Charles Sturt University powers empathetic student support with agentic AI, reducing costs by 13%

The student support experience reimagined

Charles Sturt University (CSU) is more than a place of study. It plays a central role in strengthening regional Australia through education, research and innovation across six campuses. As Australia’s first certified carbon-neutral university and a long-standing partner to its communities, CSU has a strong history of adapting and evolving. However, changing student expectations highlighted the need to rethink how support and engagement were delivered.

With 70% of its students online and most working at least part time, students want support outside traditional business hours. As a publicly funded university, CSU had to find a way to deliver a best-in-class experience 24/7 without expanding its budget. The university set out to completely reshape how it supports and engages students.

“We want to keep the support experience as accessible as possible and remove all the friction from our students’ journeys,” said Michael Buttsworth, Associate Director of Student Experience Service Center at CSU, adding that over 50% of its learners are the first in their family to attend university. “We act with empathy so students from all backgrounds can feel supported and confident throughout their studies.”

CSU implemented the Genesys Cloud™ platform and prioritized AI-powered support capabilities to make this vision a reality.

“The main reason we moved to the cloud was to meet and even exceed rising student expectations,” added Buttsworth. “And with agentic AI, it’s faster and easier to build and iterate quite nuanced flows that can handle more complex interactions.”

Over the past 18 months, as CSU has matured its use of Genesys Cloud, the contact center reduced operational costs by 13% and cost to serve by nearly 11%, while increasing its Net Promoter Score by 13 points. Students now have access to seamless support across digital channels, including outside standard business hours 24/7, and staff have the tools and confidence to deliver consistently empathetic, efficient service.

A CX strategy rooted in accessibility, empathy and insight

At the heart of the university’s customer experience (CX) strategy are several guiding principles: Act with empathy, make it easy to do business with, anticipate their needs and meet them wherever they are, regardless of the time or channel. These shaped every decision the university made as it reimagined the student experience.

To address the university’s goal of accessibility and availability, CSU introduced a virtual agent, powered by a Genesys Cloud AI Guide, to align support with student behavior. “Now we can help students immediately and have that answer at their fingertips,” said Jessica Peters, Operations Coordinator, Student Experience Service Center at CSU.

When students are too busy to wait for a response, asynchronous messaging leaves the pace of interaction up to them. “We migrated to asynchronous messaging because we weren’t fully meeting students where they are. We weren’t able to continue their conversations when they wanted to,” said Paul Drake, Contact Center Systems Manager at CSU. “Now we see chats happening over the course of the week.”

To better anticipate students’ needs, CSU focused on personalization through intelligence. Using tools such as Genesys Cloud™ Agent Copilot, intent mining and topic spotting, support interactions are more contextual and efficient. Agents now receive real-time guidance during interactions, students enjoy faster resolution and the university’s “student casuals” workforce — a part-time workforce with turnover aligned to academic cycles — reaches competency faster than ever before.

Additionally, the university shifted from a reactive support model to one that anticipates student needs using the proactive and predictive engagement capabilities in Genesys Cloud. Instead of waiting for questions or concerns to surface, CSU began identifying moments of hesitation or risk during online interactions and offering help immediately.

This approach extended to outbound calls as well, with excellent results: Proactive calls using Genesys Cloud outbound campaign capabilities have led to 402 additional enrollments, including 69 international students.

Finally, CSU ensured its support operations were flexible and scalable. Through Workforce Engagement Management and the Tempo app, staffing levels are now aligned to real-time demand. This has reduced reliance on frontline staffing by 33% through natural attrition and role redesign, while maintaining strong service levels.

Intelligent orchestration at scale

The university’s implementation of Genesys Cloud was foundational to reinventing its student support. The result is a seamless, omnichannel experience where context flows effortlessly across end-to-end journeys. If a conversation starts with a chatbot and moves to a voice call, the agent receives the full history, eliminating repetitive explanations — a common frustration in traditional support environments.

AI insights now fuel continuous optimization. Topic spotting identifies new trends, intent mining surfaces emerging student needs, and performance data feeds into university-wide reporting systems for stronger governance and decision-making.

“Using topic and intent mining gives us a deep understanding of where our traffic is and what our top inquiries are,” said Buttsworth. “Using those data points, we’re identifying where and when we should implement our AI Guides.”

The AI Guides-powered agentic virtual agents CSU has implemented so far are delivering more efficient, empathetic interactions for students. They’re getting answers faster, even to more complex inquiries.

For example, after hours a student can ask the AI Guides powered virtual agent about withdrawing from a course. Rather than simply outlining the process, the agent explores what is driving the question. If the student is experiencing financial pressure or competing life commitments, the agent can suggest relevant options, such as support to help manage cost of living pressures, information about scholarships, or reducing study load to better balance work, family and study.

“Students want a conversational bot, and the virtual agents powered by agentic AI are very conversational,” said Drake.

“It makes interactions more empathetic, and students are more trusting of the responses because they’ve had a conversation rather than the previous ‘one question, one answer’ interaction,” added Peters.

Crucially, CSU built its new support capabilities internally because Genesys Cloud is so easy to use. This self-reliance has allowed the team to grow from two to five specialists, promoting from within, minimizing the use of external consultants and establishing a long-term innovation engine.

“One key benefit of Genesys Cloud is that it supports a more business-led approach within agreed governance,” said Buttsworth. “Previously, updates were heavily dependent on IT processes, which made it harder for the business to iterate at pace.”

While factually correct out IT team may see this as dismissive to them.  This will help me maintain that key relationship.

“Within a two-week period, we were able to migrate our knowledge to the Knowledge Workbench within Genesys Cloud and launch our first digital bots,” added Drake. “Almost overnight, we saw a 20% reduction in our inbound chat volumes.”

With AI Guides, agentic virtual agent development is also more accessible. Instead of relying on specialized technical skills or complex back-end configuration, staff across the business can now use natural language to quickly build comprehensive, fully functional virtual agents. This makes it easier for teams to iterate, refine and expand conversational experiences without needing deep technical knowledge.

When the university started using agentic virtual agents, one concern was having appropriate guardrails. Another was using the right tone of voice, one that would be consistent with its digital chatbots.

“After using the AI Guides and configuring the agentic virtual agents, the guardrails have been strong,” said Drake. “They’ve given us confidence in how the virtual agents behave in production.”

Transformational benefits for students, staff and the university

The impact of the university’s student engagement transformation has been profound — operationally, financially and culturally.

“With the capacity we’ve created through efficiencies gained through our digital bots and our AI Guides, we’ve been able to invest back into the platform and into our staff,” said Buttsworth.

CSU reduced its support-related operational costs by 13% and cost to serve by nearly 11%. NPS increased from 53 to 60, reinforcing the positive student sentiment around the university’s experience transformation.

Operationally, average speed of answer fell 41%, from 10.65 minutes to 6.33 minutes, significantly reducing student friction during time-sensitive periods like admissions and enrollment. First-contact resolution climbed 29% across seven-day and 30-day windows, thanks to better routing, improved self-service and agent enablement via Genesys Cloud™ Agent Copilot.

After introducing the digital bot, CSU shifted from having no after-hours chat interactions to seeing 53 percent of all chat activity now occur outside standard business hours. This reflects a fundamental change in accessibility, aligning support with when students are most able to engage.

Escalation rates on our chatbot plummeted from nearly 58% to under 20%, signaling a meaningful shift: Students now trust digital channels, even for complex queries — due in large part to the conversational nature of the agentic AI Guides.

Aligned with its sustainability leadership as Australia’s first certified carbon-neutral university, CSU has advanced its sustainability goals by moving to cloud-based CX infrastructure that reduces on-campus system demands.

“Sustainability has driven us towards building solutions that are futureproof, scalable and responsible. Using Genesys Cloud is helping us decrease carbon emissions and be more energy efficient and sustainable,” said Peters. “And the ambitions Genesys has to be carbon neutral by 2030 aligns to our values.”

Charting the next level of student experience innovation

What makes the CSU transformation journey remarkable is not just what it has achieved, but what it has unlocked. With a stronger internal team, a culture of evidence-based improvement and agentic AI at the core, the university now has the foundation to continue reimagining student support.

“We don’t have a virtual agent in our voice channel yet,” said Drake. “That’s our next big step: using AI Guides to remove the high-volume, low-complexity inquiry types so our agents can have those more meaningful conversations.”

Other innovations the university is planning will deepen personalization, automate more of the journey and expand predictive engagement to support students before they even realize they need help. CSU is also positioned to broaden its knowledge ecosystem, elevate staff development programs and apply AI insights to even more parts of the student lifecycle.

The university’s approach to agile transformation is certain to ensure its success. “When developing and using AI Guides, we start small, build that credibility, build that confidence and scale up. You can keep iterating to improve it once you see how they’re being used by the public,” said Drake. “Perfect is an illusion. It’s never going to happen. Don’t wait for it.”

With this mindset, CSU has evolved from a traditional contact center into a leading example of thoughtful, empathetic, AI-powered student experience — all while reducing cost and complexity. And this is only the beginning.

To learn more about the solutions featured in this case study, visit www.genesys.com.