noHold’s CEO, Diego Ventura, Invited to Speak at EDUCAUSE 2019

October 7, 2019, MILPITAS, CA – noHold’s CEO, Diego Ventura, is pleased to be speaking at one of the largest conferences for higher education IT professionals, EDUCAUSE 2019. The conference will be taking place in Chicago, Illinois on October 14^th to the 17^th. Diego, together with Borre Ulrichsen, CIO of Gonzaga University, will be presenting during the Lightning Round Session: Transforming the Student Experience. The session will emphasize the role Artificial Intelligence (AI) is playing in higher education. Attendees will learn about implementing, deploying, and adopting AI technology to help students and faculty help themselves, while improving the overall experience.

In 2018, noHold announced it had been partnering with industry leaders to provide Virtual Assistant technology for over 7,500 educational institutions. Since then, noHold has made great progress in the higher education space, helping new customers such as Gonzaga University deploy an AI strategy that has innovated the way they connect with their students and faculty on campus. Moving forward, noHold’s hope is to continue to empower Higher Education to leverage Virtual Assistant technology that will help students as they navigate through the college experience with 24/7 access to the information they need, from any device, resulting in success throughout their college career. College staff will also benefit by capturing actionable metrics, increasing self-service, while relieving faculty/staff to focus on critical projects that require human intervention.

“I’m looking forward to being part of EDUCAUSE this year, sharing lessons learned and best practices along with Gonzaga University. We plan to share student sentiment around Virtual Assistants as well as ideas on how to increase adoption. You can attend our Lightning Round discussion on October 16^th, and also find me at the Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise booth, number 1839.” – Diego Ventura, CEO of noHold.

For more information about the EDUCAUSE conference, and Lightning Round session, you can visit http://bit.ly/EducauseAI.

A Customer Success Story: Virtual Assistant Thrives in Educational Institution

Preface: Back in 2018, noHold announced one of our customer in the education market started utilizing a Virtual Assistant to help with their expanding training platform. Here is a follow up on how the Virtual Assistant is performing.

A company that serves 7,500 educational institutions has created a platform. The platform is meant to teach skills in Networking, Programming, Cybersecurity and IoT. The platform provides faculty with a course layout and instructions to manage class logistics, while giving students a way to participate in the course. In the United States, over 7,500 institutions, 3,200 instructors and 135,000 students utilize the platform to date.

The popularity of the learning platform has grown tremendously in the last 5 years. Translating into an increase in support tickets to the Contact Center. To manage the increase in traffic the Networking Company has increased spending.

In an effort to better manage support tickets, reduce contact center spending and support a growing academy they looked to a Virtual Assistant to help students and instructors help themselves. The Virtual Assistant was designed with a persona, as well as, positioned as a first line of contact on the platform and website to encourage usage. The Virtual Assistant took 2 weeks to launch with the help of two engineers, a web master and one content specialist.

The Results

The Virtual Assistant went live in the first quarter of 2018 with an immediate 27% reduction in support tickets. As the year continues, each quarter has resulted in about a 46% reduction in Contact Center tickets. The reduction in tickets has resulted in a 70% ROI. The Virtual Assistant and persona associated with it have received an overwhelmingly positive review from students and faculty.

For more information on a Virtual Assistant's role in higher education, please feel free to contact noHold.

noHold Helps Simplify Life on Campus' Across the Nation

Artificial Intelligence is working to simplify life for students and teachers on campus! In today’s day and age, almost everyone is looking toward technology as a way to simplify some of the mundane or cumbersome tasks that need to be accomplish. For example, noHold conducted a student survey study and found that 3 out of 4 students on a college campus believe that a Virtual Assistant (Artificial Intelligence) would be a helpful resource they would use when they ran into some sort of problem or thought of a question they had. The 2-minute video clip below gives some real-life examples of just how students (and faculty!) are leveraging this type of technology to simplify their lives.

When implementing a Virtual Assistant correctly, it can increase enrollment AND reduce support cost all by simply providing the students and faculty with the tools they need to help themselves. noHold has created a datasheet that goes over general benefits, best practices, and features, as well as give a specific use case. The use case provides real metrics demonstrating how one University was able to increase First Contact Resolution, reduce Average Handle Time, and increase Net Promoter Score almost immediately after going live.

If you have any questions or feedback regarding noHold's Virtual Assistance for EDU, we would love to hear from you. Please contact us through the web at http://www.nohold.com/contact.html.

Gonzaga University Enlists noHold’s AI to Innovate the Way Technical Support is Handled on Campus

March 28, 2019, MILPITAS, CA – Gonzaga University is continuously looking to improve processes to enhance the support experience for students and instructors. Gonzaga needed a solution that would innovate the way technical support is handled on campus.

Gonzaga found noHold, a company that specializes in Virtual Assistant technology. Virtual Assistants utilize Artificial Intelligence (AI) to help users through a chat interface. Now, the Virtual Assistant allows Gonzaga University to:

1. Support students and instructors 24/7/365 from mobile phones, the school website, social media sites, and automated personal assistants like Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant 
2. Provide users with a first point of contact, so they can find the information they need without searching
3. Analyze interactions between students and the Virtual Assistant to improve processes
4. Create an effective solution that is within budget
5. Deploy an AI tool in 6 weeks with the help of noHold Professional Services and intuitive backend

In the first month, 71% of students providing feedback found the Virtual Assistant to be helpful, twice as effective as the average Virtual Assistant at launch. noHold and Gonzaga have also discovered what topics students are struggling with most, added QR codes around campus for easy access, and expanded the Virtual Assistant’s knowledge based on user interactions.

Lyle Spencer, Data Architect from Gonzaga University said, “When we decided to find a virtual assistant solution, we were fortunate to find a partner like noHold. The noHold professionals worked relentlessly to help us create and deploy a truly exceptional example of what a virtual assistant can be. noHold’s experience helping Fortune 100 companies and providing a low-cost deployment gave me confidence in not only the capability of their solution, but also confidence in their product. Since go-live, noHold has dedicated a project manager and developer that meets with us to weekly continue supporting and improving our virtual assistant. I feel this very much speaks to their commitment as a partner, not just another vendor.”

Diego Ventura, CEO and Founder of noHold, adds, “It has been inspiring to see the passion and care the Gonzaga staff feels for its students. They worked very hard to make sure the Virtual Assistant launched without a hitch and was adopted by the whole school.”

Click here for the full use case. 

Educational Institutions Leverage noHold's Artificial Intelligence to Improve Students' Experience

Just last year, noHold announced that over 7,500 educational institutes are using noHold's Artificial Intelligence to help students and teachers. noHold realized that the Education Market (such as Colleges and Universities) is really benefit from implementing a Virtual Assistant for their Students and/or Faculty. 

Here is a 3 minute clip showing just how colleges can leverage this technology to benefit their students. 

Also, it is not just the students who can take advantage. I would like you to see how the help desk at a top University  benefits from a Virtual Assistant. This is a quick read and includes a short case study: http://www.nohold.com/edu-datasheet.pdf.  I'm interested in your feedback - let me know what you think.
www.nohold.com

noHold Conducts Study on Students’ Opinion of Artificial Intelligence and its role in Higher Education

January 31, 2019, MILPITAS, CA – noHold has always thought that leveraging Virtual Assistants that could help students with topics such as navigating around campus, understanding the enrollment process, or how to get financial aid was a good idea. Recently, we surveyed students from colleges and universities around the US to get their opinion on Artificial Intelligence and how it could be used at their school.

Here are the results we gathered from the survey:

• According to the survey, 3 out of 4 students think that a Virtual Assistant is a good idea.
• The majority of students reported using a Virtual Assistant within the last 6 months, and Siri was the most commonly used.
• The preferred way of communicating with the Virtual Assistant would be through a dedicated app, and a close second was on the schools’ website.
• Most student would want the Virtual Assistant to help them with getting around campus, answering questions like “where is the biology lab?” The next topics would be enrollment and then IT questions.

Overall, the Student Evaluation of Artificial Intelligence received positive feedback and demonstrated that students are interested in using Artificial Intelligence in a school setting to make their lives a little easier. Students from the study said, “Seems like a great solution for the problems at larger schools being more confusing to navigate as well as getting help when needed!” and “Would be great for general information around campus like operating times and contact information for certain departments.” Diego Ventura, CEO and Founder of noHold, adds, “I was surprised to see that when students were asked about their favorite channel to access a Virtual Assistant, smart speakers were not included.”

About noHold, Inc.

noHold is a privately held company established in 1999 and is headquartered in Milpitas, CA, USA (Silicon Valley). noHold is the acknowledged leader in Web based Self-service solutions with a mission to deliver real answers to real questions – real fast. Simple to use, easy to implement and as close to human as you can get, noHold turns automated customer support into cognitive customer interactions. noHold customers include Cisco, Dell, McAfee and a host of industry leaders. More information can be found at http://www.nohold.com.

7,500 Educational Institutions use noHold's AI-based Virtual Assistant to Help Students and Teachers

August 28, 2018, MILPITAS, CA – noHold, Inc. has partnered with leaders in the training space to create a Virtual Assistant now used by more than 7,500 educational institutions.

The Virtual Assistant specializes in supporting teachers to create and administer classes, as well as answer student questions like “How do I sign up for the class?”, “Where can I find the syllabus?”, and “What are the pre-requisites for this class?”

The Virtual Assistant is able to answer these types of questions because:

·        It is built to understand plain English through a powerful Natural Language Processing (NLP) engine.

·        It is able to conduct a dialog with end users to confirm uncertain intents through an Inference Engine that serves as a Dialog Manager.

·        It is able to tap into its own repository of information that has grown organically based on the audience’s interests.

It took about six calendar weeks to build the Virtual Assistant, four for implementation and two for testing. The team included a Subject Matter Expert, a Knowledge Base Specialist and a part-time Manager for a total of 200 hours.

Three weeks after deployment, the Virtual Assistant is consistently helping thousands of students and teachers a month, and has an answer rate of 87%. Questions that cannot be handled automatically by the Virtual Assistant are promptly escalated to call center agents. The content of the exchange is also passed along, so that agents don’t have to ask the same questions and users don't have to repeat themselves.

The next version of the Virtual Assistant will be trained to answer IT type questions which will help faculty and students with computer, security and networking issues.

“There are several advantages related to deploying a Virtual Assistant. It can help the school reduce support costs, it is available 24/7, it can help new agents at the call center, and it can diligently capture the voice of the customer. More than 7,500 schools can now enjoy these benefits," said Diego Ventura, CEO and Founder of noHold, Inc.