9 min read The education industry is rapidly evolving, blurring the lines between traditional and online learning. In fact, edtech has been one of the fastest-growing education markets, with 900% growth since 2000.
Today, students can sign up for their preferred courses from anywhere, anytime.
But that has led to newer problems to tackle in the form of support queries that educational platforms and institutions have to handle.
In this post, we’re going to discuss why customer support automation is a must and how AI can help.
Table of Contents
Why do educational platforms and institutions need support automation?
Here are some of the reasons why the education industry is exploring support automation:
1. Managing high inquiry volumes during admission periods
With a limited number of human agents, managing high inquiry volumes during admission is always difficult. Not being able to attend every query means unhappy students and parents and missed enrollment opportunities.
2. Providing 24/7 support for global students across time zones
As education becomes a collaborative approach between online and offline modes, it’s only natural for students to take courses irrespective of their geographical location. This means your human agents need to be on their toes 24/7 across time zones.
3. Handling diverse queries across multiple channels
Today, customer support is not just limited to emails or phone calls. Students are interacting with a brand across multiple channels. This means your customer support has to be consistent across channels, handling diverse queries.
4. Addressing technical issues with online learning platforms
Along with the usual admission and course queries, human agents also need to address technical issues with online learning platforms. This can be anything from a login issue to a more complex platform compatibility issue.
5. Delivering multilingual support for international students
Students can now join a course from any part of the world. So delivering multilingual support for international students is a must for an education brand. However, it’s not feasible to hire a customer support team locally.
6. Ensuring personalized guidance for student success
Educational courses are critical decisions and investments as they impact the future career of the aspirant. Hence, it’s natural for students and parents to seek guidance before enrolling in a course. Educational brands that offer personalized guidance for student success surely stay a step ahead.
7. Balancing support for academic and non-academic queries
Customer support in education not only handles the queries of the students or the faculties, but they also need to extend support for non-academic-related queries that can be anything from brand partnership to organizing events.
8. Resolving payment-related issues quickly
Apart from processing admission queries, technical support, and managing non-academic related queries, the human agents also need to resolve any payment-related issues. Since it’s a sensitive area, they must resolve it quickly.
9. Maintaining consistent communication access departments
The customer support team also has the responsibility to maintain consistent communication access to departments. So, when a prospect or a student calls for some specific departmental queries, the customer support team works as a bridge to connect to the right department.
10. Tracking and managing ongoing student concerns effectively
Finally, the customer support team must also tackle and manage ongoing student concerns effectively throughout the year. The customer support team must answer them effectively, be it an exam query, session query, or result update.
Benefits of using AI customer support automation
With so many responsibilities, it’s nearly impossible for human agents to tackle all sorts of queries and issues alone (unless the brand has a massive budget to build local customer support teams that can process all sorts of queries).
This is where AI comes in as a collaborator with human agents. With AI by your side, customer support teams can:
- Offer 24/7 assistance to students spread across the globe.
- Offer faster resolutions to all sorts of queries – be it admission, enrollment, academic, or non-academic queries.
- AI platforms using machine learning and natural language processing can offer personalized guidance to enhance student engagement and success.
- AI makes it possible to scale up and handle the volume of calls, especially during peak admission times and exam periods.
- With AI, you can gather various insights into customer behavior, preferences, past purchase history, and more. These data-driven insights can help you in continuous improvement in support services.
Must-have customer support automation in education
Some of the must-have automation that learning platforms cannot do without today include:
1. AI chatbots for instant query resolution
With AI chatbots, you can instantly offer a resolution to any customer query or route it to a human agent if it needs more complex processing.
For example, the Auralis AI chatbot is designed to analyze and process customer inputs, whether in text or voice form, enabling seamless communication across multiple platforms.
These bots can handle a wide range of tasks, from answering simple queries to assisting with complex issues, ensuring customers receive accurate solutions without long wait times.
Plus, unlike human agents, chatbots can operate 24/7, providing instant assistance regardless of time zones. This constant availability leads to better customer satisfaction and brand experience.
2. Automated enrollment assistance and course guidance
With AI, educational institutions can set up workflows to streamline the enrollment process and guide students in courses.
These automated workflows can be used to collect students’ details using forms and chatbots, send out timely and personalized communications based on the student’s journey, notify educators, collect documents on time, simplify the registration process, and so on.
3. Proactive notifications for deadlines and updates
Traditionally, customer support has always been reactive. But as customer demands are growing, proactive customer support is becoming one of the non-negotiables.
With AI, businesses can offer proactive customer support that involves identifying and addressing problems before they escalate.
This includes analyzing customer behavior data and purchase patterns anticipating potential issues to work towards resolving them in advance. Predictive customer support will become more common as AI systems get integrated into business operations.
In the education industry, this means AI chatbots can send in reminders for upcoming exams, announcements of results, nearing deadlines, reminders for fee payment, offering other relevant courses, etc.
4. Self-service knowledge base for learning resources and FAQs
Customers no longer want to wait for phone calls or emails to get a response to their queries.
As self-service is becoming popular among customers ( 67% of customers said in a survey they prefer self-service rather than talking to a customer service agent), brands must go beyond setting up knowledge bases, FAQs, and video tutorials.
For example, by integrating Auralis AI’s co-pilots with self-serve support platforms, you can make it easy for students to find learning resources and FAQs. Educational institutions can automate responses with AI agents and co-pilots to help students find their desired information faster.
5. Automated technical support for platform issues
With automation integrated into customer support, you can offer technical support for platform issues instantly. AI reduces the wait time by quickly resolving technical issues.
For example, powered by generative technology, Auralis AI aims to empower support teams to deliver faster, smarter, and more humanlike interactions to ensure businesses remain agile and efficient.
6. Personalized recommendations for courses and learning paths
Modern customers expect brands to understand their needs and offer personalized recommendations. They’re not satisfied with just being addressed by their first name.
With AI automation, you can now have access to a student’s previous interactions, course purchase patterns, and behavior.
This can help you offer personalized recommendations for courses, and learning paths, and also upsell and cross-sell courses based on 360-degree context.
7. Automated feedback and survey collection
Automated surveys are a great way to interact with your audience and gather feedback. So, while the AI agent captures the feedback on courses, the human agents can analyze the areas of improvement and work on them.
8. Multilingual support for diverse student communities
Multilingual support is necessary for an educational platform with a global student base. AI-powered multilingual support is one of the best ways to offer support in different languages without burning a hole in your budget.
With Auralis’s AI-powered multilingual support, you can improve your customer experience by offering instant assistance in multiple languages. With advanced natural language processing and machine learning algorithms, AI systems can understand nuances, slang, and cultural contexts of different languages, thus creating accurate and contextually relevant responses.
9. Intelligent routing for escalation to relevant departments
AI automation can intelligently route to the relevant departments or a human agent when there is an escalation that involves complex processing. Auralis’s AI engine can automatically categorize and distribute incoming support tickets to the most qualified agents based on expertise and availability.
So, if a student has a fee-related query, the ticket gets automatically routed to the finance department.
10. Integration with learning management systems for seamless support
A seamless integration of automation with the learning management system ensures seamless support, automated workflow, reduced manual data entry, better user experience, and improved reporting capabilities.
Conclusion
If you’re an educational platform or institution looking for ways to automate customer support, Auralis AI is the solution you’re looking for.
As opposed to conventional, templatized workflows for support automation, Auralis AI enables educational institutions and platforms to create custom workflows leveraging chatbots, agents, and more.
Book a demo of Auralis AI today.
