AWS Public Sector Blog
Blackboard launches omnichannel student services transformation with Amazon Connect
Every year, thousands of students in higher education struggle to navigate enrollment processes, access support services, and find the resources they need to succeed. Sixty percent of students are unaware of the support services available to them, according to a recent study by Tyton Partners in collaboration with Blackboard. This data represents a staggering awareness gap that can impede student retention and success.
Blackboard is on a mission to change that. As a leading education technology (EdTech) company, Blackboard helps over 2,000 institutions empower millions of students with innovative software-as-a-service (SaaS) solutions that support their higher education journey.
Within Blackboard’s Services organization, its Student Success services help students navigate college application, financial aid, and course registration processes, technical support, and more – offering student support from prospective enrollment through graduation.
To future-proof its Student Success business, Blackboard initiated a bold modernization effort. Working with Amazon Web Services (AWS), Blackboard is developing a comprehensive omnichannel contact center strategy powered by generative artificial intelligence (AI) to transform the future of student support.
Addressing student needs with comprehensive contact center support
Blackboard’s Student Success services provide a comprehensive contact center solution to institutions: they support prospective student inquiries, manage enrollment funnels, resolve financial aid account issues, and more. Blackboard’s white-glove contact center service makes sure institutions can deliver consistent, high-quality support to students, faculty, and staff alike.
However, as Blackboard’s Student Success business scaled, its legacy on-premises system needed to evolve to proactively meet institution and student needs. Today, Blackboard Student Success handles over eight million inbound and outbound interactions annually. The scale of these interactions significantly impacted contact center staff, who often handled repetitive inquiries about logging into applications or checking financial aid status. Blackboard wanted to streamline the user and employee experience to resolve highly repeatable questions quickly, while freeing contact center staff to handle more complex inquiries.
Collaborating with AWS to transform the student experience and institutional outcomes
Blackboard turned to AWS for help. “We could have moved to the most current version of our existing tech stack,” explains Blackboard Senior Vice President Richa Batra. “But we made the strategic move because of what AWS could offer us in the long term. The AWS name, and their ability to innovate and transform software solutions with AI, forced us to really rethink our business model.”
In May 2024, Blackboard began working closely with its AWS account team and Amazon Connect specialists. Through a series of collaborative strategy sessions and workshops, AWS and Blackboard designed a solution that aligned with Blackboard’s three main goals: revolutionize enrollment, boost student retention, and drive student success.
“We worked with people that were intimately familiar with our tech architecture and current environment,” Batra says. “These strategy sessions were really important to helping us build a strong business case to successfully drive the project forward.”
By combining AWS technology and generative AI with Blackboard’s deep expertise in higher education, these collaborative sessions led to an innovative solution to proactively and reactively support students.
Providing students and staff with new support services in Amazon Connect
At the heart of Blackboard’s contact center transformation is Amazon Connect, an omnichannel cloud contact center designed to deliver seamless communication experiences across voice, text, and chat.
The solution will power Blackboard’s enrollment, retention, help desk, and support services for students with financial and administrative questions. Blackboard services and expertise, combined with the cutting-edge technology, efficiency, and scalability of AWS will empower institutions to deliver an unparalleled student experience.
Amazon Connect will help Blackboard expedite answers to user inquiries with its AI-driven technology. Students will be able to engage with an AI-powered chatbot, text messaging system, or interactive voice response (IVR) to get answers to routine questions fast, or escalate complex issues to the appropriate agent staff member.
“Our technology today does not manage these repeatable questions, but everything we understand AWS can do will allow us to remove those barriers,” says Batra. “A student doesn’t want to wait on hold to talk to a person—they’re likely in their car or walking across campus. Wouldn’t it be a greater experience if they could resolve this within minutes?” Taking the burden of these repeatable questions off of staff also lets agents pursue more high-impact work.
Amazon Q in Connect, a generative AI-powered assistant for agents, will help contact center staff provide real-time guidance and recommended actions based on a particular query. While handling a call or message from a user, agents can ask the generative AI assistant about the question; the assistant uses natural language processing (NLP) to understand the question, search its knowledge databases, and surface the correct answer back to the agent in seconds—helping agents deliver answers faster.
The Blackboard team is particularly excited about the Amazon Connect Contact Lens integration, which will provide real-time analytics and quality management powered by AI. “From Contact Lens, we’ll be able to get aggregate data,” explains Batra. “You’ll be able to see sentiment by supervisor and by employee, over time. We can then take all our eight million inbound and outbound interactions and apply sentiment analysis to proactively identify students who are at risk.”
Providing proactive student support with generative AI
To make sure the new modernization strategy aligns with its clients’ needs and expectations, Blackboard has established a client council. This council serves as a sounding board throughout the modernization and migration, providing valuable feedback and insights. As the modernization progresses, Batra is already receiving positive feedback from Blackboard’s clients. “They’re excited that our agents will be leveraging AWS AI,” shares Batra. “The fact that our agents and our employees can use AI to answer questions correctly quickly has been one of the top reasons.”
For students, this transformation means getting answers faster than ever before. But beyond immediate responses to questions, the new solution also enables proactive support—suggesting services students may not even know exist on campus. Using AI for propensity modeling across multiple data streams will help Blackboard discover where a student might need extra support and proactively offer solutions to boost student retention and engagement.
Rethinking the future of education support services
While Blackboard’s contact center modernization strategy is still underway, the company sees this transformation as just the beginning. “If the generative AI allows us to handle what we do today in a more scalable, efficient, and consistent way,” says Batra, “it opens up the opportunity to rethink how we support students.”
The conversation and sentiment data from these contact center interactions will uncover insights about student needs previously thought inaccessible. These insights and trends can help Blackboard refine its strategies for engagement and retention, enhancing how it supports student success. “I think there’s going to be so many other questions that previously went unanswered that we can now help with,” adds Batra.
Evolving technologies like generative AI hold immense promise for transforming higher education. As the generative AI landscape continues to evolve, the AWS EdTech team can help EdTech organizations design, deploy, and go-to-market with innovative solutions that improve education outcomes around the world. Learn more about our generative AI capabilities in the AWS Generative AI Innovation Center and discover how AWS supports EdTech companies to start, expand, and optimize their business.