How Riverside University cuts administrative load 62% with Chatref

Riverside University is a public university in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania serving around 18,000 students across undergraduate and graduate programs in liberal arts, sciences, and professional studies. The university employs roughly 1,200 staff across admissions, financial aid, registrar, housing, and student services. Before Chatref, those offices handled the same application, deadline, and process questions hundreds of times per day – especially during peak admission and registration windows.

Prospective and current students flooded Riverside's offices with questions about admission requirements, financial aid deadlines, course registration, housing, and campus resources. During application season, admissions staff could not keep pace and response times stretched past 2 days, which cost enrollments to competitor schools. International students needed support across time zones and languages, and parents wanted clarity on costs and campus safety.

Riverside ran a semester-long pilot with Chatref across admissions, financial aid, and registrar. Each office uploaded its policies, deadlines, forms, and thousands of previous enquiries so the chatbot could answer from the university's own source of truth. Chatref now runs on the main university website, the student portal, and the mobile app, answering questions about admissions, academics, campus life, and student services in English, Spanish, and Mandarin.

Because every answer is grounded in Riverside's own content, the bot stays accurate on things like deadlines and fee structures that change each term. Complex cases – appeals, exceptions, or anything outside published policy – are routed to the right office with a full transcript, so staff never have to start the conversation over.

Within 8 weeks of launch, Chatref was handling 83 percent of student enquiries end-to-end. Administrative workload across admissions, financial aid, and registrar dropped 62 percent, freeing staff to focus on appeals, counselling, and high-touch student cases instead of repeat questions. Student satisfaction reached 91 percent, applications rose as prospective students got instant answers, and Riverside estimates the automation saves roughly 73,000 dollars per month in recovered capacity.