Training Organisations who deliver short courses are particularly sensitive to ensuring they maximise the numbers of students on a course. The way that CourseSales.com allows and then prevents courses from being overbooked is by tracking the number of registrations and as a course becomes near to full warns with the word ‘Limited’ and then, once the course is full the document form buttons are removed and the word ‘Full’ is displayed. This is useful to ensure that the maximum number of students (recorded on the course date in the field ‘Total places’) is not exceeded but what about when students register but don’t turn up? Fine if they have paid, while an opportunity to fill another place was lost at least the revenue is still there. However what about situations when a student registers but does not pay this results in lost opportunities to fill the place with no corresponding revenue.

Change when a ‘registration’ occurs

In some cases if you just want to ensure that the number of registered students represents those who have paid, and not just provided their details you can change the ‘registered’ count on the process step to when payment arrives ie the ‘Paid’ step, not when the registration is made. This works best when payments are to be made mainly online at the same time as the booking. When payments could be made by cheque, bank transfer or as part of a company credit or invoicing process it becomes more complicated. You could for example manually process those other payments, there is a risk that you end up with too many registrations as people make payments days later and the time it takes to manually update these could result in the course offering places that have actually been filled already.

When doing this it might be sensible to make the point of the initial registration be counted as an ‘enquiry’ while when payment is made increases the ‘registered’ total. This will allow you to keep track of those students who say they will pay but have not yet paid. All these documents (paid or not) will appear in the list of documents for a given course date.

Read more about Add and Edit a Process Step

Persuasion

This is the recommended way to attempt to fix the disparity between those who have registered and those who have registered and paid. Some suggestions are:

• Include in your emails a message such as ‘your registration is not complete until you have paid’. In a big, red font.

• Setting up an automatic email to student if they have not paid to remind them to do so x days before a course

• Add a message to the ‘thank you’ page after the first form submission that encourages (similar to above) the student to make immediate payment eg ‘You registration is not complete - payment is required to secure your place’.

Insuring information is accurate

The more accurate the information is the better you are positioned to make decisions and enable CourseSales.com automated systems to work. In particular to know when payment is actually made can be enhanced by using call back features from the payment provider that confirm payment has been received. For example our PayPal integration uses IPN (Instant Payment Notification) to be certain that a payment has been made. Use this and auto return to ensure you do know when people have paid and smooth the customer experience.

Invoking a clear difference between enquiry and registration

If customers see a clear difference between two steps: one that includes payment and the other that is registration this can give impetus to the individual to complete payment and register.

This could be done by making the registration process a two-step arrangement where you take basic information eg email and name and payment in a first step and then only when payment is confirmed, eg via IPN, trigger an email that then invites the student to submit their remaining registration information.

In this case the first registration could be considered an ‘enquiry’ while the other is a ‘registration’. Keep in mind however that this might have its own issues if students don’t complete the second step but have paid, leading to refunds.