NK Education — Lead Management
TheCRMthatrunstheconsultancy.
A bespoke lead-management CRM for NK Education — every Meta-Ads enquiry, counsellor note, and visa stage in one internal product the whole team lives in.
Stack
- Next.js
- TypeScript
- Tailwind
- Node
- PostgreSQL
- Meta Ads API
- Google Sheets API
- Role-based access
Results
The brief
Problem
NK Education runs on leads — Meta-Ads enquiries, walk-ins, referrals — across multiple countries and offices, worked by counsellors, branch managers, and marketing staff. That pipeline used to live in a sprawl of Google Sheets and WhatsApp threads: leads slipped, follow-ups were forgotten, nobody could see the funnel, and source attribution was guesswork. Off-the-shelf CRMs were the wrong fit in both directions — generic deal-pipeline tools (Zoho, LeadSquared) don't model a study-abroad workflow (intakes, IELTS status, per-country document checklists, visa stages), and per-seat pricing punished a growing team for adding counsellors. They needed software that spoke their own language.
How we built it
Approach
We built a bespoke CRM around the study-abroad lead lifecycle, not a generic deal pipeline. Every lead carries the fields the team actually works from — country, intake, IELTS status, funds-ready, source — and moves through a seven-stage pipeline from New Lead → Contacted → Docs Received → Options Discussed → Application → Offer Received → Visa Applied, with a one-click stage change inline on the table. The Leads module shows the same data three ways: a dense List for power users, a Compressed view for scanning, and a Kanban board for dragging leads between stages. Search, filter by stage / country / starred / enrolled, star a priority lead, and call or WhatsApp straight from the row — the counsellor never leaves the screen. The Dashboard is the team's morning snapshot: new leads today, follow-ups due, starred leads, enrolled students, the live pipeline funnel for the quarter, a new-leads trend chart, and a feed of latest arrivals tagged with their source. Every card is clickable into the underlying list. The Activity module is the system of record — one reverse-chronological timeline of every note, follow-up, call, WhatsApp, and stage change across all leads, each attributed to the staff member and their role. Nothing happens to a lead without a trace, which is exactly what a multi-counsellor branch needs when a handover happens. Around the core sit the modules that make it a real operating system rather than a contact list. Applications are recorded against leads with status and scholarship detail. A Documents module mirrors the team's Google Drive knowledge folder — SOPs, per-country visa guidelines, checklists, offer templates — as a searchable, view-only repository, so counsellors quote the right process without hunting through Drive. The Reports module turns the pipeline into performance analytics: total leads, conversion and loss rates, a lead-volume-vs-conversions chart, source attribution, and counsellor leaderboards over any date range, with one-click Excel and CSV export for the leadership review. The lead engine is wired to where leads actually originate. Meta Ads lead forms sync directly in; the team's existing FY27 Google Sheets sync bidirectionally, auto-pulled every ten minutes, and every new lead is written straight to Postgres. Role-based access governs who sees what across four roles — Admin, Branch Manager, Marketing, Counsellor — with admins managing seats, roles, and password resets from a Team module. The whole product is a bespoke Next.js build on Vercel over a Postgres database, with light and dark modes, deployed at hub.nkeducation.in. The same studio that built NK Education's public website built the system that runs behind it — one practice, one standard, from the marketing site to the operational backbone.
Feature showcase
The bits worth zooming into.
Leads desk
Every lead in List / Compressed / Kanban views, inline stage changes, and call/WhatsApp from the row. Lead names, contacts and the follow-up toast are blurred for privacy.
Reports
Conversion and loss rates, lead-volume trends, source attribution and counsellor leaderboards over any date range — one-click Excel / CSV export.
Integrations
Meta Ads + Google Sheets sync straight to Postgres, auto-pulled every ten minutes; a linked Drive folder powers the view-only knowledge repo.
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