Did you employ the Customer Service Chatbot? How did it go/is it going?

Question

Hello Community

We at Michener are looking to hear from HE Institutions who have employed D2L's chatbot system as part of their Student/Faculty support system.

How did you implement it? How did you decide its scope, i.e. which queries does it handle for you? Was/is it successful? Did you get any feedback from your communities?

We'd love to hear from you, thanks!

John Woodcock

Michener Institute at UHN, Toronto

Angelo.M.344 · Accepted Answer

Good morning John,

Angelo here from Rosalind Franklin University, I’m the lead LMS admin for our university and worked closely with D2L on our Virtual Assistant release. We rolled out Virtual Assistant in late 2022, it’s been a tool that we rely on for student & faculty support since.

Because we advertise our IT and instructional design support heavily to our internal staff and faculty, we decided to make our preconfigured queries student focused. These preconfigured options include a description and links to our academic services, student counseling services, and our IT helpdesk for student applications. With these topics covered, it ensures that our students are asking the Virtual Assistant only Brightspace related questions, which the tool is more than capable of handling.

Depending on your faculty and staff’s familiarity with your Brightspace support services, you may decide to go another route with the preconfigured options.

Once we were ready to release Virtual Assistant, we sent an email to the entire university to let them know about the tool and what it is used for. We felt that it was important to include faculty and staff in this announcement because, not only can they also utilize Virtual Assistant for their questions, but they can also help direct students to the tool for immediate Brightspace related help.

If you use multiple LMS applications at your university, you may decide to do a more targeted advertisement of Virtual Assistant.

The feedback from our communities has been very positive, primarily from new students who have never used Brightspace. From a support perspective, it brings us comfort knowing that students have an additional venue to seek Brightspace help outside of our office hours.

I hope this perspective is helpful for your release, if you have any other questions don't hesitate to reach out. 😁

JP.D.858 · Accepted Answer

We meet monthly with the EUS team to continue to build and strengthen our Virtual Assistant. Each month we are adding new options. Satisfaction continues to be in the mid to high 90's. Since we do not have an on campus 24/7 support desk, this is a game changer for many of our students and faculty. At the start of a new semester the number of calls is high, but levels off during the semester.