Learnsmarter has the facility to manage waiting lists for live training courses, but how do you manage the people who are waiting?
We recently had a great chat with a customer about this to work out the best way forward. The problem is that if you tell a person that they’re on the waiting list, then that implies a certain level of obligation to that person. If they’re the first person on the waiting list, should they be the first person to get the place if one becomes available? Now that may be what you want to do and it’s relatively simple to make that happen, but for many customers that could create as many problems as it solves.
The fact is that since the person made the waiting registration, all sorts of things might have changed. They might have gone for an alternative, or maybe they’ve just made other plans now for that day. If you simply give them the place they might not want it, or maybe they don’t get the message that you’ve now given them the place and they don’t show up for training.
The solution we came up with was to change the word ‘Waiting’ to ‘Notify Me’. This changes the obligation and the expectation (and you can make this clear in any communications you send out). All waiting users can expect to be notified when a place becomes available, but they get don’t get priority when that happens. Everyone on the notify list now has a chance to swap their waiting place for a confirmed one, but if another person grabs that place first, then the user might feel disappointed, but hopefully they don’t feel cheated. The other thing that happens is because the learner makes the change themselves, they know that this has happened and they know that they’ve been successful, making them much more likely to turn up on the day.
