Student inquiry routing and escalation

The problem

Student support offices face rising inquiry volume without matching staff growth, and a large share of questions on financial aid, registration and course access arrive outside business hours. A prior keyword based chatbot could not keep pace, leaving many inquiries unresolved or unlogged.

• Advisors spend time on routine questions instead of complex student needs
• After hours inquiries go unanswered until staff return
• Support requests scatter across phone, email and in person channels with no shared record
• Emergency situations can shut down phone and in person support entirely
• Website content quality issues go unnoticed until students hit dead ends

The solution

A support agent classifies each student question by intent, resolves what it can from the knowledge base, and routes anything else to the correct queue, with staff reviewing what the agent could not close.

1. Receives the student question through the university website or preferred channel
2. Classifies intent against categories such as financial aid, registration, course information and IT access
3. Resolves the question directly from the indexed knowledge base and emergency knowledge base when available
4. Routes unresolved questions to the appropriate student service queue with context attached
5. Logs any case that arrives after hours and triggers an automatic follow up email
6. Surfaces recurring gaps in the knowledge base back to staff for content review

Where people stay in control

• Staff review any case logged after hours before it closes
• Escalated queue routing keeps a person responsible for complex or high touch student needs
• Content gaps surfaced by the agent are reviewed by staff rather than corrected automatically

Systems and data

The workflow reads from the university website content, an emergency knowledge base and indexed FAQ content, and writes routed cases and after hours logs into the student service queues; planned integrations extend this to the CRM and Banner API.

• CRM
• Banner API

Results

• The agent processed over 47,000 student interactions within months of launch in the documented deployment
• The agent became the primary real time communication channel during a campus wide ice storm that shut down phone and in person support in the documented deployment

Why platform-native

The workflow classifies and routes within one support channel and knowledge base, so it runs well platform-native, directly on the model platform with Altivus providing monitoring and governance.

Frequently asked questions