As a training provider you invariably have many plates to spin. Time can be precious as you try to manage the tasks required when running successful training courses and programmes. In this feature, we look at four essential training management automations that can significantly reduce the workload and help your team work more efficiently.
Automating Email Confirmations and Onboarding
Getting delegates to sign-up to a course can take some legwork, and it’s not uncommon for that process to include multiple emails back and forth, collating info and sending out confirmations, providing essential joining details and reminders about up-coming courses.
Each email may only be a five-minute job. But if you have to send three emails to fifty delegates, then you could suddenly be looking at up to two working days of five-minute emails.
Or, put another way, up to 40% of a working week.
This is where the tools in your booking or training management system should be helping.
By automating the emails sent to customers when they register onto a course, providing all relevant information such as venue or joining instructions, as well as any reminders in the days leading up to an event, then you can be giving significant chunks of time back to your sales, marketing and operational teams.
Seamlessly Automated Payment Processes
Being able to add automation to your payment processes can offer the double-whammy of eliminating time-consuming and headache inducing tasks, while making things a little less jarring for your clients.
Taking online bookings should allow you to take payments at the point of sale for new customers and visitors to your site. A system integrated with secure, feature-rich payment gateways such as Stripe, means you can take instant payment by credit or debit card.
It can also take the hassle away from refunds, when they’re required, through a simple cancellation process in line with your terms and conditions.
The time spent reconciling purchase orders and generating invoices can also be dramatically reduced and made more efficient by automated admin tools in your booking system and integrating with your accounting software (e.g. Sage or Xero).
Online Booking and Client Accounts
Giving the clients access to the courses they want to book, the details they need and the ability to search, select and book their space online not only improves the user experience for them, but it also eliminates a huge amount of associated admin for your staff.
You can further expand both the reduction in admin time and the customer experience by introducing an online account for your clients.
This might be something that works at both individual and company level.
For individuals, they can access their own accounts, viewing their personal profiles and course history, as well as checking details on upcoming bookings and having the opportunity to amend the booking if they need.
At a company level, it means the training or HR team can have access to their company information, and detailed records of the delegates they’ve put forward for training, in the past or upcoming. For those companies who have accounts with you, it means they have their own way of adding groups of delegates to upcoming courses, bypassing the need for unnecessary admin intervention by your training team.
Automatic Registrations
By automating the registration process you can, again, save your team hours from their working week; removing laborious admin from their day and freeing up more time to focus on more productive tasks.
All too often do we see companies and training providers wallow in a deep sea of spreadsheets as staff have to collate the details of those registered onto courses and uploading them into Excel, for each and every course. Depending on the number of delegates you have and the number of courses you run, this task alone can regularly take 1 to 2 days per week when done manually.
With an online registration function with your training management or booking system, this task is eliminated completely. Delegates’ details are instantly captured into the course register, which can be accessed and viewed in real-time on any device, or downloaded as required.
Summary
It’s easy for training providers still clinging to their old ways to get bogged down in excessive admin and workflows that are inefficient and get in the way of business development and essential customer experience enhancing activity.
As a training organisation, you may have taken a step towards some online provision by adding a simple ecommerce element to your website, but that’s rarely enough to maximise efficiency and reduce costly admin practices.
Investing in a training management and booking solution for your business is much more than just providing a platform for your customers to sign-up. It’s an investment in tools that can:
- Create a seamless, hands-free onboarding process
- Ensure payments, refunds and invoices are handled quickly and effectively
- Allow clients to view and manage their own bookings
- Keep registers up-to-date without onerous need to manual amend spreadsheets
At thinkBooker we are constantly improving our platform with features that help organisations improve their efficiency, work more productively and enhance the customer experience they can deliver to their clients.
Get in touch to find out more about how we can help you.
At thinkBooker, we specialise in online booking systems for training courses, classes, activities and events – optimised for efficiency, growth and ongoing client satisfaction.
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