Best Practices
How to Improve the Registration Process: 6 Tips to Reflect on Your Last Enrollment Season
Every registration season delivers lessons for how to improve the registration process for your classes. The trick is recognizing those lessons when they come along. Education program directors may not realize that they already have a wealth of information that could help them make informed decisions about the next enrollment season.
We’ve compiled a 6-step checklist to help you reflect on your most recent enrollment season to learn from it and apply the lessons next season.
We’ve drawn on our years of experience supporting arts and nonprofit programs with class registration and payment processing to develop a seasonal registration audit checklist that brings these lessons to the surface. We’ll show you where to look for information about your most recent enrollment season and how to collect even more data so you can use it to increase enrollment.
6 Steps to Improve Your Registration Process
At the end of each registration season, follow these 6 steps to complete a registration process audit that will help you identify areas for improvement and get results.
1. Check Your Metrics
Start by comparing this season’s metrics to metrics from the same time last year. Don’t get too caught up in month-to-month fluctuations. Most programs see peaks and valleys in their registration numbers. Make sure you’re comparing apples to apples by checking this September against last September or this fall against the previous fall.
Even if your enrollment numbers are trending in the right direction, it’s worth completing the full registration process audit. Seasonal check-ins can help you spot small issues before they blow up into major problems.
Investigate:
- Whether enrollment levels grew, shrunk, or remained the same
- Which classes got the most enrollments
- Which classes got the fewest enrollments
- How students enrolled: online, in-person, by phone
- How people reached your website: ads, web search, email, direct link
Use this information to understand how people are enrolling in your classes and where changes may be needed. You can segment data to help you spot specific trends. For example, you may want to look at whether specific populations are enrolling, or whether 6pm classes attract more students than 7pm classes.
2. Collect Student Feedback
Ideally, you’re asking students to complete student feedback forms at the end of each class. These can give you information about what students thought of the class experience, but probably won’t tell you much about registration. For that you may want to send out a seasonal survey that asks about the registration, customer service, website experience and payment process.
Asking students for feedback doesn’t just help you collect useful information. Harvard Business Review reports that it also increases customer loyalty. People feel valued when you ask for their opinion.
We’ve written a whole article about how to collect and use student feedback, and here’s a broad overview of the kinds of questions that could help you improve your programs.
Ask students:
- How easy the registration process was
- Whether they could easily find the classes they wanted
- Their overall level of satisfaction
- Whether your website was easy to use
- How you could improve the registration experience
Use these questions to understand how students actually feel about your process and identify areas for improvement. A complex process, confusing website, or hard-to-navigate course catalog may be holding you back more than you realize. The best way to find out is to ask.
3. Investigate for Tech Issues
Some technical issues may be obvious — you’re not going to miss a website crash during your busiest enrollment day of the year. Others are harder to spot and may take some digging. A link that sends visitors to the wrong enrollment form might result in staff confusion, but no complaints from students.
Many education program directors assume that a lack of complaints means everything is fine. That may not be true. Research shows that the majority of unhappy customers don’t complain. Most just leave. And almost a third of customers will walk away from a company they love after just one bad experience.
Our own professional experience managing websites and payment systems tells us this is especially true if your website is clunky or hard to use. If your website is confusing customers, asks them to complete a complicated process, or simply does not deliver a seamless registration and payment process, they may leave without telling you.
Check for:
- High bounce rates on class registration pages
- Abandoned carts
- Waitlisted students who don’t convert into registrants
- Broken links
- Low traffic on course catalogs or registration pages
Proactively looking for technical issues helps you improve the user experience and enroll more of the visitors who come to your website.
4. Ask Staff for Their Impressions
Instructors and staff who work directly with students may have special insight into the registration process. Ask them for their impressions and opinions. You’re not necessarily looking for hard data here. Instead, you want to hear how staff and instructors perceive the process.
These anecdotes can be valuable because they reveal problems you may not have noticed otherwise. A receptionist who tells you they got three phone calls a day asking how to find your course catalog lets you know there is a pattern worth addressing.
Sometimes staff will use their own workarounds to try to solve these problems on their own. They may have developed scripts, tracking documents or resource lists to try to help students register. These kinds of resources help staff do their jobs, but can also obscure an ongoing problem. A functional workaround may mean you never notice that there’s a major issue with your system.
Ask staff about:
- The questions they most often heard from students
- Any shortcuts or special tools they developed
- Student stories that stuck out to them
- How they would improve the registration process
When you ask for staff feedback, you don’t just get valuable insight into your registration process. You also improve relationships with staff and instructors. Multiply this effect by thanking staff for their insight and keeping them informed of how you use their feedback.
5. Identify Areas to Improve
With baseline metrics and insight from your students, technical team, and instructors, you should be able to build a short list of areas to improve. Prioritize the list based on which issues have the greatest impact on student experience. An issue that affects just one course is less urgent than a systemic problem with your process.
Try to step back and get a big-picture view of what’s going on. This can help you find efficient solutions rather than creating a patchwork of fixes for various issues. For example, if you notice that some potential students are leaving the registration process without completing payment and others seem to be struggling with finding the classes they want, you may be able to solve the problem with all-in-one class registration and payment software.
Find solutions by:
- Prioritizing your problem list
- Looking for solutions that solve multiple issues
- Considering budget and complexity of roll-out
- Asking for recommendations from other course providers
These steps help ensure that you’re choosing efficient and effective improvements for your class registration process.
6. Make and Test a Strategy
Make a plan for how you’ll implement the solutions you’ve identified. Some may be simple and require little up-front planning. For example, adding a link to your cancellation policy to your universal registration form may take just a few clicks. Other solutions could benefit from a longer roll-out process. For example, before you introduce a new registration software you might need to train staff on how to use it, announce the change to students, and have technical support documents ready to go.
Consider:
- When you’ll roll out the new strategy
- Who will be responsible for each step
- How you will communicate changes to staff and students
- How you will measure the strategy’s success
A well-planned change strategy will help you make positive changes to your class registration process without the unintended side effects of confusing or frustrating the people you’re trying to help.
Repeat Every Season to Keep Improving the Registration Process
Complete this registration audit at the end of each enrollment cycle to help your program grow season after season. Regular check-ins will help you catch small issues before they become enrollment-impacting problems. Along the way, you’ll strengthen your relationships with both students and staff.
If a complex registration process is keeping your enrollments low, it might be time to investigate a new enrollment tool. Learn How the Right Enrollment Tool Can Save You Time, Money, and Effort.
Natasha Wahid
Natasha is a seasoned marketing leader with a curious mind and a passion for storytelling and community. A mission-driven person, Natasha has spent the majority of her career in industries that impact people, including HR and education technology. A firm believer in lifelong learning, Natasha is currently sharpening her roller skating skills and dusting off her Italian.