Victoria University
Victoria University’s history dates to 1916, when it first opened as the Footscray Technical School. Over subsequent decades, the school expanded to include degree courses across several academic disciplines, becoming the university it is today.
Victoria University (VU) still offers both vocational and academic courses, and ranks within the top 2% of universities worldwide*. It is one of Australia’s largest and most culturally diverse education institutions, with an award-winning ‘VU Block’ learning model and strong ties to industry.
As one of the few dual-sector universities in Australia, VU offers unique opportunities for students to move between its TAFE and university divisions. And, with work experience embedded into the curriculum, the university prides itself on producing successful, job-ready graduates.
Victoria University continues to innovate, offering small, supportive classes in sequence – rather than large lectures concurrently – in what it aptly calls “The New Way To Do Uni”.
Read about our ongoing partnership with Victoria University, and the remarkable campaign where Oracle Digital Assistant and cutting-edge AI technology gave students a thoroughly modern, interactive online Open Day.
Introducing “VU Assistant” for 2021 Virtual Open Day
The annual VU Open Day event lets prospective students experience campus life, get course information and have their questions answered by staff and current students. Due to COVID restrictions, the 2021 Open Day was implemented online (https://openday.vu.edu.au) – with the goal of optimising the experience for prospective students.
Victoria University has traditionally taken advantage of Oracle Service live chat to support enquires from students. For the Virtual Open Day, the university introduced the “VU Assistant” to optimise the process by allowing prospective students to get an answer to their enquiry.
Using the Oracle Digital Assistant and its native web client, prospective students could start the “chat conversation” directly from the Open Day page, focused on their topic of interest. This improved the experience from the alternative: moving them to a central Chat environment, potentially losing the context of the conversation in the process.
The Digital Assistant also collected “lead data” along with the nature of the enquiry. This allowed the query to be directed to the most appropriate resource, and the call centre agents were able to optimise their call time and focus on the specifics of the enquiry.
Open Day Outcome
During the period of the VU Open Day event, the Digital Assistant was able to initialise (and triage) almost 700 conversations between prospective students and more than 200 different subject matter experts within the university.
This represented a significant YoY increase in the number of 1-to-1 conversations held during previous university Open Days.
Please refer to the following to experience the Virtual Open Day event – https://openday.vu.edu.au/
What’s Next?
The team at VU have ambitious plans to roll out further digital assistant-based use cases so prospective and current student communities can get the answers they need, in the quickest, most helpful way possible.
Foot Notes
* Times Higher Education World University Rankings 2020
