Student enquiries has a new frontier, and it's moving faster than universities can follow.

Over the past 6 months I’ve worked directly with two universities, and interviewed a further six, to help redesign student enquiry processes. It's high-volume and complex nature makes it fundamental to the student experience, and critical to administrative efficiency.

For example, one of those two universities I worked with processed over 700,000 enquiries last year. That’s everything from “when is my exam happening” to “what are the implications on my career if I switch my major”. Finding a way to efficiently triage those queries, and get students high-quality responses, is a critical challenge for most institutions.

Looking at sector and out-of-sector best practice, it’s clear that there is a very wide spectrum of maturity in enquiries management. On one hand, the biggest private sector organisations are implementing “AI Concierges” where AI agents handle most enquiries in a fully automated way. On the other hand, some universities are still dealing with enquiries through highly decentralised, manual processes that inevitably involve duplication of effort (and don’t necessarily get students the answers they need, when they need them).

In this article I want to unpack what is driving those differences, and what institutions can do differently.

For institutions earlier in the journey, "good" looks structural before it looks technological

Moving up the maturity curve rarely starts with new technology. It starts with:

• A single front door - one entry point for enquiries, rather than dozens of disconnected faculty inboxes and phone lines students have to guess between.

• A genuine enquiries hub - a centralised team with the authority and training to resolve most enquiries on first contact, freeing specialist and academic staff for the work only they can do.

• A tiered triage model - clear rules for what's resolved centrally versus genuinely escalated, with the data to hold both sides of that line accountable.

Several Australian universities have made exactly this shift in recent years, moving to centralised, tiered service hubs backed by CRM platforms to bring consistency to a previously fragmented experience.[1]

The frontier is moving rapidly

For universities already operating with a high level of service maturity, I’ve noticed four key trends which are reshaping what "good" may look like next for them.

1.      AI concierges have already proven themselves at scale within the private sector. Klarna's enquiries assistant handled 2.3 million customer conversations in its first month alone - the equivalent of roughly 700 full-time staff - cutting resolution times from 11 minutes down to under 2, while more complex and premium enquiries are still escalated to specialist human staff.[2] Universities doesn't need to mimic this entirely; but instead adapt components of it, using the same tiering they already have and building it into an automated off-the-shelf concierge tool. The real challenge here is whether they have the structural elements in place to allow this.

2.      Unified, connected case management is the new baseline. Institutions have moved past treating a CRM as a system of record for enquiries, and towards a single connected view of every student interaction across systems - SMS, LMS and enquiry platforms alike. This isn't optional groundwork: systems and AI tools are only ever as good as the data underneath them, and institutions can't personalise or predict what they can't see in one place.

3.      Agentic AI is moving enquiries from reactive to proactive. The University of Michigan's "Go Blue" app gives students, faculty and staff a mobile AI assistant trained on Michigan-specific knowledge, handling everything from class information to campus navigation, with voice and image input built in.[3] Western Sydney University's "Western 100" initiative, developed in partnership with Microsoft, goes a step further: a platform designed to deliver just-in-time information during a student's first 100 days, and flag disengagement to staff before a student has to ask for help.[4] This is the leading edge of the spectrum within the sector - enquiry handling shifting from "answer the question" to "anticipate the need."

4.      Enquiries are moving to where students already are. Email and web forms remain the default enquiry channel for most institutions, but examples like the University of East Anglia's use of WhatsApp for open days and, increasingly, ongoing student support, show genuine appetite for meeting students on the platforms they use daily, rather than the ones institutions find easiest to manage.[5]

It isn't only a digital story

The same "single front door" principle reshaping digital enquiries applies physically too. The University of Queensland's Student Central makes the point well: administration, employability and wellbeing support co-located across connected buildings, with a deliberately designed journey from arrival through to a dedicated space for decompressing after a difficult appointment.[6] Students shouldn't have to know which building solves which problem, whether they're online or on campus.

In modelling AptoNow has done for a separate Queensland-based university considering a similar investment, even a modest improvement in physical space for student retention translated into a multi-million-dollar annual revenue impact, a reminder that physical service design isn't a soft consideration, it's a financial one.

Where does your institution sit?

This is exactly the question AptoNow's own Service Maturity Framework is built to answer. We benchmark institutions against four stages:

The breadth of this spectrum is exactly why there's no template answer to "what should we do about student enquiries?" The right next step depends entirely on where an institution currently sits, and what's actually holding it back from moving further along.

If you're not sure exactly where your institution sits, or what the highest-value next step looks like, that's exactly the conversation we're set up to have.

Reach out to the AptoNow team to discuss how we can help.

[1] See, for example, UNSW Sydney's move to a centralised, tiered student services model integrating CRM-based enquiry management with specialist faculty support (Inside UNSW, "A revised model for student services").

[2] Klarna International, "Klarna AI assistant handles two-thirds of customer service chats in its first month," February 2024.

[3] University of Michigan, "New AI-powered mobile app launched for U-M community," The University Record, February 2025.

[4] Western Sydney University, "Western Sydney University and Microsoft join forces to prepare students for an AI-driven world," October 2025.

[5] Pickle Jar Communications, "WhatsApp in higher education: a UEA case study."

[6] Hassell, Student Central Case Study (2022); University of Queensland, Student Central.