Job · Admissions enquiries
The enquiry that arrives at 00:41 gets answered at 00:41.
A parent asks about places and fees in the middle of the night. Scout answers from the approved prospectus with the source named, refuses to put a fee in chat, captures the year group and the entry term onto the contact, and books a campus tour. The admissions office reads it at nine, already qualified.
عرض توضيحي ببيانات وهمية.
What it looks like
Cairo Learning, 00:41: places confirmed, fee refused, tour booked.
The parent opened the conversation, so the whole exchange runs inside the 24-hour service window.
00:41 — the enquiry arrives
“Hi, is there still space in Year 4 for September? And how much are the fees?” Two questions: one Scout can answer, one it must not.
Scout answers from the prospectus, with the source named
It cites admissions-2027.md and year-groups, and confirms Year 4 has places for September 2027. The parent can see where the answer came from, and so can you.
The fee question is refused on purpose
“Fees are confirmed in writing after the assessment, so I can’t quote a figure here — but I can book you a campus tour. Which day suits?” A guardrail, not a gap in the knowledge base.
The qualification lands on the contact
Year group 4 · Entry September 2027 · Source: Instagram ad. Custom fields, filterable, not three sentences buried in a transcript.
A campus tour is booked and a person is told
Campus tour booked · Tuesday 11:00 · Admissions team notified. The office opens at nine to a qualified enquiry with a tour already in the diary.
The problem
Admissions runs on a working day. Parents do not.
Enquiries arrive at night and in the few days after a campaign runs, and they all land in one inbox looking the same.
- The peak is outside office hours
- Parents write after the children are asleep, and in the days after an ad runs. An enquiry that waits until nine competes with every other school the parent messaged that night.
- The inbox is a queue in arrival order
- A parent asking about a year group with places and a parent asking about a year group that is full sit next to each other, in the order they wrote, not the order that matters.
- The same six questions every time
- Year group, entry term, curriculum, term dates, whether there is space, what happens next. An admissions officer retypes them, and the answers end up in a thread nobody can filter.
- A fee quoted in chat becomes a promise
- A figure typed casually at 23:00 is the figure the family expects to see on the offer. Fees are contractual, and chat is not where they belong.
How it works
The mechanism, step by step.
Four pieces: approved knowledge, a scenario you wrote, a guardrail that refuses, and a tool that books.
- Knowledge is the approved prospectus and nothing else
- The admissions pack, the year-group table and the term dates you upload. Scout answers from those documents and cites them; a question outside them goes to a person rather than to a guess.
- The qualifying questions are a scenario the school writes
- Year group, entry term, current school, how they heard about you — in the order admissions agreed on, written down where anyone can read and change it.
- Capture is structured
- Answers land on contact fields, so “every Year 4 enquiry from the September campaign” is a filter rather than an afternoon of reading threads.
- The fee refusal is a guardrail
- Fees, discounts and scholarship amounts are blocked at the point of sending, regardless of how the question is phrased. The refusal is the designed behaviour and it shows in the trace.
- The tour slot is a tool you configure
- An HTTPS endpoint of yours returns the open tour slots and takes the booking. There is no built-in SIS integration: you point Scout at a URL you control, with the auth and the fields you choose.
- Handoff keeps the thread
- The admissions officer opens the same conversation with the captured fields beside it, reads what Scout said and to which document, and carries on.
What it costs to send
A midnight reply is a service message.
The parent writes first, which opens a 24-hour window. Answering, qualifying and booking inside that window are service messages. Only the follow-up a day later is a template.
- Answering the 00:41 enquiry
- Service message
- A message from the customer opens a 24-hour window. Meta began charging for service messages on 1 October 2026, with the first 1,000 per business phone number per month free.
- Tour reminder after the window closes (Egypt)
- $0.0036
- A reminder about a tour the family already booked is a utility template.
- Open-day campaign to past enquiries (Egypt)
- $0.0644
- An invitation to an open day is promotional, so it is a marketing template — about eighteen times the utility rate.
Source: Meta WhatsApp per-message rate card, Egypt, retrieved 2 November 2026; category, window and service-message rules from Meta developer documentation.
Meta bills these fees, not us, and we never mark them up. BlendDesk charges for seats and AI resolutions.
Control
It answers questions. It does not make offers.
Admissions is a contractual process. The assistant's job is to get the family to the right conversation, not to pre-empt it.
- No fee or discount outside a written offer
- No tuition figure, no sibling discount, no scholarship amount in chat. Those arrive in writing, after the assessment, from the school.
- No place promised
- Scout can say a year group currently has places. It cannot say a child has one. Allocation is a human decision.
- No assessment outcome
- Results, rankings and admissions decisions are never delivered or hinted at by the assistant, however the question is asked.
- No discussion of another family's child
- The assistant answers in the context of the contact it is talking to. Another applicant's status is not available in that conversation.
- Every run is readable
- Which document was cited, which guardrail fired, which field was written, which slot was booked — one trace per conversation, after the fact.
Source: WhatsApp Business Messaging Policy, updated 23 September 2026.
What you need
Mostly documents you already have, plus one endpoint.
- The approved prospectus or admissions pack, as the only source Scout may quote.
- Your year groups, available places by entry term, and the term dates.
- The qualifying questions admissions agrees on, and the contact fields to hold the answers.
- The refusals: fees, discounts, scholarships, places and assessment outcomes.
- A tour-availability endpoint over HTTPS that returns slots and accepts a booking.
Questions schools actually ask.
What happens when a parent insists on a fee figure?
Scout repeats that fees are confirmed in writing after the assessment and offers the next concrete step — a tour or a call with admissions. The guardrail does not soften because the question is asked twice.
Does it connect to our student information system?
Not out of the box, and we do not claim a built-in integration. You expose an HTTPS endpoint — tour slots, year-group availability — and register it as a tool with the auth and fields you choose.
Can it answer in Arabic and English?
Yes. It answers in the language the parent writes in, from whichever approved documents you have uploaded in that language.
Who decides which questions get asked?
You do. They live in a scenario your admissions team edits, and you rehearse a change against past conversations in the playground before it goes live.
Does the parent know they are talking to an assistant?
Yes. Scout introduces itself as one and says when a person is taking over. Pretending is how a school loses a family's trust in the first message.
What if the enquiry is about something the prospectus does not cover?
It says so and hands the thread to admissions with the question intact, rather than inventing an answer that the school then has to walk back.
Answer tonight's enquiries tonight.
Book a demo, bring your prospectus and your year-group table, and we will have a midnight enquiry answered against a test number before the call ends.