The challenge: forty thousand families, one moment
Srinivasa Academy runs four exam cycles a year for its NEET and JEE cohorts, plus the admissions season that runs May through July. On each result day, the institute has to push individual scorecards, rank, and next-step instructions to roughly forty thousand students and an equal number of parents — in a single burst, ideally before any of them read a leaked screenshot on a WhatsApp group.
The institute’s previous bulk SMS aggregator delivered the batch reliably, but slowly. A clean run took about twelve minutes from the first message to the last. In the context of exam day, those twelve minutes were long enough for families at the end of the queue to hear their neighbour’s result first, for the academy’s phones to start ringing, and for the support team to be fielding rank questions before the actual rank SMS had landed.
The second compounding problem was template approval. For an institute that runs frequent, time-bound admissions campaigns, waiting five to six days for a DLT content template to clear is the difference between a campaign landing on schedule and missing an entire batch. “We had a finance team asking us why we had budgeted for Tuesday and sent on Saturday,” Sharma says. “That is not a messaging problem. That is a business problem wearing a messaging disguise.”
The approach: parallel delivery, a human template desk
Srinivasa moved to SMSLocal for two specific capabilities. The first was parallel multi-operator dispatch — a single campaign is split across operators at the sender side, so the forty-thousand-message burst clears in a single minute rather than twelve. The second was SMSLocal’s template-approval help desk: a human reviewer who sits with institute-side drafts, flags the exact compliance blocker before submission, and cuts the back-and-forth from five rounds to one.
The team added WhatsApp Business API for parent communications alongside SMS. For exam results, the SMS remained the official channel — legally receipt-able, DLT-compliant, auditable. But a parallel WhatsApp message gave parents the rich-content version: a rank summary, a counselling timeline, a link to the detailed report card. Parent engagement on WhatsApp settled at roughly 2.8 times SMS open rates within the first three campaigns.
“We did not migrate SMS to WhatsApp,” Sharma emphasises. “We ran them together. SMS is for trust; WhatsApp is for depth. A parent needs both.”
The results: a quiet results day
On the first full cycle after rollout, the entire forty-thousand-message burst cleared in 82 seconds. By the time the first parents opened the SMS, the last parents already had theirs. The call volume to the academy’s admissions desk during the first two hours of results day fell by 38% year-on-year — a shift Sharma attributes directly to the delivery window.
On the admissions campaigns, the thing that changed was not the click rate. It was the planning cycle. With template approval landing reliably within fourteen hours, the academy’s marketing team started scheduling campaigns a week ahead instead of three. Season-on-season admissions campaign ROI rose 41%, with the institute’s analytics team attributing most of the lift to timing rather than creative.
“A good admissions SMS on Tuesday beats a brilliant one on Friday,” Sharma says. “The boring operational part turns out to be where the ROI lives.”
What’s next
Srinivasa is rolling out SMSLocal’s AI WhatsApp agent for admissions enquiries — the repetitive questions about fees, hostel availability, transport, and scholarship eligibility that consume a counsellor’s day during peak season. The institute’s aim is for counsellors to spend their time on the conversations that actually need judgement.
“An excellent counsellor is rare and valuable,” Sharma says. “We should not be spending that counsellor’s afternoon answering whether the hostel has a mess. We should be spending it helping a child choose between two universities.”
