An AI chatbot for education admin — your prospectus, finally able to reply
CustomerBot reads your prospectus, fee schedule, term dates and policy PDFs, then answers applicants in their own language at whatever hour they ask — and tells you which questions your documents fail to cover.
- ¿Cuándo cierra el plazo de solicitud?Spanish
- 入学要件は何ですか？Japanese
- Quels sont les frais de scolarité ?French
- क्या छात्रवृत्ति उपलब्ध है?Hindi
Two things are called an education chatbot
One teaches. One answers the enquiry inbox. They are bought by different people for different reasons, and only one of them is this.
Teaching and tutoring AI
Subject tutors, practice and feedback, personalised learning paths, marking support. Built around pedagogy and student outcomes, and usually procured by academic staff.
Not us. If you are looking for something to help students learn a subject, this is the wrong page and those tools are a genuinely different discipline.
Admissions and student services
The enquiry desk: entry requirements, fees, deadlines, term dates, how to apply, what to bring, where to submit something, who to contact.
This is us. It is the half that generates the repetitive enquiry volume, and the half that spikes every clearing and enrolment season.
Six jobs across the student journey
From the first comparison at eleven at night to the term-time signposting that never quite stops.
Entry requirements, course content, fees and funding
Prospective students compare several institutions in one evening. An unanswered question at 11pm is an application that goes elsewhere.
International equivalencies and English language requirements
The highest-volume international question, asked across every timezone, and answerable directly from your published tables.
How and where to submit, and what documents are needed
Process questions, not judgement calls. Publishing them once and answering them a thousand times is exactly what this is for.
Deadlines and key dates
The question with the highest cost of being wrong, which is why it must come from a page you control rather than a model’s recollection.
Registration steps, induction, what to bring, accommodation
A predictable seasonal spike that arrives at the same time as everyone being busiest.
Term dates, policies, and where to find the right service
Signposting. Most students do not need an answer so much as to be pointed at the right office.
Three moments in the year that break the inbox
Open days & enquiry season
VolumeThe same forty questions arrive a thousand times: entry requirements, deadlines, what a conditional offer means, whether the course runs in January. All of them are answered somewhere in a document you have already published.
Application deadlines
UrgencyQuestions cluster in the last 72 hours and half of them arrive at night. An assistant that answers the deadline question correctly at 2am is worth more than a form that promises a reply in three working days.
Enrolment & induction
RepetitionFees, instalment plans, ID requirements, term dates, where to collect a card. Different audience, same shape of question — and the answers live in the same handbooks.
Start with the eight documents you already have
Institutions usually have far more written down than their websites make findable. Training is mostly an exercise in gathering what exists — the prospectus, the handbooks, the fee tables — rather than writing anything new.
Storage is 5 MB per assistant on the free plan and 40 MB on paid plans, which is a great deal more text than it sounds — PDFs are indexed as text, not stored as page images.
Prospectus PDF
Course structure, modules, contact hours
Fee schedule
Including instalment terms and deposits
Entry requirements page
Per course, per route
Term dates
The single most-asked page on most sites
Policy handbooks
Attendance, appeals, deferral
Accommodation guide
Costs, deadlines, what is included
Scholarship criteria
Eligibility written the way you mean it
Q&A from the enquiries inbox
Wording you already trust
Draw the line before you launch
The assistant should be confident about published facts and firmly unhelpful about individual circumstances. That boundary is set in the system prompt and enforced by handover.
It should answer
- Deadlines, term dates and fee amounts
- Entry requirements as published
- What a document or policy actually says
- How and where to submit something
It should hand over
- Anything about a specific application’s status
- Appeals, mitigating circumstances, welfare
- Fee waivers and discretionary decisions
- Anything a member of staff must sign off
One knowledge base, ninety-five languages
International recruitment is where this stops being a convenience. The assistant reads your English documents and answers in whatever language the applicant wrote in, so a prospective student in São Paulo gets the same fee information as one in Sheffield, at the same speed.
How multilingual answering worksQuestions from admissions teams
What is an AI chatbot for education?
The phrase covers two different products. One is teaching-focused: subject tutoring, practice and feedback, personalised learning. The other is student services: answering the admissions and administrative questions that fill an enquiry inbox — entry requirements, fees, deadlines, how to apply, term dates. CustomerBot is the second. It is trained on your prospectus and policy documents and answers from them, rather than from a general model’s idea of how universities work.
Is this a tutoring or teaching tool?
No. It does not teach, tutor, mark work or adapt to a learner, and it should not be positioned to students as something that will. It answers institutional questions from your own published material. If you want AI in the classroom, that is a separate procurement with a very different set of questions to ask about it.
Is it safe to put in front of school-age students?
Treat that as a decision requiring your own safeguarding review, not a feature claim. Two practical points: scope it to administrative information rather than anything pastoral, and write the handover message so that a student raising a welfare, bullying or safety concern is routed to a named human immediately rather than engaged in conversation. A chat widget must never sit between a young person and a safeguarding lead. On a public-facing prospectus or admissions site, aimed at applicants and parents, these questions are much simpler.
Is there a free plan we can pilot with?
Yes — one assistant and 50 conversations a month with no card, which is enough to index a prospectus and test it against the questions your admissions team actually receives. Pilot it out of season if you can, so that the first real test is not clearing week.
Can it read our prospectus PDF, including the tables?
Yes. PDFs are uploaded, parsed and chunked into the same index as your web pages, and image-heavy pages are put through extraction so text inside diagrams and scanned tables is not lost. Fee tables and module grids are the most common thing people upload and the most common thing they ask about.
How does it handle questions from international applicants?
It detects the language of the question and answers in it — over 95 languages — drawing on English source documents. You do not need to translate the prospectus to serve an applicant writing in Portuguese.
What stops it giving a student the wrong deadline?
Answers are retrieved from your documents and cite what they came from, so a wrong answer is traceable to a wrong or outdated page rather than to a black box. When a deadline changes, update the page and re-crawl — the assistant is corrected everywhere at once.
Can it see student records?
Not unless you deliberately connect one. By default it only knows the content you trained it on. If you do connect an endpoint as an API tool, treat it as you would any other integration and scope it to data you are comfortable exposing in a public chat window.
Can different departments manage their own assistant?
Team access is granted per assistant with owner, admin, editor and viewer roles, so admissions and student services can run separate assistants with separate knowledge bases and separate people.
Does it work on our existing CMS?
One script tag before the closing body tag. It works on WordPress, Drupal, Squarespace, Wix, Webflow and hand-rolled sites alike — there is nothing to install server-side.
Try it on the term dates page
It is the page your visitors ask about most and the one that is hardest to find. Train it on that and see how it answers.
Start free