Ed-tech admissions: one flagged number block, and a week of counsellors talking to themselves
After a big enrolment push, a block of numbers picked up spam tags overnight. The team now checks every number on a schedule instead of waiting for the connect rate to fall.
The morning the connect rate fell off a cliff
An online learning company runs admissions calls in waves. A campaign goes out, counsellors ring a few thousand applicants over four or five days, and the next wave follows a month later. After one particularly heavy wave the connect rate on the following Monday was roughly half of what it had been the week before. Nobody had changed the script, the list, or the hours.
It took three days to find out why. A block of consecutive numbers had collected spam labels on a couple of caller ID apps, apparently because a few thousand people had marked the calls as unwanted. By the time anyone noticed, counsellors had burned through most of the week’s list.
Moving from “check when it hurts” to “check every day”
The operations lead set up a recurring campaign instead. Every number in the dialling pool is checked once a day against Truecaller and Hiya, early, before the first counsellor logs in. The results sit in one place, and a number that turns up labelled gets pulled before it is used.
- A daily schedule meant a bad number lost a morning, not a week.
- Counsellors stopped asking “is the system down?” when the phones went quiet.
- The team learned which of their number ranges aged badly and bought fewer of them.
A small habit that paid for itself
None of this needed new tooling on the dialling side. The check runs on its own and nobody has to remember it. The ops lead says the part she values most is that she can open the results first thing and know, before the day starts, which lines are safe to use.
Industry: online education · Use case: admissions and enrolment calling · Team: operations
If this is your team
Admissions dialling is seasonal, and that is exactly what reputation models punish: a quiet number that suddenly places hundreds of short calls a day looks like a robocaller. Run a free caller ID check on each counsellor line before the campaign starts, then repeat it daily while volume is high. Watch for three things on the result: the name shown, whether the number arrived intact, and any label from Truecaller or the carrier.
Keep the flagged numbers out of rotation rather than trying to “wait it out”; labels rarely clear on their own while the calling pattern continues. The real estate brokerage in our other write-up reached the same conclusion from the other direction: the leads were fine, the number was the problem.
Seeing the same thing on your own numbers?