QUT has won the best education project at the 2022 iTnews Benchmark Awards for its prospective student digital assistant.
The digital assistant or chatbot, named Q, was designed to help the university's service centre, HiQ, deal with more than 1000 enquiries per day, and put the students at the centre of everything.
HiQ is responsible for student services, support and general enquiries via phone, face to face, chat and email.
Service delivery coordinator Angela Kenna said we want to provide faster, more responsive service for QUT students.
"My focus has really been on how we can best use technology to enable self-service for students, in their channel of choice," Ms Kenna said.
"We wanted to invest and explore some digital assistance to see what we could do in that space to remove some of the demand in our live channels and to improve benefits to students in terms of 24 hour support," she said.
The education finalists in the 2022 iTnews Benchmark Awards were charged with providing the introduction of innovative solutions to address the impact of COVID accelerating the adoption of online learning.
QUT Service Improvement Lead, Student Engagement, Joyi Lu said he was thrilled to lead his team to the win.
"It's really great to see the hard work of the HiQ Services team and our implementation partner being recognised at an industry event," Mr Lu said.
"It reaffirms the importance of our commitment to continue to explore and integrate AI technologies into HiQ Services to differentiate and improve our student and staff experience."
The chatbot reduced chat support volumes by an average of 33 per cent, and the cost of chat-based interactions has halved. Data analytics have been integrated into the bot to provide insights into student engagement via the channel.
