UAlbany RFI #E500954JH - Student Interaction Management - Final Copy 7.30.2026.pdf

Request for Information (RFI)

Student Interaction Management Solution

Issuing Institution: State University of New York (SUNY) – University at Albany

RFI Number: E500954JH

Release Date: 07/31/2026

Questions Due: 08/14/2026

Response Due Date: 08/25/2026

Purpose of this RFI The University at Albany (SUNY) is seeking information on solutions that support the centralized management of Financial Aid constituent communications and service activities. The University is interested in a single solution that can centralize, track, and manage constituent interactions across multiple communication channels to improve service consistency, reduce staff burden, increase operational efficiency, and maintain a comprehensive, auditable record of interactions throughout the student lifecycle. This RFI is intended solely for information gathering and planning purposes. Responses will assist the University in understanding available products, services, implementation approaches, industry best practices, and potential procurement strategies.

Organizational Background

Founded in 1844, the University at Albany is a major public research university and one of SUNY’s four university centers. As the largest public four-year university in New York’s Capital Region, UAlbany enrolls approximately 17,000 students (roughly 13,000 undergraduates and 4,000 graduate students) and offers a wide range of undergraduate, graduate, and doctoral programs.

The Office of Financial Aid administers federal, state, institutional, and private financial aid programs and serves prospective, admitted, current, and former students, as well as parents and authorized third parties. The office manages a high volume of inquiries through phone, email, web tickets, appointments, and in-person services, with a focus on delivering timely, accurate, and compliant support.

Currently, service delivery and reporting rely on multiple disconnected systems, creating challenges in maintaining a complete view of constituent interactions, tracking communication history, reducing staff context switching, and delivering a consistent service experience throughout the student lifecycle.

Desired Future State

The desired solution should provide a “single pane of glass” experience that brings together constituent information, communication history, and service activities—such as cases, tickets, appointments, walk-in visits, phone interactions, video calls, emails, and knowledge resources—into one unified interface.

The goal is to identify solutions that deliver core Financial Aid service capabilities natively and employ integrations as needed to extend functionality while avoiding fragmentation across multiple separate solutions.

The University is not seeking:

• A standalone ticketing system

• A call center or telephony-only solution

• An appointment scheduling tool in isolation

• An email management system only

• A collection of loosely integrated or siloed applications

Business and Technical Requirements Vendors should provide narrative responses reflecting on the following requirements and how the solution may meet these needs.

1. Unified Constituent Engagement and Omnichannel Service

• Maintain a single, continuous student record across the entire lifecycle (prospective, admitted, enrolled, former student), including capabilities to match, manage, and prevent duplicate records.

• Consolidate all interactions into a unified timeline.

• Associate communications and services to the student record (e.g., appointments, cases/tickets, phone calls, walk-in visits).

• Provide a complete, auditable history of interactions across all channels.

• Support tracking and management of interactions across:

o Email o Phone o Cases/Tickets o Walk-in visits o Appointments o Web forms o Virtual engagements, including video o Self-Service Knowledgebase

• Allow staff to manage all interaction types from a single interface.

• Provide search, filtering, and retrieval capabilities for constituent interaction history.

• Support routing and assignment of interactions to appropriate staff members, service areas, queues, or teams.

• Describe which omnichannel interaction capabilities are provided natively versus through integrations.

• Support a unified constituent experience for interactions originating from integrated third-party systems.

• Support multiple offices, departments, or service units within a single platform.

2. Case & Ticket Management

• Create, assign, track, categorize, prioritize, route, reassign, close, reopen, and manage cases/service tickets.

• Support submissions from authenticated (user must sign in with campus credentials) and unauthenticated users (no account or login required).

• Support configurable web intake forms.

• Generate case/service ticket from any interaction channel (e.g., email, phone, appointment).

• Associate cases/service tickets with constituent records and maintain complete communication, activity, and interaction history.

• Support staff collaboration through internal notes, standardized response templates, workflow automation, and knowledge-assisted responses (knowledge base for staff and students).

• Support two-way communication between constituents and staff, self-service visibility into case status, and automated notifications and updates throughout the case lifecycle.

• Support file/document attachments, unique case/ticket identifiers, multiple statuses, related or linked cases, and configurable closure/reopen rules.

• Support role-based access, permissions, configurable administration, reporting, data export, records retention, and customer satisfaction surveys tied to case resolution.

3. Appointment Scheduling & Advising Support

• Support self-service scheduling by authenticated (user must sign in with campus credentials) and unauthenticated users (no account or login required).

• Support both virtual and in-person appointments.

• Support booking by service type, reason for visit, advisor, and staff availability.

• Support configurable staff schedules, working hours, and appointment durations.

• Support staff creation, modification, and management of appointments.

• Support automated appointment confirmations, reminders, status tracking, and virtual meeting links.

• Support intake forms, questionnaires, document uploads, and appointment check-in processes.

• Support capture of appointment notes, outcomes, and interaction history.

• Support integration with Microsoft Outlook calendars and walk-in queue management processes.

• Provide role-based access, reporting, and customer satisfaction survey capabilities.

4. Walk-In & Lobby Management

• Support kiosk, web-based, and staff-assisted check-in for both walk-in visitors and scheduled appointments.

• Support authenticated users (user must sign in with campus credentials) and unauthenticated guest visitors (no account or login required).

• Capture configurable visitor information and check-in responses.

• Automatically place visitors into appropriate service queues and provide estimated waiting times

• Support privacy-safe queue displays, queue self-removal, and configurable lobby displays.

• Track visit details, service duration, notes, outcomes, and interaction history.

• Provide reporting, role-based administration, data export, and customer satisfaction survey capabilities.

• Support queue management, transfers, staff availability management, and configurable service routing.

5. Telephony and Contact Center Support

• Support inbound and outbound calling.

• Support Interactive Voice Response and queue management, call routing, transfers, wait time notifications, callback options, and configurable service hours.

• Provide agent tools including softphones, call controls, status management, call notes, and interaction wrap-up capabilities.

• Support call logging, recording, transcription, AI-assisted summaries and interaction tracking.

• Associate phone interactions with constituent records, cases, and interaction history, including caller identification and contextual interaction visibility.

• Support escalation from phone to browser-based video interactions, on-demand video support, and tracking of video interactions within the constituent record and interaction history.

• Provide supervisor monitoring, dashboards, reporting, analytics, customer satisfaction surveys, and data export capabilities.

6. Centralized Email Management

• Enable management of all constituent populations from a single platform.

• Automatically log outbound communications and maintain complete history within the constituent record.

• Support targeted communications.

• Support configurable outbound communications that allow recipients to reply directly to the message and automatically generate a ticket or receive a notification directing them to submit a ticket, with replies disabled.

• Provide audit trails, email engagement metrics, response-time monitoring, and communication reporting.

7. Knowledge Base & Self-Service

• Support content authoring, editing, publishing, approval workflows, versioning, ownership, and lifecycle management to users with appropriate security.

• Provide a public searchable knowledge base with mobile-friendly self-service capabilities.

• Surface relevant knowledge articles and recommendations for both staff and constituents.

• Provide analytics on article usage, search activity, and content gaps to support continuous improvement.

• Support content filtering, featured content, FAQ-style articles, and related content recommendations

• Support integration with chatbot and virtual assistant solutions.

8. Reporting, Analytics & Operational Intelligence

• Consolidate and provide cross-channel reporting and dashboards across tickets, phone interactions, appointments, walk-ins, email, and other service activities.

• Support real-time, historical, and trend reporting for frontline staff, supervisors, and leadership.

• Track service volumes, response times, wait times, outcomes, resolutions and other operational performance metrics.

• Provide self-service reporting, dashboard configuration, and data export in common formats.

• Support reporting across multiple offices, departments, or service units.

• Support institutional analytics and integration with reporting platforms such as Power BI.

9. Integrations & Enterprise Architecture

• Describe integration architecture, available integration options, and support for secure real-time and batch integrations using APIs, web services, file transfers, and other industry-standard methods.

• Describe experience integrating with higher education enterprise systems and platforms.

• Present integrated data and interactions within a unified user experience that minimizes staff context switching.

• Support integration with the University's current enterprise systems, communication platforms, authentication services, and reporting tools, including:

o PeopleSoft Campus Solutions o EAB Navigate o Technolutions Slate o CampusESP o IVY or other third-party chat bot o Campus Logic o Mulesoft Integration Platform o Microsoft Outlook Email & Calendars o Cisco Telephony o Zoom, Microsoft Teams, or other video conferencing solutions o Jotform o Power BI, Oracle BI, or other enterprise reporting tools o Inceptia o Microsoft Entra ID (Azure AD) and/or Shibboleth for authentication and single sign-on

(SSO)

10. Security, Privacy & Compliance

• Support FERPA compliance and higher education data privacy.

• Support secure access for authenticated and unauthenticated users, including SSO compatibility with Microsoft Entra ID and/or Shibboleth using standards such as SAML or OpenID Connect.

• Provide audit trails and data governance controls.

• Support secure cloud-based deployment and data portability.

• Support role-based access control, delegated administration, segregation of duties, automated provisioning/deprovisioning where available, and auditable access request workflows for roles not assigned through integration.

• Describe architecture, availability, uptime/SLA commitments, maintenance practices, integrations (e.g., APIs) and mobile-responsive design.

• Describe operational responsibilities between the vendor and University.

• Describe any AI-enabled capabilities, governance practices, transparency controls, human review processes, data use restrictions, and compliance with applicable AI disclosure requirements.

• Support configurable data retention, backup, disaster recovery, business continuity, data ownership, tenant data segregation, and data portability/export in open formats.

• Describe customer offboarding and data exit processes, including export formats, timelines, and any associated costs.

Additional Requested Information Please respond to the following questions:

Solution Overview

1. Provide an overview of your company and solution, including years in operation, target market, company size, and what differentiates your solution from competitors.

2. Describe the licensing model and any licensing requirements for internal users, external users, integrations, or third-party components.

3. Describe the solution architecture, scalability, deployment options, and ability to support growth in users, data volume, and functionality.

Implementation

4. Describe your typical implementation approach and recommended timeline for installation, training, and rollout from the point of purchase.

5. Describe how system roles, groups, permissions, and administrative access are typically structured.

Training and Support

6. Describe your support model, including support channels, hours, response times, and escalation process.

7. Describe the training provided during implementation, including available materials and support for functional and technical staff.

8. Describe how frequently updates are released and what level of client review or acceptance is required before updates are moved into production.

9. Describe recommended ongoing training for effective system use and long-term adoption.

Higer Education Experience

10. Describe your experience supporting higher education institutions, specifically Financial Aid and/or student services offices.

11. Provide a list of comparable higher education institutions currently using the solution, preferably institutions similar in size and complexity to the University at Albany. Briefly describe how those institutions are using the solution.

Additional Documents

12. Accessibility compliance: Capable of meeting WCAG 2.1 AA requirement or higher. Provide the VPAT (Voluntary Product Accessibility Template) documenting compliance with WCAG 2.1 AA standards or higher. https://www.itic.org/policy/accessibility/vpat

13. Vendor Security & Risk Assessment: Provide the HECVAT (Higher Education Community Vendor

Assessment Toolkit) to document security and privacy compliance.

https://library.educause.edu/resources/2020/4/higher-education-community-vendor-assessment-toolkit

14. Other relevant security documentation (e.g., SOC 2 reports)

Pricing Information and Cost Structure

15. The University is not requesting formal pricing at this time. Any pricing information provided will be used solely for budgeting and planning purposes. Please provide a high-level, non-binding overview of your pricing model, cost structure, and major cost drivers.

Submission Instructions

Submit electronically in PDF format to:

Jessica Hill jjhill@albany.edu

Responses desired to be received no later than: August 25, 2026 at 4:00PM ET https://www.itic.org/policy/accessibility/vpat https://library.educause.edu/resources/2020/4/higher-education-community-vendor-assessment-toolkit https://library.educause.edu/resources/2020/4/higher-education-community-vendor-assessment-toolkit mailto:jjhill@albany.edu

Submission Instructions