As a fully online institution without a physical campus, building connections with students at CSU Global is uniquely challenging. The school’s Director of Student Experience, Jerid Counterman, was finding it was especially difficult to re-engage those students who enrolled at CSU Global but then vanished after a semester or two without a trace.

Looking to keep existing students on track and get those “disappearing students” back to class, the university wanted to find a better way to reach out and provide accessible answers to questions when students had them.

[Customer quote call out] “The footprint makes it really easy for students to fall off and just quietly disappear. We didn’t have any actual data about what students’ intentions were as far as returning within the near future, distant future, whether students were unable to return and why or whether students hated us and were done,” – Jerid Counterman, Director of Student Experience, CSU Global

Effectively reaching students across a disperse geography, however, can be resource intensive. Proactive efforts via email often went unnoticed by students and phone channels were becoming increasingly costly to staff to maintain adequately.

While CSU Global had looked to chatbot solutions in the past, the team found it challenging to manage consistency and integrate in-portal systems with those assisting prospects on public-facing channels. Counterman found that managing disparate chatbots that were not integrated required staff hours that CSU Global simply didn’t have.

It was imperative CSU Global found a way to proactively connect with students and prospects in a personalized, efficient, and integrated way using channels they paid attention to, utilizing data the university already had.