This past August, as the University was preparing to welcome students back to campus and embark on a large-scale COVID-19 testing plan, IS&T took the lead on providing student support for non-medical COVID-19 questions. The IT Help Center was tapped to form the core of the team due to their expertise in handling many requests at the beginning of the school year as well as having procedures and a ticketing system in place to deal with the volume. To support them, a broad team was quickly assembled from a variety of departments including Student Health Services, Student Services, Dean of Students, Housing, and even Human Resources. While HR handles COVID-19 support of employees through covidhelp@bu.edu, there were situations such as an employee taking classes where collaboration would be needed to get the correct answer.
Within IS&T, we also assembled a team of individuals spanning several groups, some of whom do not normally provide direct support to our clients. All the individuals tapped have great customer service skills, a solid understanding of BU’s culture, as well as desire to learn and help.
With the individuals identified, we set up a separate email address healthwayhelp@bu.edu and a separate area of our ticketing system to allow us to best answer these requests. A Healthway phone line at 617-353-0550 was set up to answer all questions with options to speak to medical staff, contact tracers, Healthway IS&T staff, or HR Covid-19 Support staff. To best share our collective knowledge and collaborate between such a large team, we created a site in Microsoft Teams to allow IS&T staff to ask questions and get advice from the experts in the other departments.
We created an internal FAQ document to provide consistent answers to questions that were being submitted. As we started to see patterns emerge with the submitted questions, we brought in our colleagues from Marketing & Communications who were creating and updating the Healthway and Back2BU websites. This document gave them a snapshot of questions that we were seeing from students and allowed Marketing & Communications to update or adjust information on these websites.
At our peak, soon after classes began, we had over 100 individuals from multiple departments using our Healthway Help Teams site. It was really encouraging to see staff from various groups and departments collaborating quickly and efficiently to help enable a safe return to campus. As of mid-November, the team has answered almost 5500 questions.
Many of our most common questions are now answered through our Healthway Helper chatbot found on the Healthway and Back2BU websites. Healthway Helper went live in mid-September and in the two months that it’s been active, the chatbot has answered almost 5000 questions. This interactive chatbot is updated as new information comes in and is constantly tweaked as the bot learns how to navigate language nuances and answer questions that may be asked in a variety of different ways. With continued refinement, our goal is to make this chatbot as useful as possible. If Healthway Helper doesn’t know the answer to a question, you’re given the option of sending the conversation to the Healthway team where a staff member will follow-up with you.
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