By business type
Two audiences, one website: what a university assistant handles
A university site serves two people with almost nothing in common. One is deciding whether to apply and wants entry requirements, fees, funding and somewhere to live. The other is already enrolled and wants a deadline, a form or a department phone number. An assistant can serve both from published material. What it cannot do is tell either of them what will happen in their own case.
What people actually type
Not the questions on your FAQ page. These are the phrasings that arrive in a chat window, lowercase and unpunctuated, and the material has to answer them in those words rather than in yours.
- what are the entry requirements for computer science
- is my diploma accepted as equivalent
- when is the application deadline
- how much are the tuition fees for international students
- do you offer scholarships
- how do i apply for accommodation
- can i defer my offer for a year
- do i need a visa to study here
- what score do i need in english
- when is the next open day
- how do i contact my department office
- i am struggling and need to talk to someone
What to feed it
In rough order of how much work each one takes off the front desk. Every one of these is a document you almost certainly already have.
| Course pages with their entry requirements | The requirements written per course, including subject prerequisites and the grade profile, rather than a single institutional summary. Applicants ask about one course, and an assistant answering from a generic page will confidently give them the wrong bar. |
|---|---|
| Your qualification equivalency tables | The country by country mapping of school leaving qualifications to your own offer levels. This is the highest volume international question you get, it is genuinely hard to find on most university sites, and it is already written down somewhere in admissions. |
| The admissions cycle calendar | Application opening and closing dates, the deferral window, the deadline for supporting documents, when decisions are usually released, and the dates for any clearing or late entry route you run. Dates carry a year on them, which is exactly why this has to be the version you maintain. |
| Tuition fees, funding and payment terms | Fee levels by fee status and by course, instalment options, the deposit for international offer holders, and every scholarship or bursary with its own eligibility criteria and closing date. Fees and funding are one decision to the applicant even though they are two departments to you. |
| Accommodation guidance | Hall types with their rents and contract lengths, the application window, whether any guarantee applies to first year students, and what happens to somebody who applies late. Housing is often the question that decides whether an offer is accepted. |
| International student and visa guidance | Your own published guidance on the documents you issue, the English language evidence you accept, and the arrival and enrolment process. Index the process you control. Do not index a summary of another country's immigration rules, because those change without telling you. |
What has to reach a person
Whether a particular applicant will be accepted
This sits underneath a very large share of the messages a university site receives, and it arrives disguised. Somebody types their grades and asks whether they are enough. Somebody lists a qualification you have never heard of and asks whether it counts. The assistant can quote the published requirement. It must not weigh a person against it.
The reason is not caution for its own sake. An admissions decision is made by people applying criteria consistently across a cohort, and an assistant that tells one applicant they look fine has effectively made an offer in your name to somebody who may later be rejected. Have it state the published requirement, say that admissions assess each application individually, and offer to pass the question to the admissions team.
Visa and immigration questions about an individual
Whether somebody can bring a dependant, whether previous study affects eligibility, whether a refusal on an earlier application matters, how many hours they may work. These are legal questions about one person's circumstances, and the rules differ by country and change between intakes.
The safe line is that the assistant may describe the documents the university issues and the process the university runs, and nothing about the applicant's own immigration position. Name the international office in the refusal so the question lands somewhere.
Wellbeing, mental health and safeguarding disclosures
Students disclose in whichever channel is open, and a chat widget at two in the morning is often the open channel. A message that mentions self harm, an assault, harassment or a crisis has to produce a human route immediately, not a page reference.
Put that wording in the refusal message itself rather than trusting composition, and put the out of hours number in it. Universities generally have a named support service and a security or duty line, so name both.
Anything about a named person's application or record
Whether an offer has been sent, whether documents arrived, what a grade was, whether somebody is enrolled. The assistant has no access to your student system and cannot look anybody up unless you separately connect a data source, and even then, confirming anything about a named individual to an anonymous visitor would be a disclosure.
The wording when it cannot help
This is the message the assistant returns when nothing in the material covers the question. It is written by you rather than generated, which matters here more than anywhere: it is the sentence a stranger reads at the worst moment.
I cannot tell you whether your own application will be successful, and I cannot help with visa or personal circumstances. I can give you the published entry requirements, fees, funding and deadlines. If you would like the admissions team to look at your situation, leave your name and email with a short note and I will pass it on.
It names what it cannot do, gives the route that can, and offers to take a message. A refusal that only apologises leaves the person exactly where they started.
Rules and duties that shape the answer
Published admissions information is a promise
In many countries the material a university publishes about a course, its content and its entry criteria is treated as information a student relies on when choosing, and consumer protection rules apply to it. An assistant answering in the institution's name is publishing in the institution's name.
That argues for indexing the course and fee pages you actually maintain rather than a marketing summary, and for making the assistant quote rather than paraphrase wherever a number is involved.
Student records sit under data protection law
Applications, grades, fee accounts and support records are personal data in every regime that has one, and some of it is sensitive. The practical rule works everywhere: if the answer would be identical for everybody who asked, the assistant can give it, and if it depends on who is asking, it cannot.
Almost everything here has a year attached
Fees, deadlines, scholarship rounds and entry requirements all change by intake, and a university site keeps several years of them live at once. An assistant reading an archived page will answer with last year's deadline in a completely convincing tone.
Point the crawl at the current cycle, and where old cycles have to stay published, make sure the year appears in the visible text of the page rather than only in the URL, because the text is what the answer is built from.
Never, whatever the documents say
Out of bounds
- Whether a named applicant's qualifications are good enough for an offer.
- Whether somebody will get a visa, or what their immigration status allows.
- The status of an individual application, offer or supporting document.
- What a student's grade, fee account or support record contains.
- Advice on a wellbeing or safeguarding disclosure beyond naming the support route.
Playbooks for this trade
One page per recurring question, written for a university rather than in general. Each carries the phrasings, the material that answers them, a reply worth copying, and the line where it has to stop.
- Tuition fee questions, where the right answer depends on who is askingFees change by nationality, year of entry and course. Here is how an assistant answers without giving the wrong figure to the wrong applicant.
- Open days, tours and visit days, and how to route each oneOpen days, campus tours and applicant days are three different things. An assistant that can explain each one saves the enquiries team most of its inbox.
- Access questions from applicants, and the line between information and supportTwo different questions arrive as one: is the campus accessible, and will I be supported. The second must never be answered from a web page.
- Data requests on a university site, and why silence is the failureDeletion, access and correction requests arrive on the enquiries channel with a legal clock attached. Explain the route and never close the conversation.
- The three things a university assistant must never try to handleWellbeing, visas and anything about an individual application. Three triggers that must be rules rather than judgements on a university site.
- Two university waiting lists that behave nothing like each otherA hall waiting list and a full module are two queues with two owners. What can be said about each, and what the guarantee does not cover.
- A first visit to a campus that is not in one placeWhich site, which building, the shuttle between them and what a new arrival needs on the day. All published, usually on four unlinked pages.
- Whose hours does the visitor actually mean?The library, the department office and the service desk keep three sets of hours, and every one of them changes in vacation. What to index.
- Where to leave the car, and why the answer is usually nowhereStudent parking is usually restricted, the shuttle covers the gap, and post to halls needs its own address. Publishable, rarely published.
- Three procedures, and the cost of sending somebody to the wrong oneA complaint about a service, an appeal against a mark and a report about a person are three procedures. Naming the right one is the whole job.
- Which bill does the student actually mean?Tuition and hall rent are separate schedules with separate offices, and a sponsor is invoiced against a letter. None of it needs an account opened.
- How much comes back depends on a date, not on attendanceFee liability is set by the date a withdrawal is recorded, not by teaching attended. Everything else in this answer follows from that.
- An offer holder cannot log in because there is nothing to log in toThe applicant portal, the student single sign on and alumni access are separate. Most access questions are really about which one somebody holds.
- The reset link works, but not for the people who are askingSelf service reset works only where recovery details were set at enrolment. Everyone else needs an identity check no widget can perform.
- A technical fault with a deadline attached to itSome campus IT questions are ordinary and one is not. What to say when a fault has an assessment clock running behind it.
- An empty timetable is usually a step, not a faultOnline enrolment, the document check, module registration and the card each unlock the next. Most questions here are ordering questions.
- A teacher asks whether they can bring a year groupA teacher bringing a year group needs ratios, a risk assessment and a coach drop off. None of that lives on the open day page.
- A student says they want to leave. Which of these do they mean?Interrupting study is not withdrawing, and neither one ends a room contract. What a student has to do, and who has to be told.
Questions
- Can it tell an applicant whether their qualification is equivalent?
- It can quote your published equivalency table, which is a statement about a qualification rather than about a person. The moment the question becomes whether their particular combination of grades clears the bar, it should hand over to admissions. Write that distinction into the refusal wording explicitly, because applicants will push on it.
- Will it be able to check whether an offer has been made?
- No. It has no access to your admissions system and cannot look up an individual unless you separately connect a data source. On its own it answers from published pages, so the honest reply to a status question is the published decision timeline plus a route to a person.
- How do we keep it off last year's fee pages?
- Crawl the current cycle and leave archived cycles out of the indexed material. If old pages have to stay live, make sure each one states its academic year in the visible text, because the assistant answers from what the page says rather than from where it sits in your site structure.
- Is a chat assistant appropriate given student wellbeing risk?
- It is, provided the crisis route is built into the refusal rather than composed on the fly. Write the message so a student who mentions distress gets the support service, the out of hours number and the emergency number in the first reply, before anything else.
Keep reading
- For a private schoolAdmissions timelines, fees, bursaries and uniform lists are safe ground for a school assistant. Anything about a named pupil or applicant is not.
- For a driving schoolLesson prices, block booking, instructor coverage and what a learner needs before a first lesson, without claiming a pass rate or judging readiness.
- For a online courseWhat is included, how long access lasts, refund and cooling off rights, and the honest limit that it cannot see a learner's own progress.
- Every business typeWhat an assistant has to know before it can answer for a trade.
Try it on your own material
Upload a document or point it at your site, paste one line of HTML, then ask it something only your business could answer.