Chatbot Solution

The Vendor is required to provide chatbot solution for include:
1. Functional
•    Chatbot is available 24/7 for student assistance
•    Chatbot can be configured for all areas of institutional needs, for example, admissions, financial aid, advising, registration, student success, and operations and service desk etc.
•    "Chatbot must support the following communication formats:
o    Website chat
o    Two-way SMS texting
o    Live chat with staff "
•    Role-based administrative access and views
•    The solution should support multiple independent SMS channels, each with its own opt-in and opt-out management functionality
•    Supports escalation to a human when the bot cannot confidently answer 
•    "Chatbot will answer student inquiries with 95% accuracy - provide supporting data and documentation
•    For example: 
o    Answers should come from approved institutional content
o    No guessing or hallucinated responses
o    Customize response when the system does not know an answer"
•    Conversations should follow the student across interfaces
•    "Chatbot should provide multilingual support, for example,
o    Support for multiple languages
o    Ability to review and approve translated content
o    Consistent tone and accuracy across languages"
•    Non-technical staff can manage and review the system, content and conversations
•    Chatbot platform should have a friendly user interface
•    "Chatbot should include workflow, including the ability to assign, route, and prioritize conversations based on topic and functional area
o    Including a shared inbox or queue across departments and alert notifications"
•    Chatbot should include workflow to notify appropriate staff when content needs to be reviewed based on specified rules
2. Reporting
•    Chatbot must feature central reporting and dashboards across all experiences. 
•    "The platform should provide clear reporting on
o    Top questions
o    Engagement by channel
o    Bot vs human resolution"
•    The platform should provide the ability to download transcripts and reports
•    The platform should provide the ability to use insights from reports to improve content and outreach via AI technology
3. Support
•    Provide training for staff including documentation
•    Provide a clear and detailed onboarding and implementation plan 
•    Provide a testing plan
•    Provide a project timeline with milestones
•    Have an understanding of multi-department environments 
•    Provide ongoing support, maintenance, and account management 
•    Demonstrate support and experience in enrollment management, student success, operations, and service desk use cases
•    Provide solution configuration and deployment
•    Provide a transparent roadmap for future development 
•    Provide testing prior to go live and any major updates
4. Technical
•    Provide their content ingestion and validation process
•    The platform should retain data in accordance with record retention policies
•    Chatbot must integrate with banner (sis) via APIs or direct integration and provide documentation and data map (e.g., student id as unique identifier)
•    "Chatbot integrates with our CRMs and other systems via APIs or direct integration, including slate, CRM advise, VOCA, etc. and provide documentation and data map (high priority)
o    Examples include applicant status, program of interest, or enrollment stage"
•    Chatbot provides personalized support from CRM or sis, examples include use of student name and other student data
•    Chatbot should support multiple knowledge bases and instances, with the ability to designate responses for distinct populations including but not limited to prospective and current students, alumni, and staff
•    Each knowledge base should have the ability to crawl relevant content sources including the public website, password protected Ellucian experience and SharePoint website
•    Each knowledge base should include the ability to manually enter content
•    Duplicate library content detection within chatbot platform 
•    "Chatbot should feature multiple entry points for users that can route them to the correct experience 
o    I.e. The initial welcome message should ask whether the user is a current student or a prospective student
o    Once selected, the appropriate “bot brain” takes over and uses the correct content sources"
•    Each audience should only receive answers from content intended for them
•    Describe governance controls, confidence thresholds, and administrative review capabilities
•    Chatbot should automatically update (at a minimum every 24 hours) when source pages are updated.