Program Management

2 Who are You?

3 Today’s Talk

1. Mktg Context 2. Chatbot Basics 3. How to Build a Chatbot 4. Patterns of Use 5. Mktg & Recruitment Outcomes

4 1. PLC Marketing Context 5 Our Recruitment Marketing Baseline • Target Audience • Inbound marketing – Websites, SEO, Content & Social Media marketing • Search engine marketing – PPC on search, display and social • Focus is lead generation • Direct registrations online • 1-800 Call Center - Mon to Fri 9am -10pm, Sat 9am -5pm - Inbound inquiries and Outbound reps - Technical and tutorial support for students • Outbound - CRM/Mktg Auto/Email/Reps 6 Why add a Chatbot? Generally…

7 Why add a Chatbot? Specifically…

54 % Registrations made Directly Online

8 Our Chatbot Project Objectives • Experiment, measure, learn • Engage more, where and when students are looking • Provide a more robust UX • Generate leads and registrations by chatbot • Do no damage to our mktg baseline along the way

9 2. Chatbot Basics

10 Types of

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11 How Bots Work

Source https://www.drift.com/learn/chatbot/ 12 Complexity of Chatbots

Source: https://coditramuntana.com/en/blog/what-is-a-chat-bot

13 Set Goals

3. How to Build a Chatbot 14 Set a Budget

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15 Select a Chatbot • Buy or build - Self service with a GUI - Self service with an API, SDK or library - End to end service • Match to your objectives carefully, • Support is critical to your success - Your initial setup - Phone, Email support - Onboarding and training - Admin seats • Experiment with the demos https://blog.aimultiple.com/chatbot-companies/ 16 The Chatbot Landscape… (It’s complicated!)

17 Higher Ed Chatbots… (Also complicated!)

Chatbots Messenger bots

VirtualSpirits.com Myunibot.com Snatchbot.me Higheredm.com Chatinabox.io Dirad.com Liveperson.com Botstar.com Admithub.com Pounce.com Beacon.com Mobilemonkey Creativecampus.com Oceotbot.com Oracle highered Chatfuel Intellei.com Ivy.ai Thoughtfocus Geckoengage.com Yanatalk.com Unifyed.com

18 How we Chose

• Our research • Our criteria - Keep it simple - find a basic rules-based chatbot that we can easily manage, implement quickly and learn from - inexpensive - multiple bots - human agent hand off - support

19 Building the Botsify PLC Chatbot

• Focused on our mktg objectives • Input from all staff – recruitment, support, admin • Leverage the FAQ and marketing collateral • Leverage the available functionality • And launched in 2 months…

20 Why Decided to Move on from Botsify

• Limitations in support • Some usability issues • Granularity of control was not there - hours, pages, redirects • Limited on lead capture • Lack of online resources • We wanted more range, more analytics data to learn from

21 Key Development Questions

• What content how to prioritize it? • What are the right hours - 9-5 vs 24/7? • On what pages, use multiple agents? • How should the bot behave on the page? • How human should the bot be? • How/when do we push chat visitors to advisers? • How will the bot effect existing visitor behavior? • How much support will we need?

22 Rebooting with

Back to the drawing board: We picked Instabot because:

• Revised our goals • had both types of bots • Set new criteria • had a business emphasis - • Focused specifically how Focus on conversions they were different from • had an emphasis on service the first time /support (email from NA) • Did more careful • Improved design tool, evaluations scheduling, routing • Q&A with vendors • Would build the first bot

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24 Building out the Content

25 Building the Bot Logic

26 Decide Who to Show the Bot To

27 Define your Advisor Engagement

28 Set up Email Notifications

• Send info packs • Advisor calls • Use email to trigger f/u • Handoff to rep

• Chose not to monitor directly and intervene in chats

29 Set up Goals in Instabot

30 Adding NLP with Dialogflow

• Build as an individual agent, like a type of call center agent – could develop for service, tech support, or as an advisor • Create specific elements for each - Intents - Follow up Intents - Contexts - Events - Training Phrases - Action, Parameters - Entities https://www.i2tutorials.com/technolog - Responses y/building-a-chatbot-using-- dialogflow/

31 What are Intents?

32 Training your Bot with Machine Learning

33 Send Event Tracking to Analytics

34 4. Patterns of Chatbot Use 35 Visitor Intention

36 Conversation Flow Analytics

37 Our Chatbot Weekly Statistics

38 Pushing Chatbot Goals into GA as Events

• Instabot GA plugin is used to push events from Instabot to

39 When do People Use the Chatbot?

40 What Pages do People Engage Chatbot On? 66% from home page

41 What Traffic Sources are Chatters From?

42 Chatting On What Devices?

43 Instabot Events

Engaged conversations

Email info packs

Site pageviews 5. Business Outcomes 44 Chatbot Effect on User Experience?

• Ave Time on Page up • Bounce rate down slightly • Q&A across the clock is shows we are helping people in a new way • Chatbot engagement is strong - 3000 events logged

45 Producing Leads and Registrations?

46 Have we Met our Original Objectives?

1) More robust UX? P 2) Increase engagement? PP 3) More leads and Regs? PP 4) Learn about Chatbots? PPP 5) Do no damage to existing? P

47 What are Next Steps for Us?

• Students feedback on UX • Refine content/analytics/ attribution • Reduce fall back rate

• Roll out more chatbots

48 Recommendations • Develop a chatbot strategy that works for you • Keep it simple, iterate • Find a great partner • You won’t know what you don’t know til you know it!

49 References (Used and Recommended) https://coditramuntana.com/en/blog/what-is-a-chat-bot https://www.drift.com/learn/chatbot http://www.ezappsolution.us/nlp.php https://blog.aimultiple.com/chatbot-companies/ https://www.i2tutorials.com/technology/building-a-chatbot-using-googles-dialogflow/ https://www.bloggeroundup.com/messenger-marketing-chatbot-guide/ https://www.clickz.com/chatbots-part-of-your-marketing-strategy/224275/ DialogFlow Youtube Channel https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC1EXoqvR9VrmWnM9S47SfVA https://becominghuman.ai/a-simple-introduction-to-natural-language-processing-ea66a1747b32

Images https://commons.wikimedia.org/ https://www.dreamstime.com/

50 Any Questions? You can find me at: Thanks! [email protected] Connect with me on: LinkedIn sdassociates Twitter @sdassociates

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