AI Student Engagement and Support System

The vendor required to provide AI student engagement and support system should provide students (current and prospective) with a unified method of receiving answers to general student success questions across multiple channels— including SMS, web-based chatbot, email, and AI-powered voice agent as well as initiating proactive outreach to target student groups to complete tasks; however, the institution seeks to understand market capabilities for a next-generation solution that:
•    Improves reliability and uptime, including during vendor-side outages. 
•    Offers transparent system status reporting. 
•    Supports secure data exchange and robust audit trails. 
•    Provides improved visibility into student interactions.
•    Offers reliable campaign management, monitoring, and fail -safes. 
•    Ensure compliance with USG, FERPA, GDPR, and other relevant data handling requirements.
- Requirement:
1. Multi‑channel student support capabilities
•    Interactions via SMS text messaging.
•    Interactions via web‑embedded chatbots.
•    Interactions via email‑based AI interactions.
•    Interactions via AI-powered voice agents.
•    Consistency of responses is maintained across channels.
•    Whether student conversation history persists across channels.
•    Accessibility compliance
2. Authentication, identity and single sign-on integration
•    SSO integration methods.
•    The system identifies and authenticates users across chat, SMS, mobile, and voice.
•    Identity resolution methods linking authenticated users to university records.
•    The system prevents unauthorized disclosure of protected data.
•    The system determines when authentication is required.
3. Knowledge base, content governance and accuracy
•    Knowledge‑base content is authored, reviewed, approved, and updated.
•    Version control mechanisms.
•    Guardrails preventing generation of inaccurate or hallucinated responses.
•    The ability to trace responses back to source documents.
4. Student interaction tracking and search tools
•    Search tools available for locating student interactions by email, id, or phone.
•    Logs of chatbot, SMS, voice, and email interactions.
•    Methods to export logs for audits or case management.
•    Support for advising and student‑success workflows
5. Campaign management, monitoring and fail safes
•    Campaigns are created, scheduled, and launched.
•    Provide details on:
o    Real-time campaign status
o    Progress indicators (e.g., “messages queued,” “x% delivered”)
o    Error and failure reporting
•    Safeguards such as:
o    Prelaunch warnings for large volume send.
o    Confirmation prompts
o    Administrative override or emergency stop (“full stop”) capabilities
•    Duplicate records (email, phone, student id) are detected and resolved.
6. Integration capabilities and data mapping
•    Integration options
•    Data‑mapping management.
•    The ability to enforce data precedence rules.
•    Tools for validating data flows and transformations.
7. Development, testing and environment management
•    Ability to provide a dedicated development and test environment separate from production.
•    Configuration changes, APIs, and automations are tested and promoted.
•    Identify tools for validating data mappings and integrations.
•    Processes for testing workflows prior to production deployment.
•    Change‑management processes.
8. Reporting, analytics and institutional oversight
•    Dashboards for monitoring system usage.
•    Analytics on student engagement
o    System level analytics-level analytics
o    User level actions-level actions
o    Student level engagement data
•    Ability to export audit logs
9. Human oversight, escalation and collaboration
•    Human‑in‑the‑loop monitoring tools.
o    Ability for staff to monitor interactions in real time.
o    Tools for flagging interactions for review.
o    Ability to correct or override AI responses.
•    Escalation workflows from AI to staff.
o    Students are handed off when AI cannot address the question
o    Urgency levels are determined (e.g., financial aid emergency, academic inquiry, etc.)
•    Staff dashboards: describe collaboration tools for annotating or following up on cases.
o    Visibility into student requests, system usage, and flagged cases
o    Ability to annotate cases or follow up manually.
10. Ethics, transparency and bias prevention
•    Users are informed when interacting with AI.
•    Guardrails for sensitive conversations.
•    Bias‑detection and monitoring tools
o    Tools for monitoring fairness across student groups
o    Ability to audit training data and identify potential bias issues.