Most of what we publish here is about CAT prep. This one is about how Percentilers itself runs, because students ask us a version of the same question every admission season: "I filled your form at 11 pm, how did someone call me at 9 the next morning?"
The short answer is that we stopped running admissions on Excel and WhatsApp forwards and built our own system. It is called OpsLoop. This post is the honest story of why.
The problem: enquiries were dying quietly
In 2025 our enquiries came from five places at once: Instagram ads, the website form, Google, walk-ins, and students forwarding our number to friends. Each landed somewhere different. Ad leads went to a sheet. Website leads went to an inbox. WhatsApp enquiries sat on one counsellor's phone.
Nobody was ignoring students on purpose. The leads simply had no single place to live, so the follow-up depended on whoever happened to notice. When we finally audited a month of enquiries, a large share had never received a second call. For a coaching institute, that second call is where most enrolments actually happen.
We later wrote up the pattern in detail as lead leakage, because it turned out every institute we spoke to had the same gap.
What we tried first
We trialled the usual CRMs. Two things did not fit a coaching institute:
- Per-seat pricing. Admission season means adding counsellors for three months. Paying per user punished us for staffing up exactly when we needed to.
- WhatsApp as an afterthought. Indian students reply on WhatsApp, not email. Most tools treated WhatsApp as a bolt-on integration rather than the main channel.
What we built
OpsLoop started as an internal tool and became a product once other institutes asked for it. The parts that matter day to day:
- One inbox. Every enquiry, from any source, lands in one list and is assigned to a counsellor within seconds. No more "whose lead is this?"
- Auto-dialer. Counsellors tap to call, log the outcome in one click, and the next callback schedules itself.
- WhatsApp follow-ups. Approved templates go out on a sequence, and the full reply thread sits next to the student's record. The counsellor sees the whole conversation, not a screenshot.
- Leak Audit. Every week I get a report of leads that went cold and callbacks that were missed. It is the single most useful thing in the system, because it tells me where to look before the month is over.
It is priced flat per institute rather than per seat, which is a direct result of the per-seat problem above.
What changed for students
Response time is the visible change. An enquiry at night is called the next morning by the right counsellor, with the student's course interest already on screen. Students who want to think for a week get a reminder on WhatsApp rather than being forgotten. Nobody gets three calls from three different people.
The invisible change is that our counsellors spend their time counselling instead of copying numbers between apps.
If you run an institute
We now offer OpsLoop to other coaching institutes, and the coaching institute CRM page explains the setup. Most teams are live in a day because the templates are the ones we use ourselves. There is a 14-day free trial and no card is required.
If you are a student reading this: nothing changes for you, except that when you fill our form, someone will actually call you back.