The Challenge

At the beginning of each semester, students must register for the new semester & at the time they would physically go to the school campus, queue up at the school and fill up forms of their individual details. Students living in far off places had to travel long distances just to register, stood in queues for up to 3 hours and the registration process ended up taking longer than expected as all 5000 registrations had to be manually entered into the system by registration staff.

Therefore, there was a need to create a simple solution which would improve the registration experience and also improve registration processing efficiency.

The Process

The Xavier Africa team worked together with the BAC team to create a solution that would be accessible to students. Initially, the firm decided to create a web application that would allow students to register online – however the high local mobile data costs would make it difficult for students to access these platform.

Therefore, the team ended up deciding on a conversational AI solution integrated to Facebook Messenger & WhatsApp (the data bundles for these two applications are the cheapest in the market) and then integrate the solution to BAC’s current registration system. The conversational agent would take the student’s ID number, query the BAC database to check if they met the registration criteria and automatically register the student if they met the compliance criterion.