Success Story
How Kyrene Uses AI to Modernize K-12 Customer Service
Kyrene School District launched an AI chatbot to improve 24/7 support, reduce emails, and give families faster, easier access to answers.
July 17, 2025SUCCESS STORY SUMMARY
Challenge: Kyrene School District (AZ) needed a more efficient, responsive way to manage inbound inquiries and reduce the burden of email overload on staff.
Solution: Kyrene implemented the Let’s Talk unified service desk and the Let’s Talk Assistant, an AI-powered chatbot that provides 24/7 support powered by the district’s website content. These tools have improved internal collaboration and customer response times.
Results: The chatbot handles hundreds of questions each month, freeing up staff time, increasing customer satisfaction, and allowing team members to track trends and improve service delivery.
Challenge
Kyrene School District, a high-performing Arizona district serving more than 16,000 students, prides itself on strong community engagement. Despite positive in-person interactions with the district, families often struggled to get the information they needed, especially after hours.
“We are very friendly and good at traditional customer service,” said Erin Helm, executive director of communications and engagement. “But when we started to look at the bigger picture of customer experience, we realized we had some gaps.”
Research in the district revealed key issues:
- Families were frequently bounced between departments to get answers.
- Tours and information about enrollment were delayed for weeks.
- District communication relied heavily on email inboxes with no visibility into responses or resolution.
- There was no system in place for providing on-demand answers outside of office hours.
“We were offering really great service between 7:30 a.m. and 4:30 p.m. on the phone or in person,” Helm said. “However, we also learned people want information at midnight on their couch on the device and platform of their choosing.”
These inefficiencies created inconsistent service, frustrated families, and operational blind spots, leading Kyrene to identify customer service as an area of focus in their strategic plan.
Solution
To modernize communications and improve 24/7 service, Kyrene implemented Let’s Talk, K12 Insight’s unified service desk, and Let’s Talk Assistant,
K12 Insight’s AI-powered chatbot powered by the district’s website content. Kyrene is one of the first districts in Arizona to use a chatbot for customer service.
Helm saw the chatbot not just as a convenience but as an essential tool for meeting evolving expectations.
Helm pointed out that families expect support around the clock and, without AI, districts are effectively choosing not to meet that need.
“Unless you’re staffing overnight shifts, you’re leaving a gap that technology can easily fill,” Helm said.
She emphasized that the quality of AI-powered support depends on content hygiene.
“Because the Let’s Talk Assistant chatbot only pulls from your website, you stay in full control of the information,” Helm said. “If an answer is incorrect, it’s an opportunity to improve your website content.”
Kyrene had recently overhauled its website and prioritized clean, current content, enabling the chatbot to provide accurate responses without relying on static documents.
“We decided we’re 100% going all in on web-based content,” Helm said. “It was an easy decision for us because we just overhauled our website and we’re committed to keeping content up-to-date.”
Let’s Talk Assistant gave families and staff a self-service option to get information anytime, without requiring a phone call or email to the school district.
“People would much rather at least have the option to try to get the answer alone first, and the Let’s Talk Assistant chatbot helps with that,” Helm said.
The chatbot also supports multilingual interactions, allowing Kyrene to serve families more effectively.
“We had one family send something in Japanese and our transportation team responded in English and it translated back. That was really cool,” Helm said.
For Helm, the instant engagement with the tool spoke volumes.
“Sometimes you have to push people to use a product but other times just seeing people immediately use the tool tells you it was the right decision,” she said. “It filled a gap we didn’t even know existed.”
Results
Kyrene saw strong engagement with Let’s Talk Assistant almost immediately—without a big launch campaign.
“We decided to just put the tool on our website and see what would happen — and we were thrilled to see people using it right away,” Helm said. “It confirmed what we suspected: today’s families expect instant answers. Having a chatbot isn’t a novelty anymore, it’s the baseline.”
Within months of launching Let’s Talk and Let’s Talk Assistant:
- The percentage of inquiries originating from email dropped from over 90% to around 60–70%.
- Nearly 10% of Kyrene’s dialogues have come through the chatbot. The district expects this share to grow to around 20% next year as families become more accustomed to using this tool.
- Departments like Enrollment and Student Records, often overwhelmed by repeat questions, became power users of the platform.
- The number of inquiries received via chatbot from Jan. 1, 2025 – June 25, 2025 reached 671 chatbot sessions accounting for 1,287 questions.
Because of the high volume of inquiries, Helm said the two-person Enrollment and Student Records team handles most of the district’s incoming inquiries and has become a key user of the platform. They’ve benefited from using the Let’s Talk dashboard to track who has responded, ensuring quick follow-ups and preventing duplicate work.
“Let’s Talk gives us unmatched visibility into the inquiries we received, and that’s been huge,” Helm said. “Now team members can see when a colleague responded instead of creating three email threads to answer one question.”
The chatbot also reduces their workload by answering common enrollment questions using information from the district website, freeing staff to focus on more complex needs. Helm noted that chatbot technology has advanced rapidly, and both staff and families are impressed by the speed and quality of its responses.
Beyond improving day-to-day operations, Let’s Talk has also helped the district address an early concern: the secure handling of student records. By enabling documents to be sent safely through the platform, Kyrene added a critical layer of security and efficiency, adding critical peace of mind for staff handling sensitive information.
Looking Ahead
Kyrene is continuing its phased rollout of Let’s Talk to schools and exploring ways to expand live chat functionality by department. With Let’s Talk Assistant, they’ve laid a foundation for scalable, efficient, and modern customer service.
Next, Helm is focused on using the platform’s data to surface trending topics and community needs. This will enable the district to be more proactive in its communications and planning.
“Let’s Talk is going to be essential in identifying trending topics across our district,” Helm said. “That’s going to be my next focus.”
By keeping website content fresh and broadening platform access across departments, Kyrene is turning proactive, data-informed support from an aspiration into everyday reality.
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