Case Study - AGI
Updated: Aug 8, 2021
AGI increasing customer engagement with Ako's virtual assistant Beaky
I’m Beaky, the virtual assistant. I’m here to make sure you have all the information you need while visiting the AGI website.
About AGI
AGI is an NZQA accredited Category 1 provider. They are positioned as one of the leading Institutions offering Diplomas in Healthcare and IT. Their passion for excellence in education ensures that students get a lively, ground-breaking and motivational learning environment. Programmes are designed by leading experts in their respective fields, all fully aware of the skills needed in the ever-changing job market, with training evolving to meet current and emerging industry trends.
Challenge
The client requested a chatbot to help with the influx of queries from both current and potential students that peak over intake periods, leading existing resources to be strained. The client, AGI, requested a fast turnaround, highlighting a rapidly approaching intake period. This left a deadline of around 3 weeks to a month to complete the bot and have it deployed to their website. This included enough training history to ensure the bot’s NLP training, and its associated responses would be informationally and tone of voice appropriately ready to go day and date. It was quietly a landmark project for Ako, as it was one of the first projects we worked on that went straight to going live and public-facing on their website rather than being behind a paywall, within a closed doors POC cycle or part of a greater project utilising tech from multiple parties. AGI was very concerned about ensuring the correct and consistent presentation of their brand within the bot. With any client understanding the tone of voice and getting this perfect is always a challenge which we managed to achieve by maintaining an open dialogue with the client and appropriate stakeholders.
Solution: Beaky, the Virtual Assistant
Beaky, AGI’s company mascot is a cute little Kiwi-bird assistant wearing his scrubs who sits on the AGI website ready to answer any incoming queries.
Benefit
Beaky is already an established company mascot used in current AGI marketing, so it made sense to bring him to life as the virtual assistant and extend his friendly guidance. His GIF avatar, which moves within the chat bubble brings him to life. That coupled with the helpful topic nudges he suggests help ensure a page visitor is aware of him and guides them to pursue their needs with the bot rather than searching the site and potentially not finding the info they needed. He asks lots of open-ended questions to keep the conversation flowing, and once you have the information you need - he will always offer any further service, or just leave the user to continue to browse the site on their own. The support topics he can offer will supply all expected self-service topics identified in the discovery process during a client consultation. All other topics guide users to contact school staff directly (with Beaky’s help, of course)!
Results
Utilising our experience developing conversational AI solutions, and Ako developed chatbot ensured Beaky’s knowledge and capabilities were perfectly matched to the needs of AGI and its customers. With a low-risk approach, AGI achieved a great ROI in a short period.
This intake month's metrics at a glance: There have been 888 conversations, totalling 3207 messages between the bot and users. With only 13% of conversations leading to a fallback and the rest resulting in resolved intent, we can infer from this data that the bot has been able to service customer queries with an accuracy level of 87%. This coupled with a conversation to messages ratio of 1:3.6 shows customers received their requested information within an approx. +/- 3 messages. This shows conversations with the bot were not just for fun, but outcome-oriented and informational.
Customers were not left hanging while contact agents were offline with an ability to service customers outside of traditional 8-5 work hours.
As with all Ako bots, any off-topic statements from users will be served by our ever-expanding database of over 180 off-topic responses we call Smalltalk
Ongoing training continues to work towards closing understanding and service topic holes guaranteeing Ako service continues to grow and evolve with AGI.
Client Testimonial
“Beaky has been a great addition to our AGI family - we have been able to retain users on our website and the bot is a major help concerning information that the user would potentially want and can guide users to relevant pages. It's great to have a friendly face on the website. The Ako team has been very supportive through the conceptualizing and execution of the bot”.