FHNW School of Business's new trinational Master's program, “Master of Science in Sustainable Business Development,” helps develop people who are committed to creating a sustainable future by applying their knowledge and their determination to make a change. In our current campaign, we receive many reoccurring inquiries about the program details, which are documented; however, they are difficult to find, or the information on our website does not answer the specific needs of the applicants.

The development of the “SBD Bot” followed a structured process, starting with defining use cases and goals through client and user feedback. Built on the Voiceflow platform, it is functional in German, English and French. Predefined answers were generated with information from the FHNW website, Moodle and past conversations with students. The chatbot features two parts: delivering information on predefined topics and a Large Language Model (LLM) for answering user questions. Regular testing and feedback ensured improvements in functionality, usability and response accuracy.

The development of the “SBD Bot” provides useful benefits for the FHNW MSc Sustainable Business Development program. By handling repetitive questions from prospective students, the bot simplifies the communication process, reducing administrative workload and improving the accessibility of program information. The multilingual support expands the chatbot's reach, serving an international audience. The predefined answers from reliable FHNW sources increase trustworthiness, while the AI-generated answers offer flexibility in handling more complex questions. The chatbot's usability testing resulted in a high score of 88, reflecting its ease of use and effective design. Furthermore, the integration of a webhook service for user behaviour tracking enables continuous improvement based on real-time feedback, ensuring the chatbot remains relevant and user-centric. This chatbot can also be scaled to support additional programs within FHNW, offering future growth potential.