The Full Story
The University of Glasgow, recently named Times Higher Education University of the Year, and ranked 14th in the UK (2nd in Scotland), prioritizes engaging students throughout the admissions journey.
Facing an overwhelming volume of 120,000 student inquiries per year without additional staff, the admissions team sought an efficient solution. Senior leadership encouraged exploring chatbot and live-chat platforms, particularly during Clearing, for which similar institutions were already adopting these technologies.
Gecko, already familiar to UoG through their lead-capture tools, was selected for the job. In November 2020, UoG rolled out its chatbot “Gilbert” across the campus. Since then, Gilbert has handled 12,723 student conversations autonomously.
Notably, 7,496 of those conversations took place outside standard office hours, accounting for 59% of interactions. Additionally, 26% occurred during weekends. These figures illustrate how Gilbert ensures continuous, reliable support, relieving staff from answering routine inquiries.
Keith Hutchison, Enquiry Team Lead, emphasized their goal: “We got the chatbot to intercept a lot of the easy stuff. We wanted something that could easily reduce the volume of easy calls that we were getting but something that will never take away from our specialist knowledge and things that our team has to do.”
Gilbert became the first point of contact for many students, allowing admission teams to intervene only where deeper, specialist support was needed. As Hutchison noted: “We definitely wanted to get away from the formality of emails but we wanted it to be like you were still talking to a human.”
Through this seamless deployment, UoG improved responsiveness and student satisfaction, particularly during high-demand periods like evenings and weekends, without scaling up staff capacity. The chatbot’s presence means students receive prompt, intuitive support anytime, while the admissions team focuses on complex tasks.