How Gwinnett Technical College Scaled Student Support Without Expanding Staff

Three college students studying together at an outdoor campus table

Gwinnett Technical College adopted Mongoose Text and Chat to support a rapidly growing student population without expanding staff. With enrollment up more than 40% in five years, the college needed scalable, responsive communication tools that kept the human element intact. By integrating texting across Student Affairs and deploying a chatbot trained on institutional content, Gwinnett Tech now delivers 24/7 support, reduces call volume, improves crisis response, and uses conversation data to continuously refine student-facing information.

Key Highlights:

40%+ enrollment growth in five years while maintaining lean staffing
Texting integrated daily across the Division of Student Affairs
AI chatbot trained on Gwinnett Tech’s own website content for controlled, accurate responses
24/7 student support with a four-person call center
Critical first-day crisis communication delivered via text when email sending limits blocked outreach
Chat data used to identify content gaps and improve institutional information

Download the Full Case Study

Download Now

When enrollment grows by more than 40% in five years, most institutions feel the strain.

Gwinnett Technical College, a public two-year institution in Georgia serving just under 13,000 students, is in a position many colleges would envy. Demand is strong. Growth is steady. Students are choosing Gwinnett Tech in increasing numbers.

As Carolyn Duven, Executive Director of Student Support Services, explains:

“We are just under 13,000 students. We’ve grown by over 40% in the last five years, which is a very unique situation for higher education at this time. We feel very privileged that students are choosing GTC out of all the colleges in Georgia, that they’re coming to us, and that demand is not going down.”

But growth brings pressure. With finite staffing and rising student expectations, Gwinnett Tech needed a way to scale support without sacrificing responsiveness or the human-centered approach that defines their culture.

Texting Becomes Core to Student Affairs

Gwinnett Tech implemented Mongoose in 2017, initially to streamline texting around orientation, deadlines, and registration reminders. Over time, texting became embedded across Student Affairs.

Carolyn shared:

“We use Mongoose daily in our interactions with students, replying to text messages and engaging. It has become integrated into what we do across the Division of Student Affairs.”

Texting addressed a reality many institutions face. Students are not consistently reading email. As Betsy Harris-Brackett, Executive Director, put it:

“We are a publicly funded institution, and we share the pain points that a lot of institutions have. When you’ve got higher enrollment than you have staff, adding new technology and trying to stay current with how our students are receiving information is important. We all know students don’t read their emails.”

Using segmentation, CSV uploads, and Smart Messages, staff can manage communication at scale while keeping outreach targeted and timely.

Rethinking the Chatbot Experience

Gwinnett Tech had tried chatbot technology before, and it did not go well.

Carolyn described their earlier experience:

“When we ventured into chat with another product, the smart bot that had pre-loaded scripts that we could train,” said Carolyn. “It was not successful. The bot was not smart. Students don’t ask full sentence questions. They’ll say things like ‘English classes,’ and that bot would respond with ‘Complete your FAFSA by this date.’ It was just really nonsensical kinds of responses.”

Training that tool required manually building language trees, which was not sustainable for a busy team:

“What we learned is that to train the bot, we would have to have the prompt and then what the response would be, basically creating the language trees. That was a huge lift.”

When Gwinnett Tech revisited chat with Mongoose Chat, which they call “Griff,” the difference was clear. During the demo, they created a page titled “Break the Bot” to test the system.

“When we had the demonstration, we created our website called ‘Break the Bot’ to test it. We started asking questions to see what we would get. That really sold us on the quality of the product and how easy it is to train it.”

Because the large language model pulls directly from Gwinnett Tech’s own website and institutional content, the team maintains control over accuracy and tone:

“I like the large language model that we use with Griff because it’s dependent on the information that we provide. It’s not pulling from Google or anything else. That makes us feel really comfortable because we have control over how the bot is being trained and what information it has access to.”

24/7 Support with a Small Call Center

Gwinnett Tech’s call center includes just four staff members and a manager. That small team supports thousands of students during business hours.

Chat now absorbs routine questions about registration, financial aid, and next steps before escalating to a human. Carolyn noted,

“Students have to go through these prompts before we’re going to get to a human. So students don’t have to talk to folks to ask basic questions.”

Importantly, chat has also become a diagnostic tool. When students ask questions the bot cannot answer, it signals a content gap. She added,

“Every time we found gaps, we created a training document and asked those departments to update the information. The bot is taking what we’ve provided—it’s not magically creating new information. We can use the bot as a reflection of what students have access to and use it as a tool to help us improve.”

The goal is not automation for its own sake. It is clarity and accuracy. Carolyn said,

“My goal would be that Griff, our bot, is not another chatbot that doesn’t answer the question. We can use the tool and the training to ensure the bot provides an accurate, clear, and concise reflection of information students have access to.”

A First-Day Crisis That Tested Everything

The value of texting and chat became especially clear during a first-day systems disruption tied to a new registration platform. Thousands of students were affected, and email was not an option due to sending caps.

Carolyn explained:

“Our IT folks were unable to send out 13,000 emails in a day because the system simply would not allow it. And so we, of course, immediately turned to Mongoose.”

Texting and chat became the primary communication channels. Staff monitored shared inboxes, tagged conversations, and escalated issues in real time. She added,

“I don’t know where we would’ve been if we didn’t have Mongoose because we needed to reach every single student who was registered in that moment.”

Students also reported problems directly through Text and Chat, giving leadership actionable data.

“We also found out about issues as students reported things to us through Mongoose Text and Chat. We were able to escalate issues quickly as a result of sending out that bulk communication.”

For Gwinnett Tech, this was not just about messaging. It was coordinated crisis response.

Scaling with Empathy

Despite the technology, Gwinnett Tech remains focused on the human element.

As chat expands across more web pages and departments, the guiding principle is clear, according to Carolyn:

“Students can tell what’s real and what’s not. Maintaining that personal, human-centered communication will always be key.”

Mongoose is not positioned as a replacement for people. It is infrastructure that enables a small team to serve a growing student body with speed, clarity, and empathy.

And in Carolyn’s words: