Sometimes the problem isn’t the software

Many businesses come to us believing they have a Mailchimp problem.

In reality, they have a process problem.

That was certainly the case when we started working with The MOT Training & Compliance Group.

Their training courses were successful, delegates were booking and the business was growing. The challenge wasn’t attracting customers. As Karena Hill described it, the frustration was simply:

“Keeping on top of MOT course bookings.”

Behind that fairly simple statement was a much bigger communication process.

Every booking triggered a chain of tasks. Confirmation emails, reminder messages, joining instructions, cancellation handling and post-course follow-up all depended on someone knowing what needed to happen next and remembering to do it.

The system worked, but only because people made it work. As the business became busier, that became harder to sustain.

Understanding the process before building the automation

One of the biggest misconceptions about automation is that it’s simply about creating email sequences.

It’s not.

Automation only works when it reflects how a business actually operates, which means understanding the process before deciding how to automate it.

Before we built anything, we spent time looking at how bookings were taken, what happened after someone booked, what information delegates needed before attending a course and how exceptions such as cancellations or no-shows were handled.

That questioning turned out to be an important part of the project.

Karena described our approach as:

“Very efficient – obvious desire to get it right for us, asking all the right questions that covered areas I hadn’t thought of.”

That last part is particularly important.

When a process has developed naturally over time, much of it can exist in people’s heads rather than in a documented workflow. Someone knows what to do if a delegate books late. Someone else knows what happens when a person doesn’t attend. Those exceptions are easy to overlook when you start thinking about automation.

Asking the right questions helps bring them into the process.

Only once we’d mapped the complete journey did we begin designing the automation.

Designing a communication system, not just an email sequence

This project involved far more than sending scheduled emails.

We created an automated workflow that managed every stage of the delegate journey, including booking confirmations, pre-course reminders, communications for managers as well as delegates, cancellation handling, non-attendance workflows and post-course follow-up.

One particularly interesting challenge involved delegates who booked shortly before a course.

A standard automation could have meant those delegates missed reminder emails that had already been scheduled earlier in the journey. Rather than accepting that limitation, we designed additional workflow logic so that someone joining the process later could still receive the information they needed.

That mattered because the objective wasn’t simply to make the emails automatic. It was to make the communication reliable.

As Karena explained, the new system has made it:

“Easier to be certain that candidates are getting all the information they need in good time before their course.”

That’s a much better measure of whether the automation is doing its job.

Making Mailchimp fit the business

Another important decision was recognising that the office team didn’t want to work inside Mailchimp every time someone booked a course.

Most bookings arrived by telephone or email, so asking staff to change the way they already worked simply to accommodate the technology would have created another problem.

Instead, we built the solution around the business.

Simple internal forms allowed staff to continue taking bookings in a familiar way. Behind the scenes, the information collected through those forms fed into Mailchimp and triggered the appropriate communication journey automatically.

The technology adapted to the business, rather than the business having to adapt to the technology.

It also meant candidates could be added as soon as their booking arrived. In Karena’s words:

“Put candidates on courses as their bookings come in – no one gets forgotten.”

It’s a simple outcome, but an important one. The reliability of the communication no longer depends on somebody remembering to come back and deal with the booking later.

The difference it made

The biggest outcome wasn’t a marketing metric.

It was confidence.

Instead of wondering whether reminders had been sent or whether somebody had been forgotten, the team could trust the system to manage the communication around each booking.

Karena summed up the difference as:

“Peace of mind, time freed up, we can trust in the automation.”

When we asked what had made the biggest day-to-day difference to the team, her answer was even simpler:

“Time.”

That’s easy to underestimate when thinking about automation. Saving a few minutes sending an individual email isn’t particularly exciting. Removing the need to repeatedly check bookings, remember what needs to happen next and worry about whether somebody has been missed is much more significant.

When we asked Karena to sum up the difference in one sentence, she came back to the same two things:

“Time saved, peace of mind.”

What this project reminds us

This project reinforced something we see time and again.

Businesses rarely ask us for better automations because they’re excited about automation itself. They usually come to us because a manual process has become difficult to manage.

Automation is simply one part of the solution.

The real value comes from understanding how the business works, identifying where communication depends on memory or manual intervention and designing a system that removes those points of uncertainty.

The MOT Training & Compliance Group can now be more certain that candidates receive the information they need, while the team spends less time managing the process behind it.

That’s the difference between automating a few emails and improving the way a business operates.

Need help designing a communication system?

Whether you run training courses, appointments, events or membership programmes, your customers deserve timely, consistent communication and your team deserves systems they can rely on.

If customer communication in your business still depends on people remembering what to do next, it may be worth looking at the process before looking at the technology.

And if Mailchimp turns out to be part of the answer, we’d be happy to help.