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Case Study

Gecko Chatbots Support 30,000 Online Students at the University System of Georgia eCampus 24/7

Since introducing Gecko, 30,000 students, most of whom work remotely, are now kept up-to-date with their courses and the wider services available to them 24/7 and when they need further information they know it’s at their fingertips any time of the day or night.

Gecko Chatbots Support 30,000 Online Students at the University System of Georgia eCampus 24/7
35%
more students use the Gecko chatbot than the live-agent service
50%
time reduction to fully train a new staff member

With 30,000 online students, the eCampus at the University System of Georgia (USG) is probably one of the most innovative and progressive higher education institutions in the world. It works with all 26 of the higher education institutions in the southern eastern US state of Georgia to provide high-quality, affordable online degrees and other accredited workplace qualifications. It covers four research universities, four comprehensive universities, nine state universities and nine state colleges.

That’s quite an undertaking and Gecko is proud to play a vital role in helping to ensure the smooth delivery of online courses from such a broad and inspiring group of educational faculties.

Here, we talk to Samuel Horsley, the student success manager at eCampus USG, about how eCampus USG has developed a unique support system with Gecko chatbots to provide accurate, up-to-date information to thousands of students across the state of Georgia and beyond.

“We offer a very unique online education,” explains Samuel. “We provide fully online core classes, which we call e-core, and upper level major classes, which we call e-major, to lots of different institutions. If you’re enrolled in any of our classes you have access to all of our customer service, help and support features, such as live chats, and our Gecko chatbots, which help with the faculty side of things, like getting students in touch with professors and uploading assignments through our programs.”

eCampus USG began using Gecko’s ChatGPT-powered bot in 2024 when it created two chatbots: one tailored for e-core courses and one designed for e-major courses.

Gecko
"Gecko's AI chatbot has transformed support for our 30,000 online students at the University System of Georgia eCampus. Available 24/7, it handles 35% more inquiries than our live agents. The chatbot has streamlined our operations, cutting staff training time in half. It's constantly evolving, and we're excited to see where it takes us next."
Gecko
Samuel Horsley
Student Success Manager

Using Gecko through ChatGPT was a no-brainer

“It was decided that ChatGPT was better suited to combing each specific website for content and it didn’t require us to continually update our knowledge base, as we’d had to do previously,” says Samuel.

The chatbots sit on the front of eCampus USG’s e-core and e-major websites and any student, potential student, faculty member or potential faculty member can access them, as well as anyone who visits one of the sites, 24/7. Questions it will answer range from, ‘who is teaching physics this fall?’ to ‘who do I contact at my institution to find out about registering for my class?’ to ‘does the English 1101 class have a major project?’ As long as the information has been uploaded onto the websites, the Gecko chatbots can answer any related question.

While enrolled students can use an embedded link to join a live chat. “If you’re a student and you’re like, I don’t know how to get in touch with my professor in this class, you can click the little get help button that we have on the pop up and one of our human help-desk agents will take that between 8am and 8pm Monday through Friday,” says Samuel.

 

 The Gecko chatbot also supports live agents

Samuel and his team were also surprised about how well the Gecko chatbots assist their live agents, which are made up of a mix of full-time staff and student workers. “Our live agents can use the chatbot to help them with their replies,” says Samuel. “That has been really helpful in terms of cutting down on some of our training, as well as streamlining replies. We really encourage our student workers to utilize it and they do, because the Gecko chatbots are really great at finding all sorts of info for them really quickly, they often customize it, but the general answer is the same.” Samuel says that while training student workers typically took about a month, the chatbot has helped to reduce this to two weeks.

As the Gecko bots are on the public sites and the live agents work only on the student member side of the sites, it is expected that they will see more traffic, but Samuel was surprised at how much usage they get. He says: ”Our most recent numbers show that our Gecko chatbots usage is about 35% higher than our live agent usage, that’s not a small amount and that’s something that has only continued to grow for us. I have not seen a single month in the last two and a half years that the Gecko chatbots were not outpacing our live agents.”

Gecko chatbots stepped up their game when students returned for spring semester, handling 37% more chats in January compared to August. eCampus USG is able to scale effortlessly to meet demand, ensuring students get timely answers even during the busiest months. “The Gecko chatbot can also now reply a lot faster to generic questions than live agents,” says Samuel. “If a student forgets their login information, for example, it can get it almost instantly.”

 

Gecko’s chatbot never stops learning

The fact that Gecko’s chatbot continually learns using the ChatGPT technology impresses Samuel too. “The Gecko chatbots have definitely evolved over time,” he says. “We’re now working with integrating another partner school into eCampus USG and the process of getting the Gecko chatbot up and running with them is so much easier now than when we were having to do everything in house. It, for example, understands every variant of ‘hello’ right off the bat. Gecko provides a really good hybrid chat model, it goes from zero to a fully functioning chatbot pretty quickly.”

Using a mix of AI and live agents minimizes inconsistent answers too. “AI helps the Gecko chatbot evolve and means it’s always improving and it makes it much easier for our live agents to handle multiple conversations,” says Samuel. “They can give a detailed bespoke reply to one individual and then click the ChatGPT button and bounce between conversations a lot faster.”

Next, Samuel is keen to introduce Gecko’s text-to-chat feature, so that students can access the Gecko chatbots and the live agents from their phones. “I think that will boost usage even further,” he says. “All of us in eCampus USG only ever have good things to say about Gecko. We’re looking forward to seeing where it will take us next.”

 

Try it for yourself

If you’re curious about how Gecko’s AI chatbot could transform your institution’s student engagement, why not experience it firsthand? Visit our AI demo page to build a chatbot that’s tailored to your institution in less than 60 seconds. Discover how Gecko can help you provide 24/7 support, reduce staff workload, and improve student satisfaction – all while seamlessly integrating with your existing systems.

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