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Went undercover, walked in as a lead. Audited the center visit live.

The center visit had never been audited. I went through all of it, from the first phone call to the enrolment payment. We fixed the compliance risks first, shipped 9 of 16 fixes, and turned the best moment of the visit into a feature on the website.

  • Service Design
  • Field Research
  • Conversion
  • 0→1 Feature
Role:
Product Designer, end to end
Live on:
Mar 29, 2026 (audit fixes)
Apr 29, 2026 (Talk to a Student)
Team:
Aniketh (Business Head), Bharath (Sales Head)
Sales, Marketing, Ops and Tech teams
Numbers verified by:
Bharath

+ 24.6%

Visit-to-reservation rate, first 16 days

₹28.5L

Revenue from Talk to a Student

9 of 16

Fixes shipped, compliance first

87%

Of student-call reservations enrolled

The problem

The center visit had never been audited.
Sales, ops, marketing and tech each owned a piece, and nobody saw the whole journey.

Story behind the problem

A new website, and a center visit nobody had ever checked.

The new website went live on March 12 and started sending more people to the training center.

What happened once they walked in had never been checked. Each team owned its own step, and none of them saw the full visit.

In a conversation with Aniketh, our Business Head, I offered to go through it myself as a student would.

Bharath arranged a new salesperson who didn't know me. I wore a mask, so the regular team wouldn't recognise me.

I went all the way: the enquiry call, the visit, the pitch, the follow-up calls, the seat reservation and the enrolment payment. Bharath gave me test payment links, so no money changed hands.

I wrote down every stage as it happened, including the exact words that were said.

What success meant

More visits turning into seats, with nothing in the pitch we'd regret.

User goals

  • Find the center without getting lost
  • Feel welcome when you walk in
  • Get honest answers and recent proof
  • Pay without second-guessing the form

Business goals

  • More center visits turning into seat reservations
  • More reservations turning into enrolments
  • A pitch with no compliance risk

Metrics

  • L1: center visit → seat reservation
  • L2: seat reservation → enrolment
  • Talk to a Student: responses → reservations → enrolments
Research

One undercover visit, every stage rated, every word written down.

I rated each stage out of five and sorted every finding into three groups: what worked, what was a gap, and what was a critical risk. Two stages scored five stars. Most of the stages we controlled through a script scored one or two.

  1. 01

    Enquiry call

    Answered within three rings.

  2. 02

    Finding the center

    No sign at the first turn.

  3. 03

    Reception

    Nobody said hello.

  4. 04

    Sales pitch

    Compliance risks in the pitch.

  5. 05

    Social proof

    Testimonials from four years ago.

  6. 06

    Talking to students

    Felt real. The center was lively.

  7. 07

    Closing

    One warm touch: an offer to talk to my mom.

  8. 08

    Follow-up to payment

    A message that never mentioned the visit.

“The online portal, demoed for the offline course” “A broken LinkedIn link” “A damaged direction board” “My name, asked five minutes into the call” “Errors only after you hit submit” “Payment confirmed by screenshot”
The main insight

The best part of the visit wasn't the pitch. It was ten minutes with a student who already studied there.

Talking to current students scored five stars. It was also the one stage that no script controlled.

Key decisions

Three calls, from the readout to the website.

01

Exact words, not opinions.

I didn't bring the leadership team my impressions. I brought what the salesperson actually said, what proof they showed, and what was missing. There was pushback, and the evidence settled it.

Positive signal

Stage 06 · Talking to students

Felt real. The center was lively, and sitting in on a live class is part of every visit.

Gap

Stage 03 · Reception

No greeting and no water. A handoff between two staff meant introducing myself twice.

Critical risk

Stage 04 · Sales pitch

Compliance risks in the pitch language. Logged word for word, and fixed first.

One example per group, anonymised. The full readout tied every finding to a stage.

02

Compliance first, then the rest.

We fixed the risks in the pitch before anything cosmetic. Then we worked outward from it: signs, the greeting, the follow-up message and the forms. Nine of sixteen fixes shipped.

9 of 16 shippedShipped Held back

Navigation

  • Way-finding signs inside

Reception and proof

  • A greeting script
  • A warm handoff
  • A proof wall in the center

The pitch

  • Compliance risks fixed first
  • The right demo for the course

Follow-up and forms

  • WhatsApp follow-up about the visit
  • Seat-reservation form fixes
  • Scholarship form fixes

03

Put a student on the website.

The visit's best moment only happened to people who had already walked in. Talk to a Student brought it to the page: book a 15-minute call with someone learning at the center today.

Live website *

*Talk to a Student went live on April 29, 2026.

The Talk to a Student section on the live page: heading, three steps (pick a time, join a 15-minute call, ask anything), a 'Talk to a student' button and real student photos
325 relevant responses
79 seat reservations 24% of responses
69 enrolments 87% of reservations

Apr 29 – Sep 16, 2026. The feature's own funnel, with no holdout group.

Trade-offs

What I traded to move within a month.

What I
kept

  • Compliance fixes before anything cosmetic
  • Every finding tied to a stage and a quote
  • The 5★ stage, untouched and then scaled

What I
gave up

  • A bigger sample: one visit, one salesperson
  • 7 of 16 fixes, like entrance signs and a new pitch deck
  • The WhatsApp booking flow behind the button

Another team runs the booking by hand for now.

What I got
back

  • Fixes live by March 29
  • A student-call feature live a month later
  • A sales team that pitched more carefully
Success

Reservations jumped, then settled higher. Student calls kept converting.

+9.25 pp

Visit → reservation, first 16 days

+4.58 pp

Visit → reservation, 30 days

79

Reservations from student calls

69

Enrolments from student calls

Salespeople knew the pitch had been watched, so some of the lift may come from that alone. The 30-day window also overlaps exam season.

Center visit audit · impact board

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Talk to a Student · impact board

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Looking back

Reflections and thoughts

What I learned:

The audit was the design work. Talk to a Student took under an hour to design because the audit had already found the answer: the visit's strongest stage. The hour was cheap. Knowing what to build wasn't.

What I learned:

The weakest stages had no dashboard. Navigation and social proof both scored 1★, and nothing we tracked could have shown either. Some conversion problems only show up when you're standing in them.

What I learned:

The stage nobody scripted scored highest. The pitch, the welcome and the follow-up all scored 2★ or lower. Ten unscripted minutes with a student scored 5★. Sometimes the job is to scale what you don't control.

What I'd do differently:

One visit is an anecdote. One new salesperson, on one day. A few more visits or some call recordings would have separated one person's habits from the process, and made the readout harder to wave away.

What I'd do differently:

Set up the comparison before launch. I can show that 87% of student-call reservations enrol, but not how that compares with an ordinary lead. That needed leads tagged before launch, not after.

What I'd do differently:

Design past the click. The button was mine. The booking after it is manual, and it's now the bottleneck. I'd design the booking and reminders too.

Collaboration

My part vs. the team's

I ran the audit end to end, wrote the readout, and designed Talk to a Student: the idea, flow, copy and UI. I designed the way-finding graphic and shaped the scripts, the WhatsApp templates and how demos were run. Bharath set up the undercover visit and the test payment links. Sales and marketing wrote the scripts and templates. Ops took on the greeting, the handoff and the proof wall. Tech fixed the reservation and scholarship forms. Aniketh and the sales team fixed the compliance risks. The sales team runs the student calls on WhatsApp.

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