Academic advisor caseloads have been climbing for years, and at many institutions a single advisor is now responsible for hundreds of students. At that kind of scale, even the most committed teams can’t maintain consistent, proactive contact with everyone who needs support. Signals get missed. Alerts go nowhere. And students disengage before anyone notices.

That's the problem that Case Management is built to solve. Case Management, the agentic backbone of Element for Student Success, offers advisors the system they need to scale student support and the infrastructure required to ensure no student falls through the cracks.

Alerts and Cases: Two Features, One System

Case Management is built around two distinct features that work together.

An alert is the signal that something happened, whether that's a missed assignment, a grade drop, a faculty concern, or a student who said something concerning to a Bolt agent. Alerts move through a defined triage flow and can be customized with institutional types, priorities, and templates.

A case is the living record where everything related to resolving a student's situation is kept in one place. This includes the alerts that triggered it, tasks with owners and due dates, email and SMS conversations, appointments, documents and all the Bolt Agents managing next steps. An assignee owns the case, and subscribers follow for awareness. Custom statuses, types, and priorities then let institutions configure cases around how they actually organize work.

One Team, Three Roles

The model is simple. Faculty flag it, staff own it, and Bolt agents handle the manual processes.

Faculty are the earliest signal in a student's journey. They see missed assignments, empty office hours, and disengagement in class, but they're not usually in the system that tracks it. The Faculty Portal gives them a user-friendly, focused interface where they can find a student and submit an alert in about 30 seconds.

Staff triage alerts, decide what escalates to a case, own the resolution, and drive the relationship. Case Management doesn't take judgment away from them. It gives them a better platform to exercise it.

Bolt agents then handle the routine outreach, sending resources, scheduling appointments, and following up on check-ins.

Bolt Reads the Case Before You Do

The moment a case is created, a Bolt agent starts reading it.

It looks at the case, the related alerts, the student's profile notes, their engagement score, preferred contact time, and, when the LMS integration is active, their course data and grade velocity. 

Within seconds, the assignee has a structured briefing covering what's happening right now, what student context is relevant, and one to four prioritized next steps they can act on directly from the case.

That briefing refreshes automatically. When a new alert comes in, it updates. When a task is completed, it reconsiders. When a new conversation is started, it reads that too. The case is never stale.

The next steps are actionable, not just informational. Staff can add a pre-written case note, send a drafted outreach message, or schedule an appointment, all with one click, without ever leaving the case.

That's the difference between a signal that gets noticed and one that gets acted on, and it's why the gap advisors have been closing alone doesn't have to be theirs to close alone anymore.