Enquiry management software · 2026
Xale CRM is the best lead management system for teams that sell by enquiry: every role on a lead and on each deal keeps its own follow-up, access is set stage by stage, automations run in the background with retries and a log of every run and Xale AI drafts them from plain words, a Custom Report Builder answers your own questions from your own data, every call is logged and recorded, and WhatsApp runs on Meta's Cloud API or your Wati, Gallabox or UrbanChat account. Xale CRM is the CRM for businesses that sell by enquiry: this page explains what an enquiry management system is, where the Excel sheet breaks, how every enquiry becomes one record in Xale, and how Xale compares with six other tools on their own pages.
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Updated · By Xale Team
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TL;DR
Xale CRM is our product; competitor facts come from each vendor’s own pages, checked 29 October 2026, linked beside each claim. Spot an error? Email hello@xale.in and we will correct it.
Definition
An enquiry is a person who asked: a parent who filled in the form on your website, a student who messaged the WhatsApp number on your poster, a lead who tapped a Meta ad, a caller the front desk missed, a walk-in who left a phone number. An enquiry management system is the software that turns each of those into one record with a source, an owner, a status and a dated follow-up, joins a second enquiry from the same person to the first, and shows the manager all of them at once: how many came in, from where, who is working each one and which ones nobody has called back.
That makes it different from a help desk or a ticketing inbox, where a request is answered and closed. An enquiry is sold, not closed: it needs a first reply, a call, a follow-up a few days later and often a second person, a counsellor after the telecaller or a fee desk after the counsellor. The software has to carry the enquiry across those hand-offs without losing the date or the owner, which is why Xale CRM gives every role on an enquiry its own follow-up, and why the pipeline of stages, statuses and sub-statuses, not a ticket status, is the spine of the record.
It is also the front half of a CRM. Customer enquiry management software stops at the yes or the no; a CRM keeps going, with each sale, application or booking as a deal with its own stage, payments and documents. Xale CRM is a CRM built around enquiries, so a team that searches for an online enquiry management system gets the duplicate check, the follow-up per role and the status pipeline, and the same workspace carries the enquiry on into a deal. For the general comparison of tools that do this, read our best lead management system guide; for the problems teams hit on the way, the lead management challenges hub lists each one with its fix.
Worked example
Almost every team that searches for enquiry management software is running a spreadsheet today, and the sheet is not wrong: it is free, everybody can open it and it held up while enquiries were few. The numbers below show where it stops holding up. They are assumptions, not an industry average, so swap in your own and redo the arithmetic.
1,600 touches a month, 64 a day, 21 per counsellor
400 enquiries × 4 touches = 1,600; ÷ 25 working days = 64 a day; ÷ 3 counsellors ≈ 21 each, every day, before any walk-in or re-enquiry.
20 people on the sheet twice
400 ÷ 20 = 20 repeat enquiries a month. In a sheet each is a second row: two counsellors call the same parent, or the second message never joins the first conversation.
75 follow-ups missed, almost one enquiry in five
3 counsellors × 1 missed follow-up × 25 days = 75 a month; 75 ÷ 400 = 19% of the month’s enquiries never get their fourth touch.
Zero answers the owner can trust
“How many enquiries did Meta bring this month, and how many did we call back within a day?” needs a filter on a column somebody typed by hand, so every answer is a count of what was typed, not of what happened.
Twenty-one touches a day is a full day of calls and messages for each counsellor, before the twenty people who are on the sheet twice and the seventy-five follow-ups that nothing reminded anyone about. None of that is a people problem. The sheet has no idea an enquiry arrived until somebody types it, no way to know two rows are one person, and no way to tap a counsellor on the shoulder at 10 am on Thursday. Moment by moment, here is what changes with an enquiry management system.
| Moment | In the spreadsheet | In Xale CRM |
|---|---|---|
| An enquiry arrives | Somebody copies it from the ad manager, the WhatsApp chat or the call list into a row, hours later | It lands on the list by itself with its source, and an automation assigns it and dates the first follow-up |
| The same person enquires again | A second row, a second owner, two calls | A duplicate phone check on creation makes it a re-enquiry on the original lead, never a second row |
| Who owns it | A name typed in a column; two people editing the same file overwrite each other | One active person per role per lead, enforced by the database, and a history of every reassignment |
| The next step | A date in a cell that nothing watches | A follow-up per role with a reminder by web popup, Android push and the in-app inbox when it falls due |
| Where it stands | “Intrested”, “interested”, “INT”: three spellings of one status | A pipeline of stages, statuses and sub-statuses picked from a list, with a reason recorded on every “not interested” |
| The call | Not in the sheet at all | Synced from the counsellor’s own Android phone with direction, duration, outcome and the recording, or recorded by TeleCMI on a business number |
| The owner’s question | A pivot table over hand-typed columns | Enquiries by source, branch, counsellor and stage, each number opening the leads behind it, equal to the leads page |
| Who may see what | Everyone with the link sees every phone number | A 5-level access dial per role on every stage, branch and territory scope, and exports that never carry phone numbers for staff other than admins |
The sheet does not have to be thrown away. Step four of the setup walkthrough below imports it, and before a row is written Xale lists the ones whose phone number already belongs to a lead and asks what to do with them. For a 2 to 15 person team doing this for the first time, our CRM for small business in India page walks through the first week day by day.
Capture
The first job of enquiry management software is to stop anyone copying enquiries into a list. In Xale CRM every channel writes to the same list by itself, each enquiry carries its source, and the same duplicate phone check runs whether the enquiry came from a form, a chat, an ad, a call, the front desk or an import.
Build the form in Xale with lead fields, your own custom fields, a course or programme picker, a consent checkbox and hidden fields, and put it on any site with one embed snippet, an iframe or a direct link. Each form is its own named lead source, utm tags are captured, and a repeat phone number becomes a re-enquiry instead of a duplicate. Any website or app can also post enquiries to a source’s own webhook URL with its own key and field mapping.
Web forms in Xale CRM →Connect Meta’s Cloud API through Embedded Signup, with Coexistence so the WhatsApp Business app keeps working on the same number, or the Wati, Gallabox or UrbanChat account you already have. A first message to the number becomes a lead with its source and a duplicate phone check, the chat stays on the record, and Cloud API, Wati and UrbanChat chats are answered from one role-scoped inbox. Xale never bills WhatsApp messages: Meta or your provider does.
WhatsApp CRM for Indian businesses →Facebook and Instagram lead forms sync automatically, each lead with its campaign and form, ad set and ad, kept through re-enquiries. Daily ad spend gives cost per lead by ad and ad set, and an automation assigns the lead, dates the telecaller’s follow-up and sends a first template.
Meta Lead Ads CRM →Every counsellor call logged and recorded, two routes. The Xale Android app syncs each call from the counsellor's own phone to the right lead with direction, duration and outcome, no per-minute charges, and attaches the phone's own recording. TeleCMI cloud telephony records calls from a business number on any phone, iPhone included. An unknown caller on a TeleCMI number becomes a new lead, and inbound call routing connects a known caller to their own counsellor while the phone rings.
CRM with call recording →A front-desk enquiry is added from the web app or the Xale Android app in the time it takes to ask for a phone number, and the duplicate check runs on the spot. The Education template starts with Walk-in and Referral sources, and any workspace adds its own.
The Education template →Bring last season’s enquiries in with their source, branch and course columns mapped to fields. Before the import runs, Xale lists the rows whose phone number already belongs to a lead and asks whether to ignore them or add them as re-enquiries, which marks the existing lead re-enquired, fills its empty fields and records the import in a note.
Lead management software for education →Xale checks the phone number when a lead is created, from any channel. A number that already belongs to a lead makes the new enquiry a re-enquiry on that lead rather than a second row, and the “lead re-enquires” trigger can start an automation of its own, such as dating the counsellor’s follow-up for today. A student who filled in the Meta form in June and messages on WhatsApp in August is one record with both conversations on it.
Duplicate leads are merged from a lead's ⋮ menu: pick which value to keep for each field, which number is the main number and which is the WhatsApp number, and who keeps each role when both leads had one; calls, notes, WhatsApp chats on the same line, deals, follow-ups and activity all move onto the kept lead, custom fields fill its blanks, tags and intakes combine and the earlier created date stands. Before an Excel or CSV import runs, Xale lists the rows whose phone number already belongs to a lead and asks what to do with them: ignore them, or add them as re-enquiries, which marks the existing lead re-enquired, fills its empty fields and records the import in a note.
Follow-ups per role
An enquiry is won or lost in what happens after it arrives, and this is where Xale CRM differs most from a shared inbox or a sheet. Several roles work one enquiry at once: the lead, and each deal under it, can each have one active person per role, so a telecaller and a counsellor are assigned together, and each role keeps exactly one live follow-up, enforced by the database, so the telecaller’s date and the counsellor’s date never overwrite each other. Tracks such as Loan, Interview preparation or Visa filing run beside the pipeline as parallel pipelines with their own owner and their own follow-up per role.
On Lead created, or when a lead re-enquires, Auto-distribute hands it to a role, a branch or a branch’s users, shared equally to whoever has the fewest leads today, or by results, with more leads to the people who move leads forward and everyone keeping a base share. Anybody who is checked out is passed over, so a new enquiry goes to somebody who can ring it.
The same rule sends an approved WhatsApp template from your Wati, Gallabox or UrbanChat account, inside business hours or as an after-hours reply, or a first email template. Every send is logged with its run and retried automatically.
When a lead enters a stage, a follow-up opens for every assigned role that works that stage, dated by that stage’s “Due in N days” dial. The telecaller’s date and the counsellor’s date are two follow-ups on one record, so neither overwrites the other.
When a follow-up falls due its owner gets a web popup, an Android push and an in-app inbox entry with the enquirer’s name, the chosen time and the note written when it was set. When many fall due together, each person gets one reminder naming the earliest and counting the rest.
Overdue means dated before today, Today means anything dated today and Later means tomorrow onwards. Managers see the team’s follow-ups by user, by branch and by role in each of the three, and can pick whose follow-up to reschedule.
“Maximum days allowed” stops anyone parking an enquiry a month ahead, a status can require a scheduled follow-up before a lead moves into it, and the “Set / update follow-up” automation dates a chosen role’s follow-up with guards such as “only if there is no follow-up yet” and “never push a date back”.
How the three lists, the dials and the automation fit together is on our follow-up management page; the rules themselves, with their retries and run log, are on CRM automation.
In the product
Two screens from the Xale CRM web app, drawn with sample data: one enquiry with a follow-up for each role on the lead and on each deal, and an automation log that records, in plain English, what each rule did to a new enquiry.
Status pipeline
A status typed into a cell is three spellings of one word by Friday. In Xale CRM every enquiry sits at a stage, a status and a sub-status picked from a list, each template starts with a pipeline on day one, and admins rename, reorder or extend any of it. The Education template, as a new workspace starts it:
| Stage | Statuses and sub-statuses it starts with |
|---|---|
| Inquiry | New Inquiry by website, walk-in, WhatsApp, phone call, referral or campaign, then contacting attempts, interested, or not interested with a reason. |
| Counseling | Counselling scheduled or done, with a follow-up status for a decision still pending at home. |
| Eligibility & Assessment | Documents pending, tests scheduled, then eligible or not eligible with the reason. |
| Course Selection | Each course choice is its own deal: options shared, seat reserved or waitlisted, seat cancelled, or course finalised. |
| Fee & Payment | Per deal: payment pending with the date given, partly paid, completed or cancelled. |
| Enrollment | Enrolled, deferred to the next batch, or dropped, each with its sub-statuses. |
Study Abroad template
Inquiry → Qualify → Application → Deposit → Visa → Enrolled, one deal per university application
Academy template
Inquiry → Qualify → Enrollment, with a Programs catalogue and an EMI plan on each enrolment
Travel template
Inquiry → Qualification → Booking → Fulfillment, one deal per booking
Three things keep the pipeline truthful. Stage requirements (named documents, fields or custom fields, an attached course or university, an assigned role or user, a track, a move note or a scheduled follow-up) block a lead or application from moving into a status until they are met. Document requirements can instead be info-only checklist items that never block a move. So “Counselling done” means it was done. Deadlines between statuses warn early and close themselves when the enquiry reaches the target status. And once an enquiry becomes a sale, each course choice, university application or booking is its own deal under the one lead, with its own stage, owner and payments, so a student weighing two courses is one person with two deals and counts once in conversions.
All six templates are on our industry templates page.
Assignment and access
Enquiry management across more than one centre is mostly a question of who gets each enquiry and who may see it afterwards. In Xale CRM both are settings, not habits, and both are enforced on the server.
Each branch, centre or clinic is a branch in Xale, every lead sits in one branch, and visibility follows it: admins see everything, managers see their branches’ leads on the stages they manage, and counsellors see the leads assigned to them. Every report reads by branch.
A 5-level lead-access dial on every pipeline stage per role (Admin, Manage, Edit, View or Deny), enforced on the server in every lead list, board, dashboard and report. Role settings also cover the activity timeline, follow-ups and deadlines, stage by stage.
Territory access lets a country or region manager see every enquiry carrying their countries within their branches without being assigned each one. A sensitive field such as Country can be limited per user to certain options, and a role can be denied a field so it disappears from pickers, cards, filters and exports.
Assignment rules are per role: who may assign leads or branch changes to others, who may receive them, and whether peers in the same role can transfer to each other. Assignments are revoked, never deleted, so the ownership history stays.
"Auto-distribute" hands new leads to a role, a branch or a branch's users, least-loaded first, and "Shuffle" moves leads between the users of chosen roles across chosen branches with the lead never leaving its own branch. Both skip users who already hold more overdue follow-ups than the limit you set, with a fallback you choose, can except named users or branches, and work through every matching lead in the background.
Exporting leads is a per-role permission that can also be set stage by stage, and staff other than admins never get phone or WhatsApp numbers in an export. A workspace display setting hides lead phone numbers on the list, grid and board for everyone except admins.
The whole model is on our role-based access control CRM page, and the branch side on multi-branch CRM.
The manager’s view
An owner buys enquiry management software to answer two questions without asking anyone: how many enquiries came in, from where, and what happened to each of them. Every Xale workspace starts with 8+ ready-made report tabs: Lead Overview, By Source, By Stage, User Performance, Call Analytics, Branch Analytics and Field Insights, with study abroad and education workspaces adding By Country. Click a number and a side drawer lists the leads behind it with a matching total, a CSV that follows the viewer’s export permission and a jump to the Leads page. Call Analytics includes how fast new leads get called and missed-call recovery, the two numbers an enquiry team most needs.
For your own questions, the Custom Report Builder is built on the Leads page: its filter panes are the Leads page filters, so a report starts from exactly the filters your team already uses and its numbers equal the list for the same filters. For any group of leads it measures lead counts, calls made, connected calls, talk time, follow-ups, activities, deal value, amount paid and amount pending. Up to 5 named metrics sit side by side, such as “Enquiries this month”, “Connected calls” and “Enrolled”, each with its own filters and date, the Compare view shows the difference and the percentage change, and targets show target vs achievement by counsellor, branch or role. Show it in any of 17 views, from Table and Heatmap to Funnel, Leaderboard and KPI tile, and export to CSV or XLSX. Any saved report becomes a dashboard card beside 20+ built-in dashboard cards, shown to only you, everyone, or chosen roles and people, each viewer seeing only the numbers their own access allows.
Xale's report numbers equal the Leads page: the Custom Report Builder compiles every filter through the Leads page's own query code, and clicking a report number opens the leads behind it with a matching total, so a figure and its list never disagree. Every date window counts whole calendar days, weeks start on Monday and "This month" means the whole month, and the first pipeline stage, where leads are created, is always counted by created date, so a months-old lead moved back into it never shows up as new this month. Blocked users never appear as a row or column, and their leads stay in every total.
Anchor Points count what already happened: mark a milestone stage and its “Verified” button counts every enquiry that reached it in a date range even after the lead moved on, so “how many were qualified this week” does not shrink as the team keeps working. Anchor Points explains the options.
The report tabs, the builder and the dashboard are described in full on CRM reports and analytics.
Xale AI
Ask Xale AI in the web CRM by chat, or start a live voice call and talk to it. It answers from your own enquiries, deals, follow-ups, calls and team, runs reports with the Custom Report Builder’s own measures and draws the chart, tells you what each person did today and who is working now, and mines notes and every rejection reason for the objections that lose enquiries. Talk to Xale AI: a live voice call in the web CRM that speaks Malayalam by default and English on a click, can be interrupted mid-sentence, shows a live transcript, plays a call recording on request, and, with read-aloud on, speaks typed answers too.
Describe the rule you want in plain English or Malayalam and Xale AI drafts it in the automation builder on your screen, trigger, conditions, actions and dials, checked against your own stages, roles, users and branches; you preview it and press Save.
Xale AI can also take the call, as your telecaller: open it on an enquiry, say what the call is for, hand the phone over, and the AI speaks first, in Malayalam or English, one question at a time. When the student asks to speak to a person, Xale AI hands them to their own counsellor: it books that counsellor's follow-up, within the hour when no time was named, and leaves the note with everything the student said, so the counsellor rings back already knowing the conversation. At the end it writes the call note, sets the agreed callback and suggests a status for a counsellor to decide. The whole flow is on the Xale AI telecaller page.
Everything Xale AI does inside the CRM is on our AI CRM for education page.
Who it is for
Xale CRM ships 6 industry templates: Study Abroad, Education (schools, institutes and coaching centres), Manpower (recruitment agencies), Video Production, Academy and Travel. Each one starts a workspace with its own pipeline, roles and statuses, and every one of them handles enquiries the same way: one record per person, a duplicate check, a follow-up per role and reports that open their own list. Xale CRM is named the best education CRM by use case and the best academy CRM on their own pages, with the reasons behind each verdict; for colleges, the CRM for colleges and universities in India page covers admissions across campuses.
A student who enquires about three countries is one lead with three deals, each with its own stage, owner and follow-up. Counsellor, application officer and visa officer each keep their own follow-up on the same student, and tracks such as Loan or Visa filing run beside the pipeline.
Why Xale CRM is the best study abroad CRM →Parent enquiries on WhatsApp, campus visits and sibling records on the Education template, with a follow-up per role on every applicant and access by campus.
CRM for schools in India →Results-week enquiries shared to the least-loaded telecaller in their centre, demo-class statuses with their own follow-ups, and an EMI plan on each enrolment on the Academy template.
CRM for coaching institutes →A business outside the six templates starts from the closest one and renames the stages: an Inquiry, Contacted and Booked pipeline for a clinic, enquiry to quote to delivery for an agency, with custom fields for the details that matter and a follow-up per role on every enquiry.
CRM for small business in India →Candidate enquiries on the Manpower template: one deal per job application, documents checked before a stage moves, recruiter and telecaller roles with their own follow-ups.
The Manpower template →A family’s summer holiday and a later weekend trip are two deals under one lead on the Travel template, each with its own booking status and payment status.
The Travel template →Vendor by vendor
Xale CRM leads the table because enquiry handling is what it is built around: every channel on one list with a duplicate check, a follow-up for every role, access by stage and branch, and reports that equal the leads page. The search results for “enquiry management software” mix two kinds of tool, enquiry and inquiry modules inside larger suites and general CRMs with an education page, so both kinds follow, each described from its own pages, checked 29 October 2026. “Not stated on its pages” means those pages do not say, not that the feature is missing. There are no scores or star ratings.
| CRM | Vendor’s positioning | Built for education | Calls / WhatsApp | Multi-branch | Starting price | Free trial |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Xale CRM | Study abroad consultancies, education teams and businesses that sell by enquiry, with 6 industry templates | Yes: Study Abroad, Education and Academy templates | Every call logged and recorded, from the Xale Android app or TeleCMI; WhatsApp through Meta’s Cloud API with Coexistence or your Wati, Gallabox or UrbanChat account, in one role-scoped inbox | Yes: each branch with branch-level access, every lead in one branch, every report by branch | From ₹499 per workspace per month, every feature on every planXale pricing page | Free trial: 7 days on Basic, 14 days on Pro |
| TeroTAMTeroTAM enquiry management page | Sales teams, on its Enquiry Management Solution page, one module of its maintenance management (CMMS) suite | Education appears in the industries list its site carries | Scheduled follow-ups with alerts on calendar and mobile, enquiries tagged and assigned to a sales rep (its page); calls and WhatsApp: not stated on its pages | Not stated on its pages | On request | Not stated; demo on request |
| EskerEsker customer inquiry management page | B2B customer service teams, with finance and operations, inside its order-to-cash suite | Not stated on its pages | A centralised AI-powered inbox for inquiries across channels, suggested responses from a knowledge base and a customer agent by chat or voice (its page); WhatsApp: not stated on its pages | Not stated on its pages | On request | Not stated; demo on request |
| LeadSquaredXale CRM vs LeadSquaredLeadSquared overseas education page | Agents and consultancies, on its overseas education page | Yes, an education CRM | WhatsApp conversations started and managed inside the CRM (its overseas education page); calls: not stated among that page’s features | Team-wise and geography-wise performance reports (its overseas education page) | ₹2,500 per user per month, billed annually (Sales Pro) | Not stated on its pages |
| Zoho CRMXale CRM vs Zoho CRMZoho CRM education page | Schools, universities, coaching and training centres, on its education page | An education page on a general CRM; a student information form customised with Canvas (its education page) | Automated follow-ups by email or WhatsApp; call scripts and call transcription by Zia (its education page) | Not stated on its pages | ₹800 per user per month (Standard) | Free edition for 3 users |
| FreshsalesFreshsales education guide | Schools, colleges and universities, on its education guide | An education guide on a general sales CRM | Captures prospects from email, live chat and web forms, with phone among its channels (its education guide); WhatsApp: not stated on that page | Not stated on its pages | US$9 per user per month, billed annually (Growth) | 21-day trial |
| Bitrix24Bitrix24 CRM page | Startups, small teams and larger businesses, on its CRM page | Not stated on its pages | A contact centre that turns web forms, live chat, WhatsApp, Instagram, telephony and email into leads; call transcription by CoPilot (its CRM page) | Not stated on its pages | US$49 per organisation per month, billed annually, 5 users (Basic) | Free plan (its pricing page) |
Prices, checked 29 October 2026, each from the vendor’s own page: TeroTAM pricing · LeadSquared pricing · Zoho CRM edition comparison · Freshsales pricing · Bitrix24 pricing. Competitor prices are each vendor’s lowest listed plan, before tax, on the date checked; they change, so confirm with the vendor. Xale CRM’s plans and what each includes are on the pricing page.
Free
Xale CRM has a free trial (7 days on Basic, 14 days on Pro), and every feature is on every plan: follow-ups per role, access by stage, automations, the Custom Report Builder, Xale AI, calls and WhatsApp are not tiers. Plans are priced per workspace and differ by seats, leads, branches, active automations, storage and scheduled reports, so a three person team pays for one workspace, and the same workspace grows into branches without a migration. The current plans are on the pricing page.
The spreadsheet is free as well, and the worked example above is the honest comparison: at 400 enquiries a month it costs 75 missed follow-ups and 20 duplicate rows, on our assumptions. Where a vendor in the table publishes a free edition on its own pricing page, the Free trial column says so in that vendor’s words; a free edition is a seat count or a record count, and the table states which.
Credibility you can check: Xale Private Limited, founded 2024, with an office in Kozhikode where visits are welcome, in-person onboarding across Kerala and remote everywhere else, support in English and Malayalam, hourly database backups and workspace data isolation. The platform figures below are counted on the production database, with demo and test workspaces left out.
Platform figures, October 2026
Anonymised totals across Xale workspaces as of October 2026, excluding demo and test accounts.
Step by step
Most of the effort is decisions, not software: which stages, which roles, which rules. Work through these in order, and keep the sheet until the numbers agree.
Choose the closest of the six templates at signup and rename its stages, statuses and sub-statuses to the words your team already uses. Add the reasons you want recorded on every “not interested”.
A branch per centre, roles from the 4 role templates, and the lead-access dial set on each stage: telecallers Edit on the stages they work, centre heads Manage on their branch, the owner Admin.
A Xale web form on the website, WhatsApp on the Cloud API or your Wati, Gallabox or UrbanChat account, your Meta Pages for lead ads, the Xale Android app on the phones that make the calls or TeleCMI for the business number, and a webhook for anything else.
Excel or CSV, with source, branch and course columns mapped to fields. Before anything is written, Xale lists the rows whose phone already belongs to a lead and asks whether to ignore them or add them as re-enquiries.
“Due in N days” on each stage and status, “Follow-up needed” off where none is needed, and “Maximum days allowed” so nobody parks an enquiry a month ahead.
Auto-distribute to the right role or branch, Set / update follow-up for the telecaller, a first WhatsApp or email template. Describe each rule to Xale AI in plain words and it drafts the rule into the builder for you to check and save. Test runs show what each rule would do before it touches real data.
Enquiries by source and counsellor for this month, saved and added to the dashboard as a card for the owner and the centre heads, each seeing their own numbers.
Never during results week or an intake peak. Keep the sheet read-only for a few weeks and check Xale’s report counts against it. Onboarding is in person across Kerala and remote everywhere else, in English and Malayalam.
Frequently asked questions
Enquiry management software is the system that turns every enquiry a business receives, from a website form, a WhatsApp message, a lead ad, a call or a walk-in, into one record with a source, an owner, a status and a dated follow-up, and gives the manager a view of all of them. In Xale CRM each enquiry is a lead, a repeat phone number becomes a re-enquiry on the same lead rather than a second row, every role on the lead keeps its own follow-up with a reminder, and reports count enquiries by source, branch and counsellor with every number opening the leads behind it.
Enquiry management is the front half of a CRM: capturing the enquiry, replying first, following up and tracking its status until it becomes a sale or a no. A CRM keeps going after that, with each sale or application as a deal with its own stage, payments, documents and reports. Xale CRM is a CRM built around enquiries, so a team gets both in one workspace: the duplicate check, the follow-up per role and the status pipeline for the enquiry, then one deal per course choice, university application or booking once it moves on, and the enquirer counts once in conversions.
Xale CRM is the best lead management system for teams that sell by enquiry: every role on a lead and on each deal keeps its own follow-up, access is set stage by stage, automations run in the background with retries and a log of every run and Xale AI drafts them from plain words, a Custom Report Builder answers your own questions from your own data, every call is logged and recorded, and WhatsApp runs on Meta's Cloud API or your Wati, Gallabox or UrbanChat account. Enquiries arrive from website forms, WhatsApp, Meta lead ads, calls, walk-ins and Excel imports onto one list with a duplicate phone check, and the vendors in the table on this page are described from their own pages, checked 29 October 2026.
Xale CRM has a free trial, and every feature is on every plan: the current trial and the plans, priced per workspace, are on the Xale pricing page, so a small team pays for one workspace rather than for each feature. A spreadsheet is free too, and the worked example on this page shows what it costs in missed follow-ups and duplicate rows once a team handles a few hundred enquiries a month. Where a vendor in the table publishes a free edition on its own pricing page, the Free trial column says so.
You can, and most teams start that way. An enquiry management system in Excel works while one person owns the sheet and the enquiries are few. It breaks when enquiries arrive from several channels at once, because somebody has to copy each one in; when the same person enquires twice and becomes two rows; when a follow-up date sits in a cell that nothing watches; and when the owner wants to know how many enquiries Meta brought this month and how many were called back. Xale CRM imports that sheet, asks what to do with the rows whose phone number already exists, and takes over from there.
On Xale CRM a school runs admission enquiries on the Education template: a parent’s WhatsApp message, website form or campus walk-in becomes one record per child with its source and a duplicate phone check, the front desk and the admissions counsellor each keep their own follow-up, a campus visit is a status with its own date, and siblings sit on their own records with the parent’s number in a field. Access follows the campus, and the principal’s dashboard counts enquiries by source and stage with each number opening the children behind it.
In Xale CRM a first WhatsApp message to your number becomes a lead with its source and a duplicate phone check, and the chat stays on that lead. Connect Meta’s Cloud API through Embedded Signup, with Coexistence so the WhatsApp Business app keeps working on the same number, or the Wati, Gallabox or UrbanChat account you already have. Cloud API, Wati and UrbanChat chats are answered from one role-scoped inbox, an automation sends an approved template from your Wati, Gallabox or UrbanChat account inside business hours or as an after-hours reply, and Xale never bills WhatsApp messages: Meta or your provider does.
Xale CRM checks the phone number when a lead is created, from any channel. A number that already belongs to a lead makes the new enquiry a re-enquiry on that lead rather than a second row, and an automation can start from the re-enquiry. Before an Excel or CSV import runs, Xale lists the rows whose number already exists and asks whether to ignore them or add them as re-enquiries, which marks the existing lead re-enquired, fills its empty fields and records the import in a note. Two leads that slipped through can be merged from a lead’s menu, with calls, notes, chats, deals and follow-ups moving onto the kept lead.
Enquiries by source, branch and counsellor for the period; which enquiries nobody has called yet and how long they have waited; follow-ups overdue, due today and due later by person; enquiry to sale by source; and calls made, connected and talk time per counsellor. In Xale CRM the Custom Report Builder is built on the Leads page filters, so each of these equals the leads list for the same filters, any number opens the leads behind it, and a saved report becomes a dashboard card for the roles and people you choose, each seeing their own numbers.
Each centre is a branch in Xale CRM, every enquiry sits in one branch and carries its course and centre as fields, and access follows the centre and the stage on the server: telecallers see their own enquiries, centre heads their centres and the head office everything. Auto-distribute hands each enquiry to the least-loaded counsellor in its centre, skipping anyone checked out or holding more overdue follow-ups than the limit you set, and reports group enquiries by centre, source, course and counsellor.
Yes. Xale CRM runs in the browser at app.xale.in and in the Xale Android app, is priced per workspace with every feature on every plan, and a two or three person team sets up its stages, one WhatsApp number, a web form and the follow-up dials in its first days. The same workspace grows into branches, roles and automations without a migration, and the Xale HR Suite is included with every plan at no extra cost.
The walkthrough on this page has eight steps: pick the template and name the stages, create branches and roles, connect the channels, import the sheet with its duplicate preview, set the follow-up dials, switch on the arrival rules after a test run, build the manager’s first report, and go live in a quiet week while the old sheet stays read-only. Onboarding is in person across Kerala and remote everywhere else, in English and Malayalam, from the team that builds Xale.
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