Celebrating Squire’s First Birthday: A look back at a Year of Data

Almost exactly one year ago, NECC launched our first ever chatbot, Squire, on the NECC Website. NECC provides a wide range of services, and we wanted to make it as easy as possible for current students, prospective students, and anyone interested in NECC, to find the information they were looking for in a friendly and responsive way. Not to mention, Squire is bilingual! As a Hispanic Serving Institution (HSI), it’s critical that we meet our community where they are – which is why we invested in a bot that speaks fluent Spanish.

Squire, NECC’s Artificial Intelligence (AI) powered bot, is trained to help website visitors with a wide variety of questions, but Squire is especially smart when it comes to questions on enrolling at the college and IT support. While we started training Squire to answer questions by entering hundreds of questions about things like Blackboard support and financial aid, Squire has since “spidered” (or combed through all of NECC’s website pages) for important information about any type of question visitors to the NECC website might have. The implementation team meets monthly to review Squire’s “I don’t know” (IDK) questions, or the questions that the bot doesn’t know how to answer, and to add more content to help Squire keep learning.

What can we learn from a year of chatbot transcripts?

• Squire has had 6,373 conversations with NECC website visitors in the last year – that’s about 17 conversations a day!
• 3% of all of Squire’s interactions are conducted in Spanish.
• NECC guests have questions 24/7! 12% of all chats took place on the weekend, and 31% of chats are conducted before or after NECC operating hours.

Over 50% of the top 5 conversation topics in the last year have related to admissions and applying to NECC!

What’s next for Squire? We’re taking things live!

This spring, the IE office combed through hundreds of interactions and transcripts that the bot has had with NECC website visitors. Most importantly, we noticed that many website guests wanted even more of a personal interaction than an AI-bot can provide. In response, we’re gearing up to begin offering live chat support this summer. Several of NECC’s Student Ambassadors, who are cross trained by all of the main areas of the college, will begin piloting a live chat option during those peak chat hours.

Interested in chatting with Squire yourself? Just go to https://www.necc.mass.edu to give it a try! If you have ideas for additional topics we should teach Squire, email me at aellis@necc.mass.edu.

Happy birthday, Squire!