By Richard Greenhalgh, Development Director, Redwing
Last week Adrian Hart, Redwing’s MD, and I attended the English UK marketing conference at Bishopsgate in London to promote Resirva, our online enrolment system for language and summer schools. With a shiny new brochure and website to match at www.resirva.com we were keen to test the water with language and summer school principals and administrators.
As Resirva is relatively new to the market, we were curious how it might be received. Any apprehension lasted for about 20 minutes though, by which time we’d had three very good conversations with language schools who couldn’t quite believe what we were telling them. One gentleman in particular gave me a friendly but nonetheless thorough grilling with some very searching questions and seemed intrigued when he couldn’t trip me up!
Throughout the day Resirva received a lot of interest and there were clear messages coming through: “This is unique. There’s nothing anywhere close to Resirva on the market. Even some ‘online’ solutions which have been around for a long time can only do a fraction of what this does.” All of which was obviously very reassuring and we’re now busy following up that interest.
When you look at what Resirva can do, it’s little wonder that it’s going down so well. Language and summer schools tend to suffer from the same challenges when it comes to taking bookings from agents and parents. Almost all are done offline, with a downloadable application form that the applicant completes and then posts (or scans and emails if they’re really on the ball). Even those schools with an online form to complete tend not to have a usable database sitting behind the form, so all of the enrolment data has to be re-entered by the school’s admin team. The applicants’ writing can often be hard to decipher, so not only does the school have to re-key all the data but they also often have to call the applicant to query anything that’s not clear.
All of this booking data usually sits in a spreadsheet (or spreadsheets, more typically, that don’t link up with each other) which is difficult to use as a contact and customer management tool. Invoices must be raised and payments taken over the phone or by cheque, some of which will be deposits and some progress payments, and all of which have to be matched back to the original booking details to make sure full payment has been made. You can imagine the sea of Post It notes and paper on desks in schools across the country…
We built Resirva to address all of these challengers, and others. One single online solution makes the whole experience much easier and better for the applicant, as well as automating almost all of the admin tasks at the school, saving time, resource and money. With Resirva, it’s possible to process an entire enrolment just by clicking ‘Accept’ on the first stage booking enquiry, the system then handles everything else for you.
If you’d like to find out how Resirva could help your summer or language school, please drop us a line or give us a call, we’d be delighted to walk you through it. And we’re very much looking forward to English UK’s next conference at the Tower Hotel in London in May, perhaps we’ll see you there.