For Robin Kincaid, Director of Technical Support and Paul Seeley, IT Project Manager, at Rowan University the value of AI chatbots was obvious. The team supported a hybrid campus (in-person and virtual classes) and needed an easy support mechanism for password resets and other “tier 1” questions. Moreover, his team often fielded calls regarding registration, financial aid, student accounts, and other questions that needed to be manually and individually handed off to other departments.

In short order the IT team saw a reduction in calls, emails, tickets, and lower call abandonment. And the team knows the campus is in good hands during off hours.

In this short period of time, we’re seeing a reduction in calls, e-mails, tickets and our call abandonment has gone down. This chatbot is available 24/7 by 365. It is absolutely amazing that we can answer the questions of our students, employees, prospective students, parents, etc., 24/7/365.”

While seemingly a “cookie cutter” use case for AI chatbots, the impact has spread across campus.

For Kyle Corrigan, Associate Director of Recruitment Marketing at Rowan University, Ocelot’s Google Analytics integration helped quantify goals and impact of the chatbot tracked within Google Analytics that inform larger enrollment and website strategies (tracking prospective student interest, application submissions, etc).

For example, chatbot interactions set up as events within Google Analytics enables chatbot usage to become a defined part of Rowan University’s marketing attribution model. Every website conversion including information requests, application submissions, event signups, and deposit submissions can be tracked back to how the chatbot was a part of a visitor’s website journey. Data quickly the impact the chatbot was having – as those that interacted with the chatbot were converting at twice the rate of those who did not.

Kyle even set up a lookalike audience in Google Ads of chatbot users for retargeting campaigns, and with this high-intent audience, Kyle quickly reduced application cost-per-submission spend by $20.

Every time they interact, it moves them around in terms of how interested they are in my university. And all of this is possible because of Ocelot and the Google Analytics integration.”

And all of this data gets logged to Rowan University’s CRM, Slate, to build “affinity scores” for prospective students that are used for marketing efforts including additional correspondences, mailers, and other programs to increase enrollment and yield down the enrollment funnel.