The onset of the Coronavirus forever changed higher education as close quarters and socialization suddenly turned universities and colleges into petri dishes.

If you’ve been following the NCAA basketball tournament this year, you might have heard one of the biggest stories to come out of the event was the disparity in accommodations between the men’s and women’s basketball teams. Most notably, while the men had a full weight room at their tournament site in Indianapolis, the women’s weight room only had dumbbells under 30 pounds and a few yoga mats.

Students Prefer Chatbots According to Study

University Information Technology Services (UITS) at Indiana University has a large, award-winning online knowledge base, started in 1988. For years, their self-help search tool has been a well-developed function on IU’s website to provide on-demand IT support. The search tool functions similarly to a Google search, where a user enters key search terms to retrieve a ranked list of knowledge base articles.

If you’re a college basketball fan, there is no better time of year than March when the top 64 teams in the country square-off for arguably the most dramatic tournament in all of sports. 

When preparing to add a chatbot to your website, you will likely face the decision over when to keep the chatbot live and when to switch to live chat. But for those who are new to the world of chatbots, the differences might not even be apparent to the untrained administrator.

If you’re noticing that much of your customer service interactions are more automated, you’re not alone. The days of packed call centers have long been a thing of the past (and it’s not because of COVID-19).

Over the past several years, businesses have rushed to implement this technology to streamline customer communication. However, many chatbot experiences leave much to be desired, especially within higher education.

Most higher ed institutions are just weeks away from wrapping up their first semester and bracing for what many health experts are referring to as “the dark winter.” While an estimated 40 million Covid-19 vaccines will be ready for distribution shortly, the surge in new cases promises to only worsen in the weeks ahead.