Core Responsibilities

1.1 Communication Automation Architecture, Wireframing and Frameworks

Journeys must be designed on paper before they are built in a tool. An automation stack assembled campaign by campaign becomes unmaintainable within a year, and nobody can then answer why a contact received a particular message. This role owns the design discipline that prevents that.

■ Own the master communication architecture — a single, current map of every automated touchpoint across every channel and lifecycle stage, showing what triggers it, who enters and exits, what it depends on and who owns it. This map is the reference document for the whole programme and is expected to be accurate at all times.

■ Wireframe before building. Every journey is specified first as a flow diagram covering the trigger and entry condition, the audience definition, each message with its objective and channel, wait states, branch and merge logic, exit criteria, suppression rules, failure paths and holdout allocation. The wireframe is reviewed and approved before any configuration begins.

■ Build reusable frameworks rather than one-off journeys. Establish standard patterns — a nurture framework, a drop-off recovery framework, a reactivation framework, a document- pendency chase framework — so a new intake, course or geography is launched by configuring an existing pattern in days rather than designing a new journey from scratch.

■ Map dependencies and collisions. Define precedence between overlapping journeys so a contact eligible for three sequences receives a coherent experience rather than three competing ones, and document which journeys may run concurrently and which must suppress others.

■ Design a message architecture, not a message list. Maintain an inventory of every message with its objective, channel rationale, position in sequence and the template or DLT approval it depends on, so that a template rejection or a channel outage has a known blast radius.

■ Set and enforce standards for naming conventions, versioning, and documentation across the CRM and messaging platforms, so that any journey can be traced, audited and handed over.

■ Operate change control. No live journey is edited without the wireframe being updated in the same change, and retired journeys follow a defined deprecation process rather than being silently switched off.

■ Architect for scale. The stack should absorb new intakes, courses, languages and channels through configuration. Requiring a rebuild each cycle is a design failure, not a workload.

1.2 Lifecycle Journey Design and Drip Campaigns

■ Map the complete lead lifecycle — new enquiry, contacted, qualified, registered, admitted, dropped, dormant, re-enquiry — and design the communication journey for each stage and each reason for being in it.

■ Build drip sequences with a defined objective per message rather than a fixed cadence: the purpose is to move a stage, not to fill a calendar.

■ Design distinct journeys for distinct intents. A lead who asked about fees needs a different sequence from one who dropped after a demo, and both differ from a registered candidate who has not paid.

■ Own the re-engagement and win-back programmes for dormant and dropped cohorts,



including intake-cycle reactivation for leads who were simply too early.

■ Build post-admission onboarding communication so the relationship does not end at payment, and so referrals and testimonials have a channel.

1.3 Omnichannel Orchestration and Channel Governance

■ Own WhatsApp, SMS, email, RCS and IVR as one system rather than five independent channels, with a single view of what each contact has received across all of them.

■ Define channel selection logic by cost, urgency and expected response — WhatsApp for conversational and rich-media moments, SMS for time-critical and low-connectivity reach, email for detail and documentation, IVR for bulk reach where no other channel responds.

■ Enforce frequency capping, quiet hours and fatigue rules across channels so that a contact in three journeys does not receive nine messages in a day.

■ Maintain a single suppression and opt-out register honoured by every channel and every tool, without exception.

■ Manage per-channel cost and report cost per response and cost per incremental registration, not just cost per message.

1.4 Workflow and Marketing Automation

■ Build and own automation inside the CRM — LeadSquared, Zoho or equivalent — covering triggers, conditions, waits, branch logic, lead scoring and stage-change actions.

■ Integrate the messaging stack with the CRM through native connectors, webhooks and APIs so that every send, delivery, read and reply writes back to the lead record.

■ Automate the operational handshakes that currently rely on someone remembering: counsellor alerts on a hot reply, task creation on document pendency, escalation when a registered candidate goes quiet.

■ Maintain version control and documentation for every live journey. An automation nobody can explain is a liability.

■ Test every journey end to end before launch, including the failure paths — what happens when a template is rejected, a number is invalid or an API call times out.

1.5 Chat Funnel Automation

■ Design conversational flows on WhatsApp that capture intent, answer routine questions on fees, eligibility, dates and documents, and qualify a lead before a counsellor is involved.

■ Build the handoff logic that routes a live conversation to the right human at the right moment, with full context, and measure how long that handoff takes.

■ Use chat as a genuine data capture channel — course interest, budget, timeline, location — writing structured fields back to the CRM rather than leaving intent buried in message text.

■ Deploy click-to-WhatsApp entry points from campaigns and landing pages, and own the flow that receives them.

■ Monitor containment and drop-off within flows, and remove steps that lose people rather than adding steps that impress internally.

1.6 Cohort Segmentation, Filtration and List Management

■ Define the cohort framework the whole programme runs on: stage, source,



campaign, course interest, geography, recency, engagement depth and reason for drop-off.

■ Maintain dynamic segments that update automatically on data change, rather than static lists that decay from the day they are exported.

■ Enforce list hygiene — deduplication, invalid number and bounced address removal, consent status and channel eligibility — before every send.

■ Build engagement-based tiers so that highly responsive contacts and long-silent ones are treated differently, and so that unengaged contacts are suppressed before they damage deliverability.

■ Never send to a broad base when a defined segment will do. Blast sending is the fastest route to a degraded sender reputation and a paused WhatsApp number.

1.7 Outbound Campaigns and the Communication Calendar

■ Own the outbound calendar across all channels, sequenced against the admission cycle — application deadlines, fee windows, counselling drives, scholarship announcements, batch starts.

■ Coordinate with the counselling teams so that automated outbound supports the calling effort rather than colliding with it. A candidate should not receive a deadline reminder an hour after a counsellor has already agreed an extension.

■ Produce the messaging and creative briefs, and own template quality and tone across channels.

■ Plan capacity for peak intake months, when message volume rises sharply alongside the media spend.

1.8 Deliverability, Compliance and Template Governance

■ Own WhatsApp Business Platform health — template submission and approval, category selection, quality rating and messaging limits — and protect the number from restriction or ban.

■ Manage DLT registration of headers and templates for SMS in line with TRAI requirements, and maintain the approval trail.

■ Own email deliverability: authentication records, sender reputation, bounce and complaint rates, and list warming for any new sending domain.

■ Ensure consent capture, opt-out handling and data handling comply with applicable Indian data protection requirements, and keep an auditable record of consent for every contact.

■ Treat a paused WhatsApp number or a blacklisted sending domain as a reliable incident, because during peak intake it removes the primary channel to the entire database.

1.9 Measurement, Experimentation and Reporting

■ Report on stage progression — how many contacts moved forward — rather than on delivery and open rates alone. Delivery is a hygiene metric, not an outcome.

■ Run a structured testing programme across message, timing, channel and sequence, with one variable changed at a time.

■ Hold out a control group on every major journey. Without a holdout, the programme cannot distinguish conversions it caused from conversions that would have happened anyway, and every reported number is an assertion rather than a measurement. This is a non-negotiable expectation of the role.

■ Work with Marketing Operations on a shared definition of every metric so that retention reporting and the central funnel MIS never disagree.

■ Publish a weekly programme summary and a monthly review of incremental registrations, incremental admissions and cost per incremental admission.

📌 Retention Manager - Omnichannel (WhatsApp · SMS · Email · RCS · IVR — Lifecycle, Nurture and Conversion) (Bengaluru)
🏢 21K School
📍 Bengaluru