Customer contact in education

You encounter the following every day in your interactions as a consumer: communication in a comfortable format, via web, app, email, phone, or social media. You want a clear answer to your specific question. In education, finding such answers is often still a cumbersome process: parents have to struggle through a whole host of web pages and documents themselves to find an answer to a question. Students often have to use various apps for timetables, appointments, and tasks. Why not make it easier?

By using RPA software and Artificial Intelligence, communication with the school can be made both easier and more personal. This is how you optimise customer contact in education.

Here is a quick guide to the topics covered on this page:

What is RPA? What is Artificial Intelligence + Examples in education Example of RPA in contact: a chatbot
A few customer cases Still not convinced?

RPA for your educational institution

What is RPA?

RPA stands for Robotic Process Automation. Simply put, RPA means using software to automate common, repetitive operations. Parents and students often ask questions during interactions with the school. Answering these questions requires access to information that the school often has to retrieve from different systems. This is time-consuming, and in many cases there is no overview available to provide an adequate answer.
RPA can play an important role in automating the retrieval of this information so that the school can provide targeted and personalised responses.

What is Artificial Intelligence (AI) and how do you implement it?

With AI, the intention of a question can be uncovered through a learning process. Frequently asked questions are identified. The AI software is trained to recognise topics and questions. Once the AI software knows what the question is about, we deploy smart templates that handle the question fully automatically. Is this not possible? Then the software recognises this and forwards the question to the right person. This could be, for example, the coach of the specific student asking the question. By combining AI with RPA, it is also possible to handle personal questions that involve accessing information from other systems. Examples include timetable information or grade information.

24 hours per day
With the assistance of AI, you can therefore provide 24-hour support, including answering questions that would normally require contact with a teacher or the administration department.

Supporting students using AI

A student has a question about an excursion. Via the school's app, the student asks the question "when are we going camping?" The AI recognises the question and the sender of the question, and based on that data, the robot refers the student to a specific article in the school's knowledge base about excursions in the relevant grade or shows the annual calendar, for example.

Supporting parents using AI

A parent wants to help their child study at home in the evening, but is not sure how to do so. When they send an email to the school or ask a question on the website, e.g. "what is the best way to learn words", the parent is given practical tips and specific links to the knowledge base or external resources.

Example of Robotic Process
Automation

A popular application of RPA in the world of customer contact is the chatbot, as deployed on Facebook Messenger, for example. This is basically a plain and simple robot, but by adding intelligence and shaping the robot process, more and more applications are possible. The possibilities then include not only the question-and-answer game we know from Messenger, but also other, more human actions enabling real dialogue.

Chatbots in education
For example, consider a student's request for extra support or guidance. The student asks for help and can use a chatbot to make an appointment with a tutor or to sign up for extra support. RPA ensures that this is immediately processed in the student tracking system and in the teacher's diary.

A few customer cases

Automatic exam processing at LOI

Before an exam result is released and the final grade is communicated to the student, a number of quality checks have to be performed.

Did the examiners add any comments to the corrections? Was the exam completed within the time allowed? Are there any specific concerns with the version of the exam used? All these issues are checked by the robot Gijs.

Whereas normally LOI employees have to search for information across several screens and have to check for special circumstances, this is no longer necessary. Also, the process is no longer error-prone, because the robot does not accidentally overlook things, which could happen to an employee.

Gijs thus ensures a fast, efficient, and secure check so that LOI employees can quickly validate the exams and the student can quickly be delighted with a (hopefully) good grade!

Sees exams and scans them

Acts by recognising patterns

Cloud Contact in education

The past year has seen a new development in education due to the COVID pandemic: distance learning and remote contact. While students and teachers alike are longing to get back to face-to-face lessons at school, certain aspects are sure to stay: remote support and remote (parent) conversations.

This is especially efficient in the context of 10-minute conversations with parents, where in many cases the parents also do not live together, for example. Often, the teacher now conducts these conversations using their own (private) mobile phone. Many educational institutions already use Microsoft Teams. By establishing a link between Teams and the telephony platform of Pegamento Cloud Contact, communication can be facilitated easily!

1,5 metres in education

In education, we want more students in school again, but how do we ensure that students and teachers stay at a safe distance? Recently, we tested our Novick, a device that both parties wear and that makes the 1,5 metres visible, at a number of pilot schools. School ambassadors gave five teachers two Novicks to test. They left it up to the teachers themselves to decide how they were going to use the wearable. While wearing the Novick, it soon became clear to the teachers that they were unconsciously getting too close to one another after all.

Relatable?

Read more about our successful experience with the Novick

Detects 1,5 m distance

Communicates when the distance is <1,5 m

Interested but not yet convinced?

Are you interested in Robotisation within your educational institution, but not quite convinced about implementing it yet? Then we would like to help you. In the free white paper on RPA in education, you can read all about Robotisation, which robots are suitable, and what they can do for you.

Here, we also cover the advantages of robotisation. You will also find a checklist to help you determine whether robotisation can make a difference within your educational institution.

Download the white paper here:

I want to implement robotisation within my educational institution

Robotisation is applicable in a wide range of processes. Each educational institution works in its own way, and therefore each solution is tailor-made.

Can RPA provide solutions within your educational institution? What savings or quality improvements can be made in your processes? And how can we keep parents and students happy using robotisation?

Request an introductory meeting with one of our specialists to find out how Robotisation and AI can be implemented within your educational institution.

Education

Customer contact in education