The Full Story
University of California, Irvine (UCI) aimed to create a more inclusive, student-centric admissions experience, especially for under-represented and first-generation students, by ensuring none slipped through the cracks. Previously, their outreach relied heavily on event sign-ups and web form captures. This approach often fell short because some students weren’t ready to share contact details, and staff couldn’t always connect with every prospect. Communications were fragmented, with no consistent strategy across channels, leading to confusion and duplicate outreach, a concern Isabella Collas, an Admissions Counselor, remarked on:
“We’d have a number of people in our team working with the same student and not know about it. There wasn’t a consistent approach to dealing with a problem and students may have got different information from different people on different days.”
To solve this, UCI turned to Gecko, integrating its full suite, including the chatbot, with their Slate CRM. This now logs every interaction, whether via the website, email, phone, in-person, or chatbot, into a single, unified timeline of engagement. As Isabella explained:
“The integration is a really great way to increase consistency in our communication, across our website, email, on the phone, in-person, and chatbot conversations. Now everything is logged in one place and the Gecko chatbot conversations are part of that timeline.”
Having this historical view at their fingertips empowers staff to deliver faster, smarter support. As noted:
“Our Slate timeline logs all interactions that we have with our students. Everything is tracked and it’s really helpful for us because when we’re helping students, we’re equipped with the knowledge of what they’ve been doing beforehand.”
With the timeline providing behavior insights, UCI can now anticipate needs before they’re verbally expressed:
“The integration means we can solve problems without students even having to open their mouth. We can get all the information we need from their timeline. It gives us the ability to reach out to prospective students and anticipate their needs before they articulate it.”
This enables proactive outreach, for example, inviting a student to a relevant workshop or financial aid session based on their interaction history:
“By capturing the data in advance we can then be proactive and send out an email that says, ‘We’re having this specific workshop. Would you like to attend?’ or, ‘We’re having this financial aid session you may be interested in?’ We can give them the support they need.”
Furthermore, the unified timeline allows trend spotting across touchpoints:
“When we see prospects asking about certain topics through chat conversations and then searching for it on the website and then making a phone call, we can identify trends.”
“Maybe a student isn’t sure if they meet a certain requirement or they’re out of state. We can help them by adding them to the mailing list of our out-of-state events, or let them know about college fairs we’re attending in their area.”
This level of personalization extends to onboarding students into specific communications based on their individual concerns.
Moreover, messaging cohesion across teams has improved significantly:
“The integration increases communication across multiple functions and it makes sure teams are consistent with their communications across different teams and people.”
With all channels feeding into the same timeline, UCI now ensures clarity and balance across campus-wide outreach efforts. And because all interactions are tracked, accountability has increased. Prospect-facing staff always know who spoke to which student, when, and about what.