Back in November 2019, I did a presentation at the Strategic Enrolment Marketing & Management Forum 2019 Conference (SEMM 2019) in Toronto, entitled “How to Build a Chatbot for Higher Education Recruitment”.
It has been up on Slideshare for a while but I’ve had a couple of requests for it recently. I thought I would put it here as well, to make it a bit easier for people to find.
This presentation is based on my experience building (and maintaining) a chatbot for George Brown College on the PLC Technician Certificate Program website.
The outline of the presentation is:
- Marketing Context
- Chatbot Basics
- How to Build a Chatbot
- Patterns of Use
- Marketing & Recruitment Outcomes
The presentation tells the story of how the chatbot was developed, implemented, maintained, used, and ultimately evaluated against its original objectives. Marketing Context describes the context in which the chatbot was developed, including information about the original site, traffic levels, and what the overall marketing mix was for the program in which it was introduced. Chatbot Basics provides a very simple primer on chatbots. It introduces the basics of how they operate and the range of possible chatbots that were considered. How to Build a Chatbot describes the process that we went through to create the structure and the content for it. We used the Instabot chatbot platform, including DialogFlow, Google’s Chatbot AI system. Patterns of Use breaks down visitor usage of the chatbot over about a 9 month period, including Instabot analytics, DialogFlow analytics, and Google Analytics. Marketing and Recruitment Outcomes provide a summary of the specific goals we had and related outcomes for the project over this period.
The presentation is now over 8 months old but I think the narrative of the experience, insights, and advice on how to do it yourself, are still quite relevant.
I do hope you find this useful.
Cheers
Scott Duncan