“Hi I’m Smokey, and I’m here to help!”

In the corner of each page of the Big Orange Tix website, a cheerful virtual assistant—modeled after Tennessee’s beloved mascot—greets students, ready to assist with inquiries about student ticketing. The virtual assistant, affectionately referred to as Smokey bot, responds to student inquiries 24/7, including nights and weekends outside of conventional business hours when the Big Orange Tix team would otherwise be responsive.

Since its launch on October 10 through the end of the calendar year, the Smokey chatbot engaged in 800 conversations, catering to students, staff, and stakeholders. Smokey was introduced to streamline the multi-step process of securing student tickets for football and basketball games, available for assistance at any hour.

When Smokey is asked a question, the bot crawls every page of the Big Orange Tix website, then Smokey meticulously catalogs information and offers AI-generated responses from the website content. Smokey also includes tailored responses curated by the Student Life Communications team to address the most common queries and concerns.

Leveraging artificial intelligence, Smokey interprets questions and responds to student queries with easily understandable information. Students can work through a flow of common questions and issues or type their specific problem right into the chat bar to start finding their way to answers. Even when Smokey can’t offer a solution, it seamlessly directs students to a help form within the chat box, swiftly sent to the Big Orange Tix team for troubleshooting.

Since launching the Smokey bot, the Big Orange Tix team has seen a reduction in help tickets, especially concerning easily solvable issues like explaining the steps to download a ticket onto a mobile wallet or becoming a group leader for ticketed events. More significantly, Smokey offers real-time insights derived from student queries, empowering the team to identify communication gaps and areas where website updates might be needed. By tracking question trends, peak days and times of inquiries, common issues, and persistent areas of confusion, Smokey plays a pivotal role in refining communication and processes around student ticketing.

“The neat thing about AI, in our case the Smokey Bot, is that it’s sort of like a 24-hour librarian,” says Joe Gray, director of technology services for Student Life. “Students have questions, but may not know exactly where to look for the answer. The bot can instantly access all the information from every website it has indexed, so it can provide a probable best response to the question. Then, it can point students to web pages with the information that they need. And it does so 24/7/365.”

Enhancing communications and processes through the Smokey bot data means ensuring students can fully engage in the activities they enjoy most. The utilization of Smokey for Big Orange Tix has not only been promising for ticketing but also highlights the potential for this virtual assistant to be an asset across various Student Life departments in the future. So, expect to encounter this bouncing, ever-helpful virtual assistant in more areas, ready to assist and support your needs.

To further advance customer service and support for students, the Smokey chatbot expanded to the homepage of the Division of Student Life website November 21. The division anticipates launching the Smokey chatbot on additional websites in the spring as well.