Newnan Advising Takes Advantage of Chat Services

LSA students can quickly connect with an LSA Advisor through online chat.
by Alyssa Longo, Administrative Assistant

The Newnan LSA Academic Advising Center exists to support and challenge LSA students as they make decisions about their education. Through individual advising conversations, online resources, workshops, and programs, the Newnan Center is dedicated to helping students develop their academic plan, set their professional goals, and foster their personal, ethical, and intellectual growth.

When Newnan Advising originally reached out to LSA Technology Services to explore the possibility of implementing a chat feature, their hope was to create an easier way for the public to get simple questions answered such as, “what are your hours of operation?”. However, over time, they realized the great potential it could have if chat was used for advising. The only issue was that the publicly available chat was not compliant with the Family Education Rights and Privacy Act. LSA Technology Services developed a solution that would use Single Sign On (SSO) and make a chat instance with an advisor FERPA compliant. On January 31, 2022, Newnan Advising launched a chat feature to allow students to connect with an LSA Advisor. 

Working with the LSA Technology Services team to launch and maintain our LSA Newnan  Advisor Chat instance has been such a great process. The team is responsive and helpful whenever we have questions or problems with the chat feature. We love Advising Chat for allowing students to instantly connect with an LSA Advisor wherever they are during the day and adding staff flexibility to support our students during peak times of the semester.

– Tiffany LaPointe

The service started out with 10 to 15 advisors at the initial launch, but in just two weeks, Newnan realized more advisors were needed. In the first three months of use (from January to April), 1,342 chat advising sessions took place with April being the single month high of 711 advising sessions. Each session with the advisor roughly averages between six to seven minutes. Today, students can connect with 38 LSA Advisors Monday through Friday from 10:00 a.m.–12:00 p.m. and 2:00 p.m.–5:00 p.m. These advising hours are extended to 8:00 p.m. for a ten day period near the end of each fall and winter semester. Implementing the chat service significantly reduced the number of phone calls and requests for walk-in appointments.

In the future, LSA Technology Services hopes to find ways to allow visitors to access chat systems through social media channels, i.e. Facebook Messenger, Instagram Direct Messages, etc. If you think your unit would benefit from having a chat service, reach out to LSATechnologyServices@umich.edu to discuss your needs. 

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Release Date: 09/19/2022
Category: Innovate Newsletter
Tags: Technology Services
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