Contact Questions

The purpose of this article is to help you understand and work with contact questions effectively. To help you navigate the article we have broken it down into the following sections:

• What is a contact question?
• Contact forms
• Office-clarifier variables in contact questions
• Use cases for changing a contact question response
• Adding clarifying questions to a contact question

What is a contact question?

Ocelot has created the following ten contact questions to work across all departments:

• Am I going to receive an email or do I wait to be helped?
  
• Can I make an appointment to speak with a counselor?
  
• How can I contact you?
• What are the office hours?
  
• What is your email?
  
• What is your fax number?
  
• What is your mailing address?
  
• What is your phone number?
• Where are you located?
• Who do I contact for questions?

These questions use office-clarifier variables to trigger the virtual assistant to ask the user which office they would like to engage with, before displaying the chosen office's information. 

If your virtual assistant setup includes multiple campuses, users are first asked to select a campus and then asked to select an office. 

For more information about office-clarifier variables, review the variables section of the Creating a Knowledge Base Response article.

Contact forms

A contact form is attached to the contact questions:

• Can I make an appointment to speak with a counselor?
• How can I contact you?
• What are the office hours?
• What is your email?
• What is your phone number?
• Who do I contact for questions?

When a user asks one of these questions, the virtual assistant will provide the selected office's contact information, followed by the prompt "Would you like me to help you contact someone?" 

If the user selects yes, they will be prompted to provide their personal contact information. Completed contact forms and the accompanying conversation transcript are emailed to the address specified in an institution's setup documents. The message sender is [email protected] and the subject is "Virtual Assistant Submission from 'Student Name'."

If the user selects no, the virtual assistant will remain available for additional questions.

To change the recipient of your contact forms, or to have the contact form option removed from a contact question, please submit a Support Ticket.

Office-clarifier variables in contact questions

Office-clarifier variables are identified by having the curly bracket prefix !{office}. Editing or removing an office-clarifier variable from a response will impact the functionality of that response for all offices using the virtual assistant.

Best Practice: Ocelot recommends that an Administrative-level user lock questions containing office-clarifier variables. Step-by-step instructions for locking knowledge base questions are available in the Content Locking article.

Use cases for changing a contact question response

In some cases, a school may wish to change the response to a contact question based on their organizational structure, to more efficiently serve users. Some examples include: 

• Schools with a single main contact phone number or email address
  
• Schools with One-Stop offices
  
• Schools combining multiple functional areas under a single department, such as "Admissions & Records" or "Financial Aid & Billing"
• Schools wishing to route a portion of all users to a single email, phone number, or office for another reason

These and other situations in which a school wishes to route a portion or all users to a single email, phone number, or department outside of the traditional office setup can be updated by Ocelot staff. 

To request changes to office contact information (phone number, email, etc.), please submit a Support Ticket.

Adding clarifying questions to a contact question

Contact questions will automatically ask the virtual assistant user the campus (if applicable), and then the office and provide the office-specific response based on the variables within the question. 

There should not be the need to attach clarifying questions to a contact question. If you would like to attach a clarifying question to a contact question, please contact your Client Success Manager to discuss the use case.