How One Simple Conversation Can Do All Your Follow-Up Work
Picture this: your recruitment team spends hours each week manually following up on website inquiries, segmenting email lists, and trying to remember who asked what about which course. Meanwhile, promising prospects slip through the cracks because someone forgot to send that follow-up email.
There’s a better way. What if one quick chat with a student could automatically trigger a whole sequence of personalised follow-ups, moving them from casual browser to event attendee without any manual work from your team?
That’s exactly what modern AI-powered workflows can do. Let me show you how.
Meet Sam (Not a Real Student, But Could Be Any of Yours)
Sam’s browsing your Engineering with Placement Year page at 11pm on a Tuesday. After a few seconds, your AI assistant pops up: “Hi there! Looking for more info about engineering courses?”
Sam types back: “Yeah, what kind of placements do students usually get?”
Your AI instantly pulls relevant information from your website – placement partners, success stories, support services. Before the chat started, Sam filled in a quick form with their name and email. Just basic stuff, no pressure.
That’s all you need to set everything else in motion.
The Magic Happens Behind the Scenes
While Sam’s reading the AI’s helpful response, here’s what’s happening automatically:
- Smart tagging: Sam’s conversation gets tagged with “Engineering interest” and “Placement query”
- List building: Sam joins a pre-built audience for students who’ve engaged via chat
- Follow-up trigger: A workflow kicks in to send an email in two days
- Personalised outreach: The email says something like “Thanks for asking about our industry connections! Want to see our facilities in person? Here’s an invite to our Open Day”
- Friction-free signup: The registration form is already filled with Sam’s details – they just need to pick their preferred session and hit submit
No manual list-building. No remembering to follow up. No copying and pasting email addresses. It all just happens.
Why This Actually Works
This isn’t about bombarding students with sales emails. It’s about being genuinely helpful:
- You’re responding to real interest at the exact moment it happens
- You’re making it easy for students to take the next step
- You’re staying in touch without being pushy
- Your team gets to focus on strategy instead of admin tasks
One moment of curiosity becomes a personalised journey that would normally require several staff members and multiple systems to coordinate.
How It Works in Practice
Within Gecko, these workflows are built right into the conversation platform:
- Chat starts: Student details and interests are automatically captured and tagged
- Chat ends: Follow-up sequences begin based on what was discussed
- Smart logic: Different responses trigger different workflows – engineering students get engineering content, business students get business content
- Full visibility: Your team can see what students are asking about, which topics are popular, and where conversations are converting to applications
You get all the benefits of personalised follow-up without any of the manual work.
It Doesn’t Stop at Email
Once Sam gets that Open Day invite, the automation keeps going:
- If Sam registers: Automatic confirmation email, reminder sequence, and helpful details about what to expect
- If Sam doesn’t respond: Light-touch check-in after a week, or they get added to a calling campaign for personal outreach
- After the event: Post-event survey, personalised follow-up based on which sessions they attended, or invitation to subject-specific information sessions
All triggered by that original 60-second chat conversation.
Working Smarter, Not Harder
This is what modern recruitment looks like: responsive, personalised, and scalable. You’re not replacing the human touch – you’re making sure it happens at the right moments with the right information.
Your AI assistant handles the initial conversation and sets up all the follow-through. Your team gets to focus on the stuff that actually needs a human brain: complex questions, relationship building, and strategic decisions.
One chat leads to one form, one invite, and potentially one enrollment. All without anyone on your team lifting a finger after the initial setup.
Ready to Build Your Own Automated Pipeline?
Test how this could work with your content at ai.geckoengage.com – build your AI assistant in 60 seconds and see how it captures and tags student interests.
Or watch our Art of the Possible webinar for a full walkthrough of these workflows in action.
The technology exists. The question is: how many promising students are you losing to manual processes right now?
