LearnSphere scales student support 4x with Chatref

LearnSphere is an online learning platform offering more than 5,000 courses in technology, business, and creative skills to roughly 200,000 students worldwide. Their catalog serves solo learners, career switchers, and enterprise L&D programs across 70 countries.

As the student base grew, so did the long tail of repetitive questions: how do I reset my password, where is my certificate, which course should I take next, why will this video not load on my browser.

A small support team was fielding hundreds of daily tickets, with average response times stretching past 12 hours during enrollment peaks. Roughly two-thirds of those tickets were repetitive questions that never needed a human in the first place.

International students in non-US time zones often waited overnight for urgent answers about upcoming deadlines or access issues. Frustrated students dropped courses before completing them, pushing completion rates down. Hiring a larger multilingual team at speed was not feasible.

LearnSphere deployed Chatref across web, iOS, and Android. They trained the agent by pointing the site scraper at the full course catalog, uploading syllabi and troubleshooting articles, and adding 14 months of historical support tickets as a knowledge source so the AI could mirror the team's tone.

For course discovery, the agent asks about career goals, current skills, and time budget, then recommends three to five matched courses with clear rationale and prerequisites. For technical issues, it walks students through video, upload, and browser fixes step by step. For certificates, it pulls the record and delivers the file in-chat.

Multilingual coverage across English, Spanish, Mandarin, and Hindi replaced a two-person bilingual queue. Complex academic questions and sensitive cases escalate to a human advisor with the full conversation attached. Chatref's pay-as-you-go billing (1 to 5 coins per reply based on length) scaled naturally with enrollment peaks.

Within the first quarter, LearnSphere was handling 4x the support volume with the same team. Enrollments grew 38% as conversational recommendations replaced an overwhelming 5,000-course browse. Satisfaction climbed from 79% to 93%, driven largely by instant response times and native-language support.

Automating 88% of inquiries freed advisors to focus on pedagogical questions and retention outreach, where human judgement actually moves the needle. Chatref paid back the investment in roughly five weeks.