Reddy's Academy runs exam-prep and school-subject coaching batches out of a single Hyderabad campus, with founder Sneha Reddy and eight teaching staff and no dedicated front-desk role — whoever's between classes handles the phone. For most of the year that's fine. During enrollment season, when new-batch ads go out and every parent in the neighbourhood seems to call within the same two weeks, it stopped being fine.
Illustrative example. Reddy's Academy is a composite scenario built to show how AIVA works for this kind of business — not a verified customer account.
The problem
Enquiries spike exactly when the academy is least staffed to handle them: evenings, when ads are most visible and parents are home from work. "Parents ask about fees and batch timings the moment they see our ad, often at 10 PM," Sneha says. A call or message that came in that late waited until the next morning for a reply — and by then, a fair number of parents had already enrolled their child somewhere that got back to them faster.
The interruptions during the day were their own cost. A teacher stepping out of a five-minute gap between classes to answer the same "what are your Class 10 batch timings" question for the third time that day wasn't a huge burden any single time, but it added up across eight staff members answering variations of the same handful of questions all season. Sneha remembers one specific evening clearly: two different teachers each spent close to twenty minutes on the phone with parents asking nearly identical questions about the same batch, back to back, neither aware the other had just had the same conversation minutes earlier.
Every one of those conversations followed the same shape: what are the fees, which batch fits our schedule, can we try a class before committing. None of it needed a teacher. All of it was landing on teachers anyway, because there was nobody else to take it.
Getting it live
Setup ran over about four days ahead of the next enrollment push. Sneha and her staff put together the batch timings, fee structure, and syllabus coverage for each subject and grade level being offered, along with the academy's trial-class policy, and loaded it in along with the campus's contact and location details.
The one issue that surfaced came from a batch that had shifted time slots for the new term but hadn't been updated everywhere — the enrollment landing page still listed the old timing, and for the first day, AIVA answered from the same page content and offered the outdated slot to two callers before anyone noticed the mismatch between the page and the actual timetable. Sneha caught it when a teacher mentioned an odd scheduling question from a parent, traced it back to the stale page copy, and corrected both the page and AIVA's underlying data that same day. Neither of the two affected families had confirmed a trial yet, so it cost a correction phone call rather than an actual missed class.
Answer, then book the trial
We set AIVA up on the academy's enrollment landing page and enquiry widget, answering fee, batch, and syllabus questions the moment someone asks — at 10 PM or any other hour — and offering a free trial class on the spot instead of promising a callback. Once booked, AIVA sends a confirmation and a reminder by SMS — the same two-way text messaging infrastructure that powers appointment reminders across a lot of consumer businesses, not just coaching institutes — which also cut down on trial no-shows. Parents calling instead of messaging get the same conversation through AIVA Voice on the academy's phone line.
The enquiry didn't need a teacher. It needed an answer before the parent moved on to the next academy on their list.
What enrollment season sounds like now
A parent messages at 10 PM asking about fees for the Class 10 science batch and whether it clashes with their other child's dance class timing, which they mention almost as an aside. AIVA answers the fee question directly, checks the batch schedule against the timing the parent mentioned, confirms there's no clash, and offers a trial slot for the following week — booked and confirmed before the parent closes the browser tab. A reminder text goes out the day before the trial. None of that touched a teacher's evening.
The calls that do reach a teacher now tend to be the ones that actually need one — a parent asking whether the academy's approach would suit a child who's struggled with math specifically, say, which isn't a fee-and-timing question and shouldn't be treated like one. Sneha says the quality of those conversations improved once teachers weren't fielding them back-to-back with repetitive scheduling questions in the same evening.
A second common pattern during peak weeks is a parent enrolling more than one child at once, asking about sibling discounts, checking whether two different batches — a Class 8 and a Class 10 timing, say — both fit around a single pickup schedule. That used to take a phone call bounced between two staff members who each knew half the answer. Now it's one conversation, since AIVA has the full batch grid rather than whatever one teacher happens to remember about a schedule that isn't their own class.
The result
Across their most recent enrollment season:
- Trials booked directly through AIVA: 68 in the first month, sourced from enquiries that arrived at every hour, not just during office hours
- Response time to an evening enquiry: from "next morning" to immediate, including the 10 PM messages that used to wait
- Teaching staff time on enquiry calls: down sharply, freeing teachers to actually teach during enrollment season instead of fielding fee questions between classes
- Trial-to-enrollment follow-through: improved, helped by the SMS reminder ahead of each booked trial
What Sneha would tell another institute owner
Her first piece of advice is to get batch and fee data genuinely current before the season starts, not just roughly right. "Our one hiccup was a stale timing on our own landing page, not really an AIVA problem at all — but it showed me how much a small data gap costs once something's answering instantly and constantly instead of once in a while," she says. "Update your source information like it's going to get checked every single day during your busiest weeks, because it will be."
Her second point is about where teacher time should go during enrollment. "We used to think being reachable meant a teacher had to personally answer every call. What actually mattered was that the caller got a fast, accurate answer — it didn't have to come from a teacher's mouth. Once I let go of that, redirecting our actual staff time toward the kids already in the building was obvious."
"Parents ask about fees and batch timings the moment they see our ad," Sneha says. "AIVA answers immediately and books a trial before they lose interest. We didn't need a bigger front desk. We needed the one we had to stop being a bottleneck." Other education and enrollment-driven businesses can read our notes on coaching institutes and tutoring centers specifically, or see how dance academies handle a similar seasonal enrollment crunch. We've also written about how SMS reminders cut no-shows more reliably than phone calls, and the broader case for automated reminders generally. Institutes gearing up for their own next enrollment push can check pricing and start free before the season hits.