Case Study: Chat-room usage in University of East Tennessee State

RumbleTalk chat room has many use cases. This post will briefly show how the chat room usage of University of East Tennessee varies.

ETSU

Universities normally experience peak times dealing with new applications and quick questions from potential students and active students. Normally universities tend to answer questions by phone. In pick times this requires a lot of human resources to answer phone calls and sometimes it introduces a real bottleneck.

In order to cope with mass applications and questions from their audience, the University of Tennesee added RumbleTalk Chatroom. This helps in answering most of the questions during a live chat, which results in reducing and streamlining the flow of phone calls to the back office.

In overall from many of our user’s experiences, this reduces the phone calls in about 80%.

The RumbleTalk chat-room is a unique HTML5 combination of group chat and private chat. In can be added to websites, blogs, and even to the university’s Facebook page.

Many of the answers are already answered in the general room and some private discussions are being addressed in one-on-one chats. If the question or issue cannot be handled in a chat, a phone call is the next stage.

ETSU chat room usage

 

And this is not all :

  • There are power users (students) who can answer questions as moderators and reduce the amount of staff answering questions even more.
  • The Chat Room can be designed to meet the overall design of the website .
    One can use css or a simple WYSIWYG (admin panel) option.
  • Some questions can be answered by the group that is already in the chat-room.
    The power of community is pretty easy.
  • With Rumbletalk one, can create various chatrooms (under one account) to various purposes and subjects (e.g Chatroom for HR, another for applications, one for students that wish to talk to their professor in a special time)
  • Moderation is extra important and this can be set up front by the university.
  • The university can choose only login with Facebook user to make authentication a bit more reliable.

New Feature: Control your floating web chat settings

The RumbleTalk chatroom platform can be embedded in 2 ways on every web page and blog, through embed or floating web chat.

Here’s how to do it:

1 – Add a chatroom inside a web page (embed it) .
2 – Add a floating chatroom to the footer right of a web page

One of the most requested features in the past year was letting the chat owner to change the floating web chat settings. We are happy to share with you that you can find in RumbleTalk admin panel –> in the chat settings section the new tab called “floating”.

This tab include several fields that let you set your own chatroom:

– Set the height, width of the floating chat.
– Set the number of times the image will bounce up and down.
– Set a new image instead of the default, to show on the right bottom corner.

floating web chat

Now, the floating web chat can be customized on the admin panel. You can now set the size of the chat widget and where it would be placed on your website page. Users can also set the image to their floating chat instead of the default one. This can help in making the chat recognizable to the users.

Improved Performance of loading youtube videos in a chatrooms.

From day one, RumbleTalk Chatroom is all about performance. The chatroom was built from the ground up with the intention to have low signature on the browser side and to have minimal network load even in loading YouTube videos in chatrooms. We used various methods to achieve that goal which resulted in the fastest loading chatroom.

Chatroom performance loading youtube videos in chatrooms

One of our features is letting chatters add images and YouTube videos to the conversation.
This led to chatrooms that include many YouTube videos. This seems to have slowed down the response of the chatroom.

We are happy to share with you that during the past days, we changed the way YouTube videos are embedded in the RumbleTalk chatroom and their for we increased dramatically the time it takes to load all the videos into the chat.

As YouTube videos are embedded to the chat room, you can also watch it directly there. But in this new update, it won’t slow down the chat rooms. Previously, it was taking up too much memory on our servers. However, we tweaked it a bit so that everyone can enjoy watching and chatting simultaneously.

We hope you will like the new feature! We will have more updates in the future!