The student experience at Charles Sturt University (CSU), particularly for those studying online, has recently undergone a fundamental transformation. Moving away from a limited 9-5 phone based support service, CSU has adopted a modern, highly engaged, and student-centric approach.
Historically, enquiry services at Charles Sturt University (CSU) were largely phone-only and operated within a rigid nine-to-five, Monday-to-Friday schedule. This created a significant service gap, especially considering that over 70% of students were learning online and often sought assistance outside of business hours—late at night or on weekends.
Michael Buttsworth, Associate Director, Student Experience Service Centre, CSU, comments, “If students needed help outside of these hours, they were forced to navigate the website, which required them to know the exact terms for what they were seeking. During peak periods, like enrollment, orientation, and grade release, the inability to scale support led to agonisingly long wait times. Even when staff were available, the weight of the queue and the high reliance on student casuals, who often requested time off during these critical peaks, made service management extremely challenging”.
Student-first experiences
CSU’s transformation followed a clear student–first strategy, resisting the temptation to implement technology before defining clear business outcomes. The journey involved a number of stages:
- Accessibility first: The first step was making their chat services far more accessible, moving them from being hidden pages to a bright orange, easily clickable widget on the front page.
- Knowledge base overhaul: An internal project focused on elevating the knowledge base. Articles were meticulously rewritten in student language, ensured to be factual, easy to find, and genuinely helpful.
- Chatbot deployment: Once the knowledge base was reliable, the first chatbot was launched using the Genesys Cloud platform. The rich data and insights provided by the chatbot became a continuous improvement loop, revealing which articles were effective, which were redundant, and the exact keywords students were using.
Buttsworth highlights, “This deployment of the chatbot, aided by Genesys Professional Services to ensure correct implementation and build internal team capability, immediately addressed the after-hours problem. The university went from offering no service after hours to seeing 50% of all chat interactions occur outside of regular business hours, successfully meeting students when and where they need support”.
Thanks to Charlie – From long queues to high satisfaction
The adoption of new technologies and strategies has fundamentally changed the quality of the student experience at CSU. A key measure of this success is the Net Promoter Score (NPS). “When the service was predominantly phone-only with long wait times, the NPS consistently hovered around 34-35. Today, that score sits at 62, marking a significant increase in student satisfaction”, says Buttsworth.
Acceptance of the chatbot, which CSU named Charlie after their University mascot, was quick as students were able to access greater information when it was convenient for them. Buttsworth reflects, “We adopted a cautious and safe approach to the rollout, which took us approximately three to four weeks due to extensive testing. Crucially, even after the initial deployment, we didn’t stop there. Before moving to the next phase, we spent time reviewing transcripts daily to understand real-world usage”.
“We started seeing positive feedback like, ‘Good bot, thank you, Charlie’. It was fascinating to observe their interaction: although students knew it was a virtual agent, they were often treating it like a human being”.
While reduced wait times was a benefit—with average wait times dropping from around ten minutes down to two to three minutes across the student lifecycle, and peak periods seeing a reduction from over an hour to 15-20 minutes—the core improvement is attributed to a shift in focus. By using technology to offload low, repetitive administrative work, CSU staff are now free to focus on better, more consultative conversations with students, thereby addressing complex enquiries where empathy and expertise matter most.
The future: empathy, agentic AI, and system integration
CSU’s future goal over the next 12 to 18 months is to advance to providing students with greater channel of choice and self-service transformation. This means moving away from processes, such as filling out lengthy forms, and towards enabling tasks to be completed within the student’s channel of choice by not repeating information already known and only asking for missing pieces of information.
Buttsworth comments. “While our initial chatbot was successful and well-received, I felt it didn’t fully align with one of our key student experience principles: acting with empathy. The goal is to start acting with genuine empathy. For example, when a student says, ‘I’m struggling’, we need to move beyond just offering a generic article’.
”For instance, if a student indicates they cannot finish an assessment, the AI can respond with empathy and facilitate processes like the automatic seven-day extension now available to students, rather than offering a generic link”.
To maintain trust and quality, the university ensures:
- Transparency: It is made clear that the student is speaking to an AI agent.
- Escalation: Students have a clear, seamless path to get through to a human team member.
- Guardrails: The AI assistants, like Charlie, operate with strict guardrails. They are currently focused on very specific flows (e.g., assignment extensions), are not allowed to give academic advice, and are prevented from hallucinating information outside their designated scope.
- Quality assurance: The same quality assurance and management processes traditionally run over human staff are now applied to the virtual agents like Charlie, ensuring high compliance and consistent delivery of the conversation framework.
Longer-term plans involve greater system integration—especially following the launch of a new student management platform—which will allow the AI to perform actions like simplifying enrollment. CSU is widely regarded as one of the most advanced universities in embracing agentic AI, showcasing how an organisation’s student-first mission can power innovation that blends empathy and technology.
Michael was a speaker and discussion panellist at Genesys’s Xperience event held in Sydney 19 -20th November. To watch the keynote on demand, please visit https://www.genesys.com/en-sg/events/xperience-sydney
