Student Services Answer Desk

At a college or university, enrollment services, registrar and financial aid offices face their heaviest load in the weeks around registration, when many students ask about holds, deadlines, transcripts and aid at once. Many of these questions are answered in the catalog or a handbook, but some need a record check or an action that a chat reply cannot take. This Botlit concept shows a student services answer desk that answers from the institution's own knowledge bases, checks the student's record, and starts a workflow with a named owner when a question needs action.

The illustration shows the Conversations view of a sample Student Services Answer Desk bot, badged active and retrieval enabled. A narrow column carries tiles for questions answered, conversations handed to staff and questions with no matching passage, above a list of conversation topics: a registration hold, a withdrawal deadline, a transcript request, a financial aid appeal tagged as routed to staff, and a course overload.

In the selected conversation, a student says there is a hold on the account and registration opens Monday. The desk explains that it is an advising hold, released once the student meets an advisor for spring planning, which can be booked from the advising page, and cites the undergraduate catalog section on holds and the advising handbook. When the student asks the desk to release the hold, it says it cannot and that it has asked the advisor's office to review it, and a tag shows that a FluidGrids advising hold review workflow was started, with its run number.

The right-hand column shows where the context came from. A record check in BuildMyIQ shows the student's enrollment status, number of enrolled sections and cohort, and a hold status line notes the hold was received through a FluidGrids request. The design has the desk check BuildMyIQ under the student's own permissions, receive hold status from the registrar's system through FluidGrids, and start FluidGrids workflows such as an advising hold review or a transcript request, while Botlit handles the conversation. A Knowledge bases card lists the undergraduate catalog, financial aid handbook and registrar FAQ as ready, and a Handoff rules card sends aid appeals and personal concerns to staff and offers a person when no passage matches. Every conversation is designed to be recorded for review. The concept is aimed at enrollment services, registrar and financial aid staff, and the student success teams who work with them.