School districts today face a growing challenge: families expect faster answers, clearer communication, and easier ways to interact with their schools. At the same time, district staff are managing an overwhelming volume of inbound communication through emails, phone calls, forms, and social media.
In this webinar, we explored why inbound communication has become one of the biggest operational challenges for districts and why traditional tools weren’t designed to solve it.
A quick recap of what we covered:
Why the volume and fragmentation of inbound communication is overwhelming district teams
Where traditional tools fall short—and what districts are replacing them with
How Community Experience brings together an AI chatbot, advanced site search, contact forms, task management, and an analytics dashboard into one solution
A real-world perspective from Skyler Hefley, Director of Communications at Longview ISD
If Community Experience sounds like something your district could use, we'd love to show you more in a personalized demo.
Transcript
Monica McClellan: Alright, awesome. Let's go ahead and kick things off. We're 2 minutes after,
Monica McClellan: Welcome! Here, we're here to talk about the new standard for district customer service, so really focusing on transforming inbound communication. So, we're going to dig into the problem. We want to hear from you all what's working in your district, what's not working in your district, and then we're going to bring it back to what we've heard and how we've created a solution here at Apptegy called, Community Experience.
So.
Monica McClellan: Before we dive in, a couple housekeeping items. So first, this is recorded, so we will be sharing it out with you all. Whoever registered, whether you, attend or not attend, will send it out, so if you have other coworkers who can't attend, don't worry, we will send this out to them. There is a chat and Q&A feature, so feel free to throw questions in throughout the webinar.
We will be keeping an eye on that.
Monica McClellan: answering that as it comes up, and then also there is dedicated time at the end, to answer any questions that pop up, too. And then you will receive this recording and some additional items in an email tomorrow, so… so keep an eye out for that.
Monica McClellan: Alright, so we want to make this fun. We want to get to know who are you guys. So in the chat, if you can throw in your role, who you are, where you're joining us from, we want to hear from you, and while you're doing that, I'll go ahead and give you guys a quick intro on myself. So, my name is Monica McClellan, I'm product marketing here at Apptegy. I am currently in Fairfax, Virginia, which is northern Virginia, right outside, about 20 minutes outside Washington, D.C.
Monica McClellan: As a product marketer here at Apptegy, I'm really focused on launching new products, so making sure our internal teams are ready to go and understand the product, and then, of course, marketing it to the world to make sure that we can get,
Monica McClellan: New folks using our tool and seeing success.
Monica McClellan: Michele, I'll pass it over to you.
Michele Popadich: And hi there, I am Michele Popadich. I'm a senior product manager. I live in Minneapolis, Minnesota right now, although I'm originally from Chicago, and I was one of several product managers who focused on, launching community experience, but I'm also the PM for our CMS product as well. So, I juggle both of those things.
Monica McClellan: Cool. Barrett, I know you're not on the side, but do you want to give a quick intro to yourself as well?
Barrett Goodwin: Sure. Hi, everyone. My name is Barrett Goodwin. I'm on the marketing team and marketing operations, and get to support fantastic efforts, like this webinar.
So, so glad that all of you are here.
Monica McClellan: Amazing. Welcome, welcome. And Skyler will be doing an intro of himself a little bit later, so stay tuned for that.
Monica McClellan: Alright, so let's go ahead and dive in. So, let's talk about just the growing communication expectations that we're hearing. So, we obviously here at Apptegy talk to school districts all day long. It's our favorite part of our job.
It's what me and Michelle talk about, this discovery work of being able to hear feedback and what the pain points and problems are within the district. And so.
Monica McClellan: when we were thinking about building something, this is a continued, problem that we keep hearing. So one…
Monica McClellan: something called Amazon Effect. So…
Monica McClellan: expectations that come from families are super, super high. And I've applied Amazon Effect to a lot of different, various things in my life, right? But when it comes to this specifically, families are now expecting that same speed and responsiveness from their school that they get from brands like Amazon. Last night, I literally ordered something on Amazon, clicked one button saying, add to my delivery for today.
Monica McClellan: And I had that thing that I ordered on my front doorstep this morning when I went out to walk my dogs.
Monica McClellan: It's crazy, that kind of high expectation, and how you probably subconsciously apply to a lot of different situations throughout your life. And so.
Monica McClellan: That same-day responsiveness, real-time updates, instant access, is something that is… the bar's being set high, and something that families are definitely expecting, especially when their children, their students are spending so much time within a school, right? And so, if Amazon can tell you where your package is at 2AM through your app, right? Families are wondering why they can't get that same simple answer from their school district. So.
Monica McClellan: Expectations bar, really, really high.
Monica McClellan: In that same vein, though, if you can meet expectations from families when they're asking questions, or inbounds, or just engaging with the school, if you're meeting those expectations, there's a lot of benefits to it, right? And so, we… you already know this, like, research across more than a thousand different studies show there's a positive link between parental involvement and academic achievement. I think there's, like, a 6% percentage points of less
Monica McClellan: Chronic absenteeism, if family is really involved in that, that experience.
Monica McClellan: With their student being in K-12. And so there's definitely an opportunity gap. If your district isn't providing that great, amazing, positive experience, families are going to fill that void somewhere else. And so we constantly hear from districts, that if they're not getting answers, they're going to Facebook groups, they're word of mouth, misinformation, gossip, whatever it is, and then you lose that narrative.
Monica McClellan: That districts are so hoping and looking for. So…
Monica McClellan: really that high expectation, but then the benefits of being able to meet the high expectations from the customer service that you are able to apply to families, is huge. And first impressions matter. So how easy it is to get answers and how families feel about your district overall are very much incremental on how that first impression goes. So really wanting to create that
Monica McClellan: That first magical, positive first impression.
Monica McClellan: And so, how do you do it, right? I think there's a ton of different ways you can, but I think the two main ingredients that you need is clear communication. If a parent or guardian or community member is coming to the school, they need that clear communication to get their answer… their question answered. And they need accessible support in doing so, right?
So, you'll hear this example probably from me a couple times, but if they're…
Monica McClellan: you know, Saturday at 10 p.m, thinking about their week and trying to plan out their schedule, and they have a question pop up, obviously they're not calling the school at Saturday at 10 p.m. to get that answer, right? So how can you support them in that time span to get the information that they need? And so that's the gap most districts are trying to close right now.
Monica McClellan: And so, with this slide, it kind of shows what the reality is of inbound communication or customer service within a district. And I think this slide is a lot, right? It kind of shows the chaos, and this can be applied across
Monica McClellan: Many different ways of communication, whether it's outbound, inbound, internal.
Monica McClellan: This represents… there's a lot of different parties involved, there's a lot of different channels involved, and they're all being directed to frontline staff, right, for the most part. So you can see that there's text messages, there's phone calls, there's emails, and then within each channel, there's a ton of different notifications, lots of email buildup, lots of voicemails.
Monica McClellan: And there's a lot of different people to juggle, so if your frontline staff is getting questions about a specific subject they don't know, and they have to go to another department to get an answer, that's just delaying everyone's time.
Monica McClellan: And then creating some blockers and backup. So questions coming in from everywhere without a central system or place.
Monica McClellan: just allows things to fall through the cracks, right? And so that's where families end up going and turning into community groups, or gossip, or misinformation. That's where you lose the narrative, right? And then staff on top of that have duplicative work, right?
They're forwarding messages, or they're answering the same question every single time, multiple times.
Monica McClellan: So, like, right now, for example, within this given season, we're in graduation season, right? I'm sure your frontline staff are getting a million questions about graduation, and so, is there one place that you can direct people that has everything they need to know about graduation? Maybe, maybe not, or maybe there is, but…
Monica McClellan: not all the information is on that page, or maybe it's not all up to date, right? And so, really, really having a one central system, that can help kind of take this chaos
Monica McClellan: Into one place, would really help solve a lot of the chaos that we're seeing across, a lot of the districts that we're, hearing from.
Monica McClellan: So, before we dive into more, we want to hear from you. What is your reality in your district? What is the biggest challenge your teams are facing with customer experience today, or customer service?
Monica McClellan: And then how many channels does your community use to reach out to? So when I say channels, I mean email, phone, forms, that type of stuff. So, I'm gonna launch…
Monica McClellan: a poll quiz, you can answer that right within, your screen, and just be able to answer those questions, fill in the blank. What is exactly… what are you hearing, from
Monica McClellan: Or what exactly are you?
Monica McClellan: dealing with within your district. So I'm going to give you guys probably 30 seconds or so, to go in and answer those two questions.
Monica McClellan: Oops, sorry, let me give you the right questions. That's coming up later. Okay, let me know if you all can see that.
Monica McClellan: Cool, okay.
Monica McClellan: Alright, so biggest challenge your teams are facing, and then how many channels does your community use to reach out to right now?
Monica McClellan: While we're waiting, if there's any questions in the chat.
Monica McClellan: Feel free to throw them in.
Monica McClellan: Another, like, 10 seconds or so.
Monica McClellan: Okay, awesome. I know there are fill-in-the-blank, so it takes a little bit longer, so I'll give you guys a few extra seconds, but this is so, so helpful.
Monica McClellan: Okay, so what are we seeing?
Monica McClellan: Oops.
Monica McClellan: So, some of the biggest challenges that you're facing, it seems like a lot are resonating with that. How many channels does your community use to reach out to right now? Seems like there is a lot of different channels, 5, 6, 8, like, there is… it sounds like the fragmentation piece is definitely there. So, let's talk a little bit more about that.
So, what are the traditional communication tools that you might be using within your district, and where's that breakdown happening?
Monica McClellan: So fragmentation. This comes back to, like I just said, the different channels. So staff juggling calls, emails, texts, forms, direct messages, whatever it is, all in different places. It gives them no centralized system.
So this is where things get missed, and then also leaders have no visibility into what's coming in, or how it's being handled.
Monica McClellan: And so it becomes impossible to know if you're providing the right content when you can't actually see what… what's going on. So if someone… if your frontline staff worker is getting a call and asking about something specific for graduation, and then this staff member over here is getting a text, they're not speaking to each other, right? So there's no way to say, hey, they're asking the same question, we need to make sure this information is on…
Monica McClellan: the graduation page, and on top of that, every time that they're, you know, stopping to answer the phone, that's taking away from their focus time, or the more complex questions that they're getting that they need to focus on. So it's just taking up staff time, and creating a lot of blockage in that capacity.
Monica McClellan: And then on top of that, outdated resources are websites, right? So, websites are often locked down, right? And that's for good reason, right? You need someone to kind of own that for the most part.
You can't have anyone just coming in and updating that, but what happens then is, if every department has different questions coming in, and there's no centralized place giving you data on what questions they're asking, then every department is probably spinning up their own material.
Monica McClellan: And none of it makes it back to that single source of truth.
Monica McClellan: So that makes it difficult then for parents to find what they need. It makes it difficult to then find the correct information. If we're all creating different materials, we're all housing it in different ways.
Monica McClellan: And then it just creates more… more work for the frontline staff, because they can either call, or they're gonna call or email. Maybe their answer doesn't get
Monica McClellan: or the question doesn't get answered because there's multiple different things that your team is juggling, and then maybe there's static PDFs or outs… assets, or outdated pages, that are floating around that have incorrect information or things that you need to update but just lost track of, and so none of it is working for your community. And so.
Monica McClellan: these are some of the things that we just, again, keep hearing from the district level, that we want to dissolve. And then I think this comes back to, like, the overarching problem of just staff capacity and lack of visibility. I think if you actually sat down and calculated how much time some of the staff was spending on just answering questions and emails, and some of them are specific questions that your team has to be able to answer that are more complex.
Monica McClellan: But I'm sure there's a lot of questions that are just trivial, that can be answered through, one source of truth or specific, a specific assay, right? And so…
Monica McClellan: That's solvable, but then the lack of visibility right now is across the board really hard to prove. And so the frag… the more the fragmented the information, the more…
Monica McClellan: time staff gets eaten up answering basic questions, and then the more of that data that can't actually be found, and you can't actually figure out what your community is asking for, what they need, and so…
Monica McClellan: there… there is no, engine, if you will, that has that information to then be able to bring that back to that one source of truth. And so, that lack of visibility and just capacity, I think, is wearing a lot on districts
Monica McClellan: And so…
Monica McClellan: We want to hear one more time from you all on what you wish your reality was, and so, what solutions do you have in place right now to help with customer service? So, again, is it some of those pieces that we talked about, like forms and things that you're creating in place? And then, if you had a magic wand, what would be the solution, you wish you had in place?
Monica McClellan: So let me lock… Launch that right now, so you guys can answer those questions as well.
Monica McClellan: Sorry, let me relaunch.
Monica McClellan: Okay, I'll give you guys a couple minutes here.
Monica McClellan: Give another 30 seconds or so.
Monica McClellan: Okay, awesome, I'm gonna end the poll.
Monica McClellan: All right.
Monica McClellan: Alright, so let's talk about… Magic wand, what would be the solution you had in place?
Monica McClellan: And so, when we're kind of building this based off of the pain points that we're hearing, we were really thinking this as, like, a flywheel or engine, if you will, right?
Monica McClellan: So what districts need to close the gap is you're not just looking at, like, a static website or an inbox full of emails, you really need an active system that works for you around the clock, right? Something that is… has all your content lives in one place.
Monica McClellan: And the more context you feed it, or content you feed it, the more smarter and more accurate it gets over time.
Monica McClellan: So, let's start at the top here to kind of walk through what this will look like. So first, self-service information. So, families need to be able to get answers on their own. Remember that Amazon answer we talked, or situation we talked about at the beginning, where if, you know, you want an answer at Saturday at 10 p.m. because you're trying to plan your week, right?
You need to be able to do that without having to call or email Monday morning.
Monica McClellan: All right? And so this also helps staff, because it reduces the volume of repetitive inbound requests, and it frees up time. So families can self-serve, meaning I can go into the website, or I can go in somewhere and get the information that I need at Saturday at 10 p.m, that drastically reduces, the pain point and being able to support that positive experience.
Monica McClellan: And in that same vein, you want to meet families where they are. So if they need more conversational support that's very accessible, you need to be able to also provide that. So, no hold times, no waiting voicemails on Monday morning, calling on Saturday night, waiting for answers. They can get that directly from that one source of truth as well.
Monica McClellan: Now, let's say they can't self-serve, or that information doesn't currently exist in your source of truth, right? You need to have a place where then people can manage requests all in one place.
Monica McClellan: So, they need… parents and guardians need a place where they can then fill out a form or some sort of place where they can send in their question, right? And it's captured, tracked, and assigned. So that way, from your perspective, everything's in one queue. You can see how many inbound inquiries you're getting, and then your team also knows what's open, what's
Monica McClellan: been resolved, and how to move forward, right? So it… there isn't just fragmented channels, everything's condensed in one place, and then you can easily move forward. So the goal here would be directing everyone in your community to this one place to get these three lines of defense.
Monica McClellan: And then from there, your team can answer those questions as fast as possible.
Monica McClellan: Now, if everything's coming in from one place, you then get the insights and data that you need to give your leaders, and to give yourselves the information you need to feed that engine. So you finally get visibility into what your community is actually asking for. So if they need help in a specific area, if there are a ton of questions around graduation.
Monica McClellan: and you notice that there's a big gap, then you can easily take the information you're getting within this queue and populate it into the website, or that one single source of truth, so that you know that question is going to get answered moving forward. So…
Monica McClellan: the data piece is what questions are being answered, what information is hard to find, what are families asking for that you don't have content? You can fill those gaps.
Monica McClellan: So, this is… I'm talking very abstract right now, I'm talking about an engine, a flywheel with these different components, and the goal is, right, you're feeding it with content and context so that it's… it's a flywheel that'll eventually be kind of continuously improving on itself.
Monica McClellan: And your team can take a step back and a step off the gas.
Monica McClellan: and focus more on those complex questions. But let's actually pick our head up and talk about how this actually applied in a real-life situation. So, based off this flywheel engine, what did we create here at Apptegy, and what does it look like, so that you guys can focus more
Monica McClellan: I'm providing great customer service without spending a lot of time doing it, and then also getting the data behind it.
Michele Popadich: Awesome. So, I am excited to be talking about what community experience actually is. Monica, if you want to, like, advance so we could see all four of them. So, it is our AI-powered community intelligence layer built inside of your district's communication platform.
You know, like Monica said, we're, like, trying to get away from introducing new tools that require new logins, external portals, require a bunch of
Michele Popadich: Heavy staff adoption.
Michele Popadich: What Community Experience is trying to do is unify the experience for everybody, so from the guardian or community member perspective, we want them to have these tools readily available at their fingertips to get the information they need more quickly, so that includes our search, chat, and task routing. And then on the staff side of things, for you and your teams, being able to manage all of that in a tool that you're already familiar with.
Michele Popadich: inside of Thrillshare. So this will include, you know, configuring your chat so that it matches your brand, and actually looking into those analytics for insights.
Michele Popadich: So that, in a nutshell, is what community experience is. I think the best way to really understand the value of it, though, is to do a quick demo. So, I am going to…
Michele Popadich: Take screen share really quick.
Michele Popadich: Is everybody seeing Longview?
Michele Popadich: Okay, cool. So, I'm actually going to do a demo on a client's site. Longview is where Skyler, our main POC, who we're going to hear from in a little bit, is from. They participated in our beta, so got to see us in the early stages, all the way through development, and now we have community experience live on their site.
So, I want to walk through both the Guardian community member experience on
Michele Popadich: your site, and then also what this looks like within the staff experience where you manage this configuration. So, if we put ourselves in the shoes of a guardian or parent, child, whoever it is that is exploring the site, looking for more information, the first place that we might start is with our search feature. So, search is available on all of our sites, and the first thing that I'm going to do is a basic keyword search.
Michele Popadich: to trigger the normal search flow. So, this is not unique to community experience. All of our clients have access to this.
Michele Popadich: In the last 6 months or so, we did update this, to just improve the design so it's a little bit cleaner, but it is also, in the background, powered by AI to make sure that we're providing the most relevant and recent answers.
Michele Popadich: But in order to actually trigger the community experience part of this workflow, we're just gonna ask… we're gonna turn this into a question and say, who is the superintendent? And this is what will, make this blue tile appear, which is our AI answer. So we want…
Michele Popadich: search to recognize when a question is being asked, so that we can just answer that question directly. This should feel really similar to other workflows you might see. If you use Google and you ask a question, you get a Gemini overview alongside the individual search results. So from here, we can click into some of the source links.
We want to make sure that these are as informative as possible, both helping guardians and community members navigate the site, but also
Michele Popadich: Also, just, like, dig deeper into a resource if they have more questions.
Michele Popadich: They can always access the individual search results if they need to. They can also rate their experience, so we'll look at the analytics in a moment, but all of this feedback gets, housed in the analytics dashboard for Skyler and his team to take a look at. Or we can decide, we have more questions, and we want to ask some follow-up questions, so we're just going to continue this in chat.
Michele Popadich: What this is gonna do is take your latest query and put it into the chat experience, and the main difference between chat and search is chat is context-aware. So it's gonna remember, previous questions that you asked, so you can build on top of that, just like you would in an organic conversation. So I'm going to switch topics really quickly and ask…
Michele Popadich: What do I need to know for enrollment?
Michele Popadich: And while we're waiting just a few seconds for that answer, I will note that all of this is translatable, so, you are able to toggle to any language that is configured on your site, and the experience will be identical no matter the language. We want to make sure this is as accessible as possible.
Michele Popadich: Okay, so we've got everything we need, lots of information around, what is required for enrollment. Maybe… I'm kind of impatient, though, and I just want to know, can you send me the registration links?
Michele Popadich: And we want this to remember the previous response, so I don't have to re-remind them what I'm talking about. We want to remember… we want chat to remember I already asked about enrollment, so we got exactly what we need. Really straightforward response and the resources that I need to actually complete that enrollment and registration.
Michele Popadich: Let's say I've done a little bit of chatting, I got some helpful information, but I really just want to get in contact with somebody at the district. That's when you would just either use the Contact Us button right here, or you can just access the contact form directly from the envelope.
Michele Popadich: A guardian can bypass AI completely if they just want to go directly to the contact form, but we always want to make sure that all of these experiences are interconnected. So from here, I'm not going to fill this out, just because, this dashboard is live, and I don't want to mess with Skyler's tickets. But pretty straightforward and self-explanatory. You would just put in your information, which school you have a question about.
Michele Popadich: These topics are configurable, and what will help organize the tasks within the task management solution, and then put in your question, and it will be routed to the appropriate person. The thing here, you know.
Michele Popadich: thinking about consolidation of tools, we don't want a guardian to have to, like, hunt down an email address or figure out who it is they need to talk to. Just fill out the contact form, and all of that routing happens internally.
Michele Popadich: Okay, so that is sort of the guardian, community member, whoever it is that is navigating the website looking for information. That's their experience with community experience. They have those three lines of defense, search, chat, and the contact form.
Michele Popadich: So then, let's switch over to the staff experience.
Michele Popadich: for your… you and your team, what exactly are the tools that you have access to to power community experience? The first, most obvious one is our task management dashboard. So, when a contact form is submitted, it gets put into this queue of tickets, where it can kind of be collaboratively worked on for folks like Skyler, who might be doing some of the delegating, just making sure all the tickets are going
Michele Popadich: through their workflow, and just making sure things are getting closed out, to the actual individuals who might be responding to those tasks. So if we click into one of them, this seems… looks like it's still in progress. In the summary, we have the details of the contact form that was submitted, and then we have the message history. Again, talking about consolidation, we want to make this experience as
Michele Popadich: streamlined as possible for both the guardian and the staff member working on the task. So the staff member, all they have to do is just type their responses within here. The entire workflow happens within a single screen. They don't need to worry about managing email or anything else.
But when they
Michele Popadich: send their response from within task, this actually sends an email to the person who submitted the contact form, so they manage their entire workflow over email. So keeping it very streamlined and straightforward for everybody involved in the task.
Michele Popadich: And then last but not least, we have our analytics, which tend to, I think, be the most exciting part of the tool. Obviously, we have all of these great channels to engage our community, but how do we actually act on it and understand, what those insights are telling us?
Michele Popadich: So, we have data that looks at, from, like, a high-level view, unique sessions, how satisfied users are with the responses they're getting, what languages are questions being asked in, how often, is chat or search actually able to provide a response. So you have these high-level metrics that can be filtered down by school or time period to really kind of dig into whatever
Michele Popadich: topic is relevant.
Michele Popadich: But what I see probably is most meaningful, depending on the person, is the ability to actually dig into the specific questions based on topic. So, we're able to see, you know, how many questions are we getting by certain topic, and how successful is it? So overall, we're seeing the questions are being answered pretty well, but if we go down to, like, events calendar, for example, we see
Michele Popadich: a slightly lower success rate. This is where you might dig into, these are the subcategories, and I want to see school dance got 0% success rate. The question that was submitted in chat was school dance. This might be a really good opportunity to investigate, like, is there just more information on the website needed around school dance?
So you can kind of see the little bit of detective work that is done here to really understand, like.
Michele Popadich: what is your community interested in? What can we do to make sure that they have all the content they need? And to just, like, share this with leadership, to demonstrate some of those key insights about the community and what these tools are, able to capture in terms of interactions on your website. So that is sort of, like, the staff experience is managing all those tasks within,
Michele Popadich: The task management solution, and then being able to see insights across all of your channels within your analytics dashboard.
Michele Popadich: And Monica, I think I pass it back to you.
Monica McClellan: Yeah, amazing. Reminder, if you have any questions, feel free to throw them in the chat. I know that was a quick high-level overview, but hopefully gave you guys some good insight into what this actually looks like in real life, so that engine piece, right? So kind of bringing it full circle.
Monica McClellan: let's recap what you just saw in the demo. So that engine of self-service answers, that's more of that search component that Michelle had talked about, right? So at any point, they can go in and just search, basically, on your website, and there's, like, this nice AI summary that's giving you the most relevant, recent answer, so they don't have to go digging around. I think that's really important.
We're giving it accessible, but also really fast, meeting that Amazon expectation.
Monica McClellan: the conversational support is right within your website as well, and that's the AI chat piece of it. So, this is all within Apptegy, and so all of your communication now is in the Apptegy Hub. So, your website, the great thing about this is because
Monica McClellan: you have, Apptegy website, we're pulling information a lot easier through your website, versus I know some other competitors pull in, like, specific KB articles, or you have to build the content in the back end. We're using the site that you already have, that's already existing. And so, then building on that, the conversational support, you're… that little AI chatbot is then building on… on top of the questions that you're putting in.
Monica McClellan: bit smarter than search.
Monica McClellan: So it's giving you the most relevant answers, just in that conversational way. And then the managed request, so the contact form is going directly into that task queue. I saw someone had asked a question about where does that go? So it goes in your task, that person that's assigned then gets an email saying, hey, you have a new inquiry, and they can go directly into that inquiry and start typing away and answering that question.
And then I think the big thing that people get most excited about is that analytics
Monica McClellan: So, right? Like, visibility into what people are asking, how many of those questions that they're asking are actually getting answered, because people can actually give a thumbs up or a thumbs down.
Monica McClellan: And then there's content gaps, right? Like, there… there's questions around the school dance. Like, if there's a lot of them, it might make sense to add into your website, right? So you're feeding that engine, and you're making that engine work for you.
So the idea is it's very little work, but huge reward, and we're living up to that Amazon
Monica McClellan: That huge high expectation, that Amazon effect bar.
Monica McClellan: And then we talked about some of the benefits at the beginning, right? So being able to have, community or parental,
Monica McClellan: having them really involved with their kids in the K-12 district is… there's a lot of benefits, right, that we see, obviously on just, like, absenteeism and participating, but, high level, getting some time back for your staff. If families can self-serve, they're gonna stop getting the same trivial question over phone, email, text, right? They can just direct everyone to the website.
Monica McClellan: And that's where all the answers are gonna be. And it's not like the community has to…
Monica McClellan: Go through page by page.
Monica McClellan: We're trying to solve that issue by giving them the tools through AI to be able to get that answer as fast as possible through chat or search, and literally spoon-feeding that information, right? So they don't have to go around and look at each individual page and navigate the menu. And then through that, you're obviously able to provide that customer experience, right? Like, if you could hit that high bar, and that first-time interaction is like, that was really solid.
I was able to
Monica McClellan: get my answer.
Monica McClellan: answered as fast as possible. The answers are consistent across the board every time I interact with my school, and it's… it's with the school. Like, I know I'm talking to my, you know, secretary or my teacher's kid at the school. It's a branded experience.
It reflects really well back at the district.
Monica McClellan: And then the transparency piece. A lot of the beta users that we were talking about is, like, for the first time, you'll actually be able to see what your community needs, and whether they're getting that information. I think that's a big thing, too, just the data loan piece.
Monica McClellan: the data alone.
Monica McClellan: is really being able to show you what, what is missing within your district. And then with Apptegy, everything lives in one place. I think Michele had on this, but there's no new logins, there's no new tools, it's the same experience that you have within Apptegy.
Monica McClellan: And then, really those content gaps and being able to close those.
Monica McClellan: So, this is the fun part. Skyler has been patiently waiting on here, but he has been here, working with us on Community Experience since January, February this year, and so I'm gonna pass it over to him to talk through his experience with community experience, and what it's looked like at his district.
Skyler Hefley: Yeah.
Skyler Hefley: I'm super excited to talk about it. I was really happy to be a part of the beta. Again, my name's Skyler, and I've…
Skyler Hefley: been working at Longview ISD now since last year, about last February, so still fairly new to, this district, but many of you that might be from Texas that are in,
Skyler Hefley: the webinar may know me from the Teespring conferences. I usually go by Skyler from Tyler, and so now I'm Skyler commuting from Tyler to Longview, so I'm trying to make the nickname stick a little bit better. But, kind of my background comes from being in the private sector for a significant time, and then moving to Tyler ISD as a facilitator of marketing there, and then moving to a director of communications role here. So.
Skyler Hefley: It's been kind of a process regarding school PR and getting used to that, but I'm always thinking of everything in a private sector marketing and customer experience mindset. And so, when Aptogy kind of brought this up of, would you like to be a part of the, you know, beta of this, it was immediate. I knew that the customer expectations need to match what experience they're getting from the school district if we want to compete.
Skyler Hefley: There is… A new phase of,
Skyler Hefley: especially in Texas, of being competitive now, not just beyond private schools and charter schools, but now
Skyler Hefley: public school against public school, because parents are given the freedom to choose where they want to live, which then impacts where… what schools they have opportunities to go to, and so we wanted to kind of correct some of this, utilizing some of the tools that community experience has for clearer communication, better family engagement, and even a more unified
Skyler Hefley: source of truth regarding what's going on, but the chat has been an absolute game changer. Since we've turned it on, I think we've had over 20,000 uses of chat and search, which has been awesome, and some of the major
Skyler Hefley: benefits that I have found has been third parties, if you're paying a third party that's a non-Aptege product to scrape your website and provide an AI chatbot, it doesn't index fast. So it's 24 to 48 hours before, if you press publish on that CMS page.
Skyler Hefley: it doesn't pull from immediately, whereas this new product actually indexes immediately. As soon as you hit publish on a CMS page, like, a perfect example is, we recently closed for weather.
Skyler Hefley: for emergency weather, and as soon as I hit publish on the page stating that information, or a live feed post, it's able to pull that content. So, a parent can go in and say, are we closed tomorrow? And it will pull from that
Skyler Hefley: directly, rather than having to wait 24 to 48 hours for something to index. As well as…
Skyler Hefley: As well as…
Skyler Hefley: Google and ChatGPT do the same thing, where they're constantly scraping URLs, but it's always behind, and so your chatbot can now be in real time, updating with real information, whereas if you went to Google Gemini and said, is Longview ISD closed tomorrow? The last time it scraped our website might be 3 days ago.
Skyler Hefley: So, I really do think that creating a single source of truth on your website can also increase the amount of website views you're getting, because they'll want to use that chatbot.
Skyler Hefley: I've also found a really interesting use case is our frontline staff. I don't know how many of y'all have experienced this, but we always feel like the front person, the administrative assistant that's at the front desk, answers the phone, right?
Skyler Hefley: and then they get asked a question about the campus, and they have to transfer it to someone that knows that answer. We've now trained our frontline staff to go have the website open at all times, and type the question that you're being asked on the phone.
Skyler Hefley: into the chat, and then provide it with the information that the chat uses. So it makes the frontline staff look even more helpful, and it increases the customer experience and customer service aspect of when you, contact that frontline employee.
Skyler Hefley: And the task… there's tons of different use cases of that, but I have just found it to be,
Skyler Hefley: Revolutionary in the customer service and customer experience piece, because if our frontline staff are now getting less
Skyler Hefley: phone calls with questions, because chat is taking some of those over. Your quality of customer service can go up, because I don't know about you, but if I have to answer the phone 400 times a day, that 399th call, it's really hard to answer it with a smile, right, at the end of the day. Whereas, if I can reduce the amount of calls, because chat is taking, let's say, 300 of those questions away from being at the front desk.
Skyler Hefley: your customer service improves because you're still gonna have a better smile at the 80th call, right? It's not like you've been worn down all day having to answer those. So, quality of customer experience and, quantity kind of goes back and forth.
Skyler Hefley: or it's an inverse relationship, so if we can reduce the amount of strain on our frontline staff, they increase the amount of customer service quality.
Skyler Hefley: But I've found it to be, even the task management side of things, y'all saw a little background of that. We used to have a group email that went to district leadership, as well as our comms team, and it felt like we were always peppered with multiple emails in our inbox of what to do, and questions that our community were asking. And I have loved task management, that it's… everyone that has group emails currently.
Skyler Hefley: it's hard to follow up with, did they take care of it or not? Because, let's say you have a group email, and then it gets taken into a separate thread to take care of it. I have to then follow up with who I don't know took care of it, and then say, hey, did that… did that…
Skyler Hefley: Did that get taken care of? Oh, it got taken care of 2 weeks ago?
Skyler Hefley: awesome, but I have no tracking of that, so I really like the concept that I can hand something off, but it also… I can confirm that it's been taken care of.
Skyler Hefley: And just a couple metrics here that I wanted to point out.
Skyler Hefley: Since we've turned on chat and search, the new community experience piece.
Skyler Hefley: It's been about an average of 2.73 questions per user, so think about how many phone calls that's potentially taken away just from implementation since the beta. That's a huge, huge benefit.
Skyler Hefley: But I know I've spoken a lot about some of the successes that I have seen from the product, and I didn't even talk about analytics, so I kind of do not want to open it up for any type of questions or anything like that.
Monica McClellan: Yeah, so feel free, I know we have, like, another minute or two, but feel free to throw questions in the chat, and we can get them answered, or in the Q&A. I think there might be a few in here.
Skyler Hefley: Let's see…
Skyler Hefley: Let me pull up.
Monica McClellan: And yeah, any questions for Skyler as well?
Monica McClellan: Michele, did you answer all of them that have come through thus far?
Michele Popadich: I did answer them, but if there were any follow-ups, feel free to let me know.
Monica McClellan: Yeah.
Monica McClellan: And just for those, how does the AI and Apptegy present in Google? Our parents search Google and expect to find the answer and sometimes aren't successful. Will SEO bring Google to the Apigee AI? Michele said, it does not impact SEO, so just confirming that is the question.
Monica McClellan: And then another question is, will this AI feature become available, enabled in Apptegy custom-developed school app? And yes, the answer is, it is in a mobile app.
Monica McClellan: And then Jim asks, is this feature going to be available to Apptegy customers at no additional cost, or is there a fee for the service? It is an additional fee for this.
Monica McClellan: So this is based per student, so if you want your custom quote, definitely let us know. You can respond to the email tomorrow, or just, reach out to your Apptegy rep, and they can, walk you through what this will look like.
Monica McClellan: We got one question of how long does it typically take to get up and running? So this definitely depends on currently what you have, with Apptegy or not, but it can be pretty quick. So if you already have the Apptegy website, it's a matter of a couple of days. We can move really fast with, chat and search, and then it's just making sure that your settings are set up on tasks.
Monica McClellan: appropriately, and how… it depends on how your… your school is set up and how you want that to work. But it can be very, very quick,
Monica McClellan: Especially if you're looking for something fast as you get to the end of the school year, and you know, hey, there's going to be a lot of incoming questions, and we need to get to those as fast as possible.
Michele Popadich: Yeah, and I'll add, like, if you have your website set up already, AI Chat in particular, like, it can take less than 30 minutes. If you want, like, branding, it's truly just a few buttons you turn on. It's very quick, and then if you need a little bit more time to set up your task management, that can kind of happen sequentially.
Skyler Hefley: Yeah, I was gonna say that, exactly what you were saying is, like, it almost felt like the chat piece was, like, instantly, and it's almost worth…
Skyler Hefley: the expense coming just to receive chat, and it feels like almost the other pieces of the product are just, like, cherries on top regarding fixing some streamlining. So, I felt like the chat was almost instant because of the indexing. It was able to operate as soon as they turned it on, versus there may be some, like, training and things that need to be done with the task management side of things, but as far as analytics and chat and search.
Skyler Hefley: It's instant.
Monica McClellan: And we've created some internal documentation, too, to help get you set up on task piece of it. So if you're like, this would be something perfect to roll out, before the new school year, that's definitely something that's possible, because then you can start fresh. So, like, if you're like, I need chat now, and then roll out tasks later on, that's an option as well.
Monica McClellan: Alright, if there is no more questions, I know we're a little bit over, so appreciate you all sticking around. We can give you guys some, time back on your Thursday. Look out for the email tomorrow. There's, like I said, the recording if you want to review more in detail, as well as some other resources.
And if you want to talk to your AppSG rep, learning more about what Community Experience can do for you, QR code here, this will direct you to the specific page.
Monica McClellan: Where you can learn more and dig in a little bit more, and then do a… if you want to do, like, a custom tour with your specific rep, highly, highly recommend. But if you're not ready, that's okay, too. Like I said, I know this is a weird time going back to school, but…
Monica McClellan: Could be good to have this conversation now, so that way, when you do start next year, you're up and running with all these great, customer service tools.
Monica McClellan: Alright, thank you all. Thank you, Skyler, appreciate it. I hope you guys have a good rest of your Thursday. Bye,