“Ask Thunder” Provides Students with a virtual chatbot agent available 24/7 to help you find answers to your admissions, financial aid, academic support, advising, orientation, student accounts, residence life & housing, and technology services questions!.
Ocelot’s industry-leading machine learning platform provided Abraham Baldwin Agricultural College (ABAC) with an unrivaled starting point for customization, enabling easy maintenance.
“I’ve enjoyed working with Ocelot,” said Allen Saylor, Assistant Vice President for Information Technology. “Their products have made a real impact here for our students.”
ABAC was looking for a tool that would allow us to have two-way communication with our students. We wanted to send a mass communication and then have one-one contact to answer any questions. After looking at several products, we found Ocelot’s Chatbot. A Chatbot is a great tool, but we were unsure if our internal teams could come up with all the possible questions a student would ask. This is where the Ocelot Chatbot helped out a lot, already having several 100s/1000s of templated questions for us to leverage/utilize. We quickly launched the Chatbot on the website and started using the Chatbot’s “I Don’t Know” (IDK) email feature to learn more about our students’ questions that the Chatbot did not have the answer. During our first six months, the Ocelot team released Text Campaigns, a feature allowing ABAC to text and engage their students via campaigns directly. If they then have a question, the Chatbot will either answer that question or label it as IDK, and the ABAC team can respond to the student using text. ABAC can also utilize Live Chat, a feature that students can use for a more personalized, human interaction. Sometimes a student does not want to talk to a Chatbot. The great thing about Live Chat is if the student is engaging via Live Chat and asks a question that the Chatbot knows, it will show the answer to the ABAC employee who is currently engaged with the student. They can then click to add the reply to the Live Chat. Not only does this feature help speed up response time, but it also helps make sure the answer given is consistent across all chat moderators.
“Our unique chatbot platform is enabling schools like ABAC to build powerful chatbots with little-to-no IT resources,” said Kevin O’Shea, Ocelot’s Chief Technology Officer. “Our extensive knowledge base and video library provide an unrivaled starting point for customization, with enterprise-grade Natural Language Understanding technology ensuring users can quickly find the answers they need.”
The Ocelot platform is mobile-friendly, WCAG AA 2.0 accessible, and can be deployed across student service departments.
