State of Admissions Follow-up in India 2026

Key findings

Who has a system to catch enquiries

An enquiry form on its own is not follow-up. Someone has to see the lead, call it and keep calling until the student decides. Research on online sales leads found that firms which responded within an hour were nearly seven times as likely to qualify a lead as those that waited longer [1]. A CRM or admissions tool is what makes that speed possible at volume: it routes the enquiry to a counsellor, alerts them and records every attempt.

Universities are well covered: more than half load an admissions tool on the homepage itself, usually an application or enquiry widget. Coaching institutes, which run on the same enquiry-to-counselling cycle and often at higher volume per centre, mostly do not. Their enquiries arrive through website forms, Google Forms, phone calls and WhatsApp, and in most cases we found nothing on the site that would put them in one queue.

Which tools they use

Meritto, formerly NoPaperForms [4], is the default for private universities: it appears on 74 university homepages, more than every other tool in the sample combined. Coaching institutes that use a tool at all are split across general CRMs, with Meritto (9) and Zoho (8) ahead of LeadSquared (5) and ExtraaEdge (4). 11 universities load more than one tool, typically an application platform beside a separate CRM or marketing suite.

Paying for enquiries with nothing visible to catch them

A Meta Pixel [2] or Google Ads tag [3] on a homepage usually means the institute buys ads that send people to its site, or measures and retargets those who come. We counted the institutes that carry one of those tags and checked whether the same homepage loads any lead-management tool.

Coaching institutes advertise at the same rate as universities: 33% carry a Meta Pixel and 27% a Google Ads tag, against 34% and 25% for universities. The difference is what sits behind the ad. Of the 108 advertising institutes with no tool we could detect, 96 are coaching institutes. For them, the cost per enquiry is paid up front and the return depends on a counsellor noticing a form submission or a missed call in time. Only 9% of coaching homepages and 5% of university homepages even run a chat widget.

How easy it is to reach admissions

Universities treat admissions as a department with its own inbox and phone line: 82% publish an admissions number and 67% an admissions email. Most coaching institutes publish one general number or a reception desk, and 5% publish both an admissions email and an admissions number. When the only route in is a shared line, a parent who calls during a busy hour can easily go unanswered, because nobody owns the missed call.

What this means for admissions teams

• Put every enquiry in one queue. Website forms, ad lead forms, missed calls and WhatsApp messages should land in the same list with an owner, not in separate inboxes.
• Measure time to first call. It is the number the research on lead response points to [1], and few teams track it. Set a target in minutes and an alert when it is missed.
• Publish a number that belongs to admissions. A labelled admissions line or WhatsApp number tells parents where to go and gives the team a queue it is responsible for.
• Plan follow-up, not just the first call. Most admissions decisions take several conversations. Scheduled reminders, call recording and, at high volume, AI calling for first contact and reminders keep the counselling team on the conversations that need a person. Our buyer's guide to CRMs with AI calling covers what to check.

Method

• Sample: 166 private universities across 26 states and union territories, and 250 coaching brands (engineering and medical entrance, civil services, management, nursing and other competitive exams, offline and online) across 20 states, found through web search in October 2026. Coaching brands with many centres are counted once, under the state of their head office.
• Published contacts: read by hand from each institute's own website. An email or number counts as an admissions contact only when the site labels it for admissions, enquiries or counselling. Numbers that are only labelled as general, office or reception count as “general only”.
• Homepage scan: each institute's homepage HTML was fetched once and searched for the script and widget domains of Meritto (NoPaperForms), ExtraaEdge, LeadSquared, Zoho, HubSpot, Salesforce, Freshworks, and for the Meta Pixel and Google Ads tags. 396 of 416 homepages loaded; the rest returned errors and are left out of the scan figures. Listing-portal widgets (for example a college-directory badge) are not counted as the institute's own tool.
• Privacy: only totals are published. The dataset has no institute names, URLs or contact details.

Limits

• The scan sees only the homepage. A tool installed on an application or contact page, or connected behind the scenes through a form's server, is not detected, so the tool shares are a lower bound and “no tool” means “none we could detect”.
• An ad tag shows that an institute measures or advertises to visitors, not how much it spends. Some tags may be left over from past campaigns.
• We did not measure how fast institutes respond to enquiries. This report shows the tooling and contact routes that make fast follow-up possible; a mystery-shopping study of response times is a separate piece of work.
• The sample is not random. Institutes with a working website and a findable contact page are over-represented, so the figures describe institutes that are visible online rather than every institute in India.

Related: Sales CRM Landscape 2026 · CRM with AI calling · How AI voice calling works · Book a demo