Colleges and universities are moving quickly to make it easier for today’s digital native students to interact with their institutions. And if Christian Theumer, interim CIO of Purdue University, can offer any advice, it’s this: Don’t get too cocky about that state-of-the-art system you just purchased if it doesn’t provide a personalized user experience.
“That hasn’t always been the case, right?” he says. “We’d buy a student information system or a CRM, throw it out there and just expect people to adopt it. If you’re not delivering an exceptional user experience, they’re not going to work around the technology platforms that you’ve invested in.”
The revolution of e-commerce and other user-centric digital platforms has set the standard for what students today expect when browsing their school email, navigating a college website or accessing digital course materials. Couple that with their growing adoption of generative AI tools, and colleges can quickly slide back to the Stone Age if they fail to adapt.
“We are dealing with a population that lives on their devices,” says Mladen Milanovic, vice president of automation at Presidio, a technology services and solutions provider.
While the next wave of IT innovation involves improving user experience, few universities are training or hiring staff skilled in customer satisfaction, Milanovic says. College enrollment may be at stake—a recent report by Collegis Education found that 40% of college students who have had frustrating experiences with school technology said it impacted their decision to enroll for another term.
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In the wake of this emerging IT need, Purdue has built a team purely dedicated to cultivating, measuring and improving the user experience for its faculty, staff and students across all its digital platforms.
“When we’re interacting with our phones, when we’re interacting with Amazon or whatever channel, we want to deliver that same experience for the student when they arrive on campus,” Theumer says.
Its most outstanding new staff member isn’t a human. Purdue contracted Presidio to develop a university-specific chatbot capable of automating menial IT tasks while offering students a lively and helpful assistant. Theumer says that since BoilerBot, Pudue’s AI and automation tool, was implemented last year, it has provided IT assistance more quickly. It has proved its worth again within the past week, handling the wave of password reset requests that usually overwhelm university IT teams at the beginning of each semester.
The bot has lowered user abandon rates by 30%, decreased wait times by 4 minutes and reduced handle times by 3 minutes. And by extrapolating the underlying automative technology in the BoilerBot program across the university system, staff have saved a combined 60,000 hours of work over the past 13 months, according to internal university data.
“You give time back to both the employee and all of our constituents and partners throughout the university system,” Theumer says.
With the time saved by BoilerBot, Theumer’s IT department is taking on AI’s broader implications in higher education. On top of the to-do list is helping draft university AI use policies and collaborating with faculty and researchers to implement AI in the teaching and learning environment.
“IT isn’t going to lead and take over these initiatives; it’s learning from each other and understanding how this new and emerging technology exists in our ecosystem,” Theumer concludes.
