The Instituto Tecnológico de Monterrey Speeds Up Attention to Microsoft Azure-Powered Community

The Instituto Tecnológico de Monterrey is a private, not-for-profit institution founded in 1943 with the mission of providing an excellent education and transforming lives by generating resources for scholarships and research. Today, TEC Monterrey has more than 60 campuses, 90,000 students and 13,000 adjunct professors. By caring for such a broad community of students, parents, graduates and teachers, TEC began to develop a strategy so that different community members could address their concerns without the need to personally communicate with an employee at a given time.

Self-management: a service for the community

"At first, each campus had its own form of service offered to its particular audience," says Hernán Garcia, Vice President of Talent and Experience at TEC Monterrey. "Whether face-to-face, remotely or by phone, each campus had their own schedules and tools to provide this service." The first objective of the TEC when Garcia assumed his position was to generate a single focus and standardize not only how this care was going to be provided, but to also define what technology would be used for these processes. As a result, TEC Services was created in early 2019 with the support of Microsoft technology.

Through the creation of this center, the service processes were unified. However, the schedule was limited, and when new topics were to be included, the speed of response depended on the ability of the work team to understand the new business processes or services provided. 

"The idea of the bot was a matter of innovation and addressing a service need," Garcia says, and adds that the first approach was made in relation to other needs. "We were first presented with the solution so that the institution's decision makers could immediately address information about the institute. However, when we looked at its operation, we had the vision of focusing it on something bigger and more centered on the students." 

With the latent goal of always providing better attention and having witnessed the value that the adoption of a bot could add to the user experience, TEC Monterrey decided to create its own virtual assistant so that the community could self-manage its questions 24 hours a day, seven days a week. 

250,000 recorded conversations 

Carmen Reyes, Head of Architecture and Development for Analytics Solutions at TEC, says that in late October 2020, Microsoft Azure was launched to develop a virtual assistant. At that time, there were four employees who worked for six weeks to create a first version. Reyes emphasizes that "Microsoft's support was critical at the time, not only for how to learn how to use the tools but also for how to make better use of them."

TEC Monterrey's front-end bot was developed in Bot Framework Composer, an open-source service that provides a visual canvas of authorship that enables dialogue, language comprehension models, knowledge bases, and response generation. In addition, Azure Cosmos DB is also used for conversation storage and SQL Server for bot efficiency reporting and analytics insights, all of which is on Azure. 

"The virtual assistant began enrollment in January 2021 and was so successful that it became the standard for care. When the query reaches TEC Services, it is Level 1," says Reyes. A process such as registration that previously required 10 people dedicated exclusively to answering questions is now carried out automatically thanks to AI.

The bot has the ability to learn interactions, to understand what the learner needs and to track their questions, as well as store information for future use. So far, the virtual assistant has been used by over 40,000 users and has recorded over 250,000 conversations. 

Technology as an enabler 

"Today, thanks to technology, service to our community is immediate," emphasizes Hernán García, Vice President of Talent and Experience at TEC Monterrey. "Currently the virtual assistant has expanded and is present at TEC Millennium and TEC Salud. Although it is technologically the same bot, it has different conversational bases for each TEC and each respective audience."  

"Technology was always critical. We seek to experiment and test how to improve processes through their use. If we hadn't taken this step forward proactively and always with the desire to keep moving forward, it would have been very difficult to address the need we had as we faced it," Carmen Reyes concludes.