Buttercups Training uses processes and onboarding to tackle a massive backlog

In the summer of 2021, Emma Seton (COO) and the team at Buttercups Training were focused on clearing a backlog of over 500 learners trying to get enrolled on their courses.

This backlog had been caused by new government funding requirements, which were both more complex and more time consuming to handle.

Getting on top of this backlog was critical for the business, but the enrollments team was struggling:

• Only 3 senior team members were clear on how to process the enrollments end-to-end
• They felt unable to onboard new team members — it was too time consuming, and mistakes were common
• While the team had documented processes in Word, these were difficult to follow and full of inaccuracies.

Helping Buttercups to tackle their biggest business problem

When we started talking to Buttercups, it was clear that there were lots of opportunities to improve their documentation and processes.

But most of these weren’t a high priority.

Working with Emma, we helped her to focus on the big issues holding back the enrollments team: Inaccurate and difficult to follow processes, and ineffective role onboarding.

Within just a few weeks, we helped the the enrollments team to:

• Replace 74 pages of processes documented in Word with 14 simple checklists in AirManual
• Fix all of the inaccuracies
• Remove the barriers stopping team members from making updates
• Start training 5 new team members (!)

An incredible return-on-investment

The new team members were able to get up to speed quickly, and the entire backlog was tackled far quicker than previously estimated.

To get these results, Buttercups worked with our consultant for about 10 hours to set-up the processes and training.

In the first month of use, the team saved ~60 hours. That’s a huge 500% return-on-investment in just one month.

The longer term return-on-investment has been much, much higher.

“With AirManual, we were able to get staff up to speed and fully functional. We reduced the time spent on onboarding from 4 months to 2 weeks.”

Emma Seton
COO at Buttercups Training

Continuing the journey

Being on top of enrollments is no longer a problem for Buttercups — they’ve moved onto other challenges.

To solve these challenges, use of AirManual has spread across the company and they've now setup hundreds of checklists.

And unlike the old SOPs in Microsoft Word, these are being actively used, managed, and kept-up-to-date.

“It’s given me confidence that the team is now using a standardized approach, and it’s easy to make changes to the checklists when needed.”

Bryony Ward
Enrolments manager at Buttercups

Key learnings from this story

There’s a couple of insights to take from this customer story.

The first is that you need to focus your energy on your current business challenges. If Emma had chosen to improve processes in another area, it would have felt like a distraction to her and her team. And the project could have failed.

Initially Emma was reluctant to focus on this area as she assumed it would take too long to see the impact she needed.

And that’s the second insight to take away.

Working with AirManual (both the tool and consultants), you can move really quickly. SOPs and role onboarding can be set up in hours. It’s possible to make a huge impact in just days or weeks.

And because we focus on the biggest challenges, we expect a positive return on time invested within a month.

About Buttercups Training