The 6 Major Time Thiefs for Training Providers – and How to Avoid Them

Time is money. And where you find money, you also find thieves lurking. Time thiefs are of the sleazy kind. They are hard to spot, but you notice they are there. They devour your working hours and the 24 hours of the day no longer hold up. As time goes on, time thiefs will negatively impact your business performance. If you manage to make the biggest time thiefs in your business visible, you can confront them, chase them away and take back your day. You will soon have time for the value-adding work that really matters. In this blog post, we reveal the biggest and most common time thieves for training providers, and give you tips on how to get rid of them.

Manual handling of registrations and participants

There is nothing that feels better than large amounts of incoming enrollments and fully booked training .

But if you do manual handling of registrations and participants, you have one of the biggest time thiefs for training providers hanging over you.

The more registrations and participants you receive on the training, the more time it steals from you.

The registration flow becomes a two-edged sword: On the one hand, the business’s revenue increases, while on the other hand the workload increases significantly for every single participant who registers.

And the work does not stop when the registration process is completed. Participants will also be followed up, including when it comes to payment status, attendance and dissemination of important training information.

If you do all this manually by moving information repeatedly between documents and systems that do not talk together, you can be sure that you are losing large amounts of time that could have been to get even more participants to your training .

Solution

First, you should go for the acquisition of an registration system that makes it easy for you to handle incoming registrations.

If you are lucky, you go for a system that also lets you follow up on the participants afterwards.After all, even if you want your registrations to flow in, you will, after all, offer professional and effective participant follow-up as well.

Functionality that you should look for is a clear list of participants, attendance and payment status of participants, participant communication and waiting list functionality. The latter not only saves you time, but also increases your earning potential. And you don’t say no thanks to that?

Issuance of training certificate

Do you issue training certificates? Then you know that this can be a time-consuming process.

Not only do you have to create the training certificate itself and insert the correct participant information, but you also have to spend time sending it out. Sometimes you also have to find the training certificate afterwards and resubmit it. If you are really persistent, then you or the training instructor must sign every single training certificate by hand. PUH! Here is a lot of manual work that takes TIME!

Solution

Avoid using separate systems for the different stages of training certificate issuance. Choose a system that lets you do everything in the same system, or a system that lets you swipe information across each other. If you want a signature on your training certificates, you save a lot of time choosing a solution that allows you to enter electronic signature on the training certificates.

Performing tasks the business customer can do themselves

Do you offer in-house training? Then you probably spend some time on the booking processes associated with these.

And you’re not alone. Many training providers have very little conversion-optimal and time-efficient solutions when it comes to business customers and training booking. Often they do not have a solution whatsoever, and are left with a lot of manual work and phones and emails going back and forth. Do you recognise your self? If that is the case, you have been victim of a time thiefs for training providers.

Solution

Many of the tasks associated with your business customers can easily be done by the business customer even through a booking solution. You can save a lot of time by letting your business customers make bookings on your training on their own.

And you don’t have to worry about transferring the training booking to your customers. Often, the customer prefers self-service, and it is often much more effective for both parties. E-mails and phone calls back and forth not only steal from your time, but also from the customer’s time.

Besides: Such a booking solution for business customers will not only chase away one of your most avid thieves, but it will also increase customer loyalty and give you the opportunity to add value to customers.

Manual execution of routine work that can be automated

How many of your tasks are purely or partly routine work?

Probably a significant proportion. And behind every routine task, there is a time stealer that is contentedly rubbing his hands.

The time spent on repetitive work increases with the growth of the business and creates a heavy administrative burden for the business. This prevents the company from spending time on value-adding activities and being able to effectively follow up customers at important points of contact throughout the customer journey.

This is a time stealer you really want to arrest.

Solution

If you have not yet automated routine e-mail and SMS routines, this is where you should start with automation work. This can save you enormous amounts of time in the long run, and there is a wide variety of solutions that allow you to do just that.

If you want to save even more extra time, choose a system that lets you feed participant information and important training information right into your broadcasts without having to lift a finger. If you don’t, you’ll be left with the next thief…

Double punching and moving information

I don’t know about you, but I work in up to ten different programs and systems daily. The most annoying thing I encounter is the lack of opportunities to move information from one system to another. I believe that this is one of the biggest time thiefs for training providers.

Good opportunities for import and export are the intermediate solution to this. It makes the move job both easier and faster than the alternative (copy and paste repeatedly), but it is quickly wrinkled with formatting and not clear if there is a lot of data. Here you really have to have your tongue straight in your mouth – and it takes time to move information back and forth.

Solution

For me, choosing systems with integration options has been very time-saving. By doing this, you do not have to enter the same information in multiple systems, and you also do not spend time exporting and importing information.

Lack of tools for effective communication

Does your business spend a lot of time communicating with customers and participants?Do you work without email templates and merge fields? Then you have a proper time stealer to arrest.

This way of operating may work fine when you have few participants to relate to – But when the list of participants starts to grow… Oh my!

Solution

Arresting this time thief is a relatively simple task.Go to the acquisition of a system that allows you to communicate effectively with participants and customers, both on a routine and off-routine basis. To save the most time, look for systems that allow you to create and use email templates with merge fields. The more template-based and the more features for automatically feeding information the system has, the more time you can potentially save!

So what are you waiting for?

Now that you have an overview of what potential thiefs for training providers are stealing valuable time from your business, it’s time to start the arrests. Don’t let the thieves get away with your time!

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