Every enquiry is a student you haven't met yet.
One workspace for the three teams who actually run recruitment: marketing fills the funnel, admissions converts it, registry closes it. Every enquiry, WhatsApp, Messenger, Telegram, website chat, Email or SMS, lands in one place, is scored by application intent, and is chased to the deadline that decides whether it becomes an enrolment.
Six things this does for your institution
1. Catch every enquiry
Open-day sign-ups, Facebook ad replies, WhatsApp questions and website chats arrive in one Enquiry Inbox, not in six personal phones belonging to six different officers.
2. Know who is ready to apply
Each conversation is scored by application intent, not by how chatty it is. “How do I apply?” is a hot lead. “Where is the campus?” is not.
3. Move applicants to enrolment
A nine-stage board from New Enquiry to Enrolled, through Prospectus Sent, Applied, Offer Made and Accepted, with one-tap status changes, so the board reflects reality.
4. Never miss a deadline
Acceptance deadlines, registration deadlines, fee due dates and session start, each one drives its own automated countdown, per student, from a date on their record.
5. Resolve student cases
A stuck application, an unconfirmed payment, a portal login that will not work, logged by category, routed to the office that can fix it, and tracked to resolution.
6. Win back the next intake
Students who applied and did not register are your warmest list for the following session. They are kept on file and can be worked as a cohort, deliberately by hand rather than automatically.
An admissions chat is not a sales chat
The classifier is written for higher education, not reworded from another industry. A hospitality prompt asks for check-in dates and room types, run it on a university conversation and it returns nulls or invents a booking. This one reads for a programme, an entry level and an intake.
Hot
Ready to act now: asking how to apply, how to accept an offer, or how to pay an acceptance fee or tuition. Admissions is alerted immediately.
“How do I apply for the September intake, and what's the acceptance fee?”
Warm
Clear interest in studying, entry requirements, whether they qualify, fees, deadlines, a named programme, but no commitment yet.
“Do I qualify for the BSc Nursing with a diploma?”
Cold
General questions and FAQs with no application signal. Answered, logged, and left to warm up.
“Where is your campus located?”
Why this distinction matters
Left on a generic sales rule, an applicant writing “how do I apply?” scores Cold and never becomes a hot lead at all. The one question that most reliably signals a student about to commit would be the one your team never gets alerted about.
Admission Enquiries, nine stages, one board
The three stages a sales pipeline has no equivalent for are the three that decide an intake.
A lead sitting in Offer Made for two weeks is a follow-up by definition, which is why this board carries the offer stages instead of a generic “awaiting response” column.
Marketing, Admissions and Registry on one screen
Each team's numbers, each tile opening the list behind it, every figure labelled with where it came from. Exportable to CSV.
Every admission enquiry that arrived, whatever its status. measured
Hot / Warm / Cold. Opens the board already filtered. inferred
Lifetime, across intakes. staff
Offer Made, with no acceptance recorded. staff
The stage where an intake is most often lost. staff
Converted to Enrolled on the board. staff
Fee due date passed with no payment recorded. staff
Student cases nobody has picked up. measured
The share of replies sent by the Admissions AI. measured
Human replies only, your real admissions performance. measured
Figures shown are illustrative.
Every figure tells you where it came from
A registrar should never have to guess whether a number was observed, typed by a colleague or inferred by a model. Each metric carries its own source, on screen and in the export.
- MeasuredThe system watched it happen. Timestamps and delivery receipts.
- StaffA person set it by hand. Only as current as admissions keeps it.
- InferredA model's reading of the wording. Not a fact the student stated.
Eight journeys that run the funnel for you
Each keys off a date on the student's own record, enquiry date, application date, acceptance deadline, fee due date, registration deadline, session start, so it fires per student, not per campaign. Every message is yours to rewrite.
Enquiry Welcome
Thanks them, asks which programme they are considering, then nudges twice while the enquiry is still warm.
Application Follow-up
Chases the missing document, an incomplete file is the most common reason an application stalls.
Offer Acceptance
Counts down to the acceptance deadline so a held place is not quietly lost.
Fee Reminder
Reminders around a payment date, including a follow-up when nothing is recorded.
Registration Deadline
Drives registration to completion, and warns about late fees when it slips.
Orientation & Resumption
Prepares registered students for arrival, accommodation and the first day.
Referral Request
Asks a settled student to refer a friend. Withheld from anyone with an open case.
Next Intake Win-Back
For students who did not register. Sent to the Lost / declined cohort by hand, on purpose.
Two deliberate design decisions
The referral request is withheld automatically from any student with an open case, you never ask for a recommendation from the one person you have not helped yet. The next-intake win-back is deliberately not automatic: the engine cannot express “did not register”, so an automatic version would win back the students who did. Send it to the Lost / declined cohort by hand.
The message reaches the office that can answer it
Six office queues ship with routing keywords already written. A portal password goes to ICT, a receipt goes to Bursary, a hostel question goes to Accommodation, and the front line stays in copy.
- Marketing
- Admissions
- Registry / Records
- Bursary / Finance
- ICT / Portal Support
- Accommodation & Welfare
21 student & applicant fields
Programme, entry level, mode of study, intake session, enquiry source, assigned team, enrolment status and the six dates the journeys key off, all seeded, all editable.
9 recruitment cohorts
- ✓New enquiries · Applicants in progress
- ✓Offer holders · Accepted, awaiting registration
- ✓Registered students · Deferred to next intake
- ✓Lost / declined · Alumni & referrers · Agents & partners
9 student case categories
- ✓Admissions process · Application portal / ICT
- ✓Fees & payments · Documents & verification
- ✓Programme information · Registration
- ✓Scholarships & funding · Accommodation · Other
Cases, not complaints
Most of what reaches this queue is a stuck application or an unconfirmed payment. Filing those as complaints makes the report read like a service failure when it is ordinary admissions work, so the edition calls them Student Cases and reports them as such.
Answers at 11pm, when prospective students actually ask
Give the AI its own name and voice, and train it on your prospectus, entry requirements, fee schedule, scholarship rules and the FAQs your admissions office answers forty times a week. It replies from that material and nothing else.
- ✓Programmes, entry requirements and fees from your own price list and knowledge base
- ✓Never invents a programme, a fee, a requirement or an offer
- ✓Every AI reply is badged, and the AI is tracked as its own agent in reports
- ✓An officer takes over any conversation in one tap, without switching the AI off elsewhere
- ✓Sensitive numbers are masked before the AI ever processes a message
The guardrail applies here too
A student writing about self-harm, a fire or a medical emergency must never be answered by a machine. Every inbound message is checked against a fixed emergency list before the AI sees it, the automated reply is blocked and a person is alerted. It is not AI-driven, so it still works when an AI provider is down, and it is never gated behind a plan.
Screens your registry staff can read without translating
Every generic term in the product is replaced with the one your institution already uses. Nothing forks underneath, it is the same data, the same inbox, the same reports, read in your own language.
One deliberate choice: the record is called a Student throughout, even when a cold enquiry is not a student yet. The alternative, Prospect before the offer, Student after it, would mean the same record is called two things on two screens, and staff would have to know which. Institutions already say “student” for everyone in the funnel, so the product does too.
- Contacts→Students
- Contact Groups→Cohorts
- Chat Inbox→Enquiry Inbox
- Drip Sequences→Student Journeys
- Complaints→Student Cases
- Touch AI→Admissions AI
- Broadcasts→Student Campaigns
- Custom Fields→Student Fields
- Reports→Recruitment Analytics
- Booking Leads→Admission Enquiries
Higher Education FAQ
Turn enquiries into enrolments, not into silence
Start the free trial and have the funnel, the journeys and the recruitment dashboard ready before your next intake, or book a walkthrough with your own admissions process in mind.