What’s
Customer Success
at Leverage Edu?

Leverage Edu as a platform / service / business operates at a very rare inflection point for our customer. Played out right, it is life altering, forever.

Which makes it a stressful affair not just for the customer, but also all of us at Leverage, all 1300 of us.

We have drawn accolades aplenty over last 4 years for having become a “platform”, a one stop shop so to say, the A > to Z of the journey, and now looking for further beyond. That comes with its challenges too. Housing provider sitting in a foreign country under a foreign city’s local rule book changes their modus operandi one fine random day, we are at the receiving end as a marketplace, moving across hundreds of friction points to make things happen. A local financial institution that is governed by dozen regulatory bodies and their own monthly NIM / NPA metrics, offers refunds at their own behest, and we scramble again as a marketplace to balance things out, move against that ungodly force. New countries are emerging as exciting new destinations for higher education, but they are on a learning curve too, their authorities haven’t seen that much VISA processing, they don’t have all the systems ready, so we cut through all of that again as a marketplace. Universities, across hundreds of programs, admit tens of thousands of students from around the world, and if a process by their book isn’t at cent percent, they have no option but to play by an objective rule, which means refunds could be stuck / certificates will take a long time to come / change of program is hard, etc etc etc. When anything breaks, and you have a young kid abusing the hell out of us, we / everyone on the team, now knows that ‘it’s in the moment’, that they are tense and for understandable reasons, and that will quickly become apologetic once we reason it out with them. Every single escalation is treated like a life & death by us. You can also argue that this is precisely what makes the business moaty, that’s true, but it’s also hard hard hard work every single day.

I, in my personal capacity, everyday, write to many Vice Chancellors of thousand year old universities to do exceptions, they have now in turn become dear friends. I write to large financial institutions, explaining the case, letting the ‘transaction’ become more human, trying to break bread where teams from both sides stuck to their logic-plexes. I write to housing providers, not just big but also small ones, once again trying to get them to appreciate that this young person is abroad for the first time, we need to relax thy rules, lead with empathy. At our end, we keep revamping processes, keep productising, keep training our folks, aren’t perfect but aim to be, or atleast get as near it as is humanly possible.

To then, receive hand-written letters like these, feels special. It was one of those above scenarios where intervention helped change a life. We also, on an every - single - day basis, host hundreds of young people and their parents in our offices, bearing sweet boxes, to teary thank you’s, to what not. My pride is that my team operates with empathy. They came together to help a kid raised in an orphanage get to one of the top universities in Italy on a 100% scholarship (fought for a full accomodation waiver too!). They all hosted a mini-celebration for an anganwadi mother whose twins, raised through many economic hardships, went to a one-of-its-kind specialised program in a German school. Many many such stories.

It’s hard, but oh boy it’s WORTH IT!