Costly Reprecussions of VILT Cancellations & No Shows

Hi @Jessica Overby 

I think that only lets them not enroll, not prevent them from unenrolling relative to the event, could be wrong though.

lrnlab wrote:

Hi @Jessica Overby 

Jessica Overby wrote:

Hello Fellow Admins, 

We offer a variety of VILT courses (we do not charge employees within the LMS) that are fairly costly. We are constantly experiencing employees canceling last minute or not showing up, which is a big issue.

What does your company do to help avoid last minute cancellations and no shows from courses that cost the company money?

The options I thought of are adding a “Last Day to Cancel” notification. I also thought about turning off the ability to unenroll from the session and change sessions, but this would apply to all course sessions at all times.

I wish there was a way to prevent unenrollment X days before the session start date. Yes you do!! Check out the options below when setting up your SESSION details

Any ideas would be really helpful! Thank you!

 

Thank you for sharing! However, I think this only prevents them from enrolling X days before the session starts; it does not prevent them from withdrawing or changing sessions X days before the session starts. Is that correct? 

Thank you @angel.maenza for the recommendations. For the seat fee, do you just run a report afterwards and charge departments based on the people who do not show as completed. Or, is this something you automated? If so, how? 

We have their department as an additional field in Docebo, so we just run a report afterwards and file it with our finance group. We charge based on those who registered, so if they signed up regardless of whether they attended or not.

Also a note, when we do have a department charge, we do also usually require a manager approval as well, just so the manager is aware their budget will be hit for the training. 

Thank you! This was very helpful!

@Jessica Overby, since you are selling the training externally, do you have waitlists turned off?

We’re currently implementing and we are extended enterprise. We have the same set up where employees can take  training for free while customers pay. The fact that you can’t have automated waitlists AND sell content is frustrating to us. We have too many customers and classes each week to manually manage waitlists, so we are pretty much no longer offering waitlist as an option. I’m currently looking to keep waitlists active, but change the wording to something like “Interested” so we can track the specific times that people are interested in a class and once we hit a certain threshold we’ll just create a new event at that time. 

My scheduling team says that they don’t think employee no shows is a problem, but in our current system if we have a waitlist, an employee can get booted for someone on the waitlist. I’m wondering if the problem your describing will become our problem with waitlists not being used as a waitlist. 

Hi Steven, we actually are not selling the training externally. This training is provided to our internal employees and facilitated by a contractor. However, for your use case, I am shocked that you cannot have automated waitlists and sell content. I would definitely submit a ticket and tell your CEM!

From your use case it seems like you need a behavioral change from the employees and their line managers. If you have a policy of the course is free, then for many “free has no value” How about informing the students and their managers of the true cost of the course with a condition that IF you turn up AND successfully complete the course, then your costs will be paid by the company. If you do not attend then those costs will be borne by your Managers cost center. 

That way employees have to explain to their managers why they have wasted the money.

We did this some time ago due to a rather expensive program we were running (not via Docebo) and it did quickly improve the no show rate and also completion at the  sessions.

Good luck !!

Gary

Culture change is hard, but yes accountability needs to be established. We are not allowed to charge back unfortunately. But a report of repeat no-shows to bosses and these users not being able to re-enroll as quick or easily so that they don’t complete programs and so their bosses miss goals for bonuses also worked out for improvement. 

@Bfarkas I completable agree, we did the same for the majority of courses, we also looked at the numbers of changes of learners and also looked at cases where a learner was sent as a replacement at the last min (Most of them did not know why they were sent and had not done the prerequisites ( we run technical training) )  

I then estimated the cost to the business (including the costs of no shows and extra admin) That did raise a few eyebrows in senior management 🤔\

Somewhat happily now I only have to deal with external (fee paying) customers 😉

Cheers.,

Gary

We have (or rather had) a cancellation fee which was charged back to the department if people cancelled within 5 days or was a no show.  The problem we have now with self enrolment/unenrolment is that we have no idea when people cancel.

Ideally we would like some way of people being able to give a reason when they cancel e.g. workload/sickness/other leaver  and for us to be able to pull off a report which shows all unenrolments within 5 days of a session date.  nether of which we can do.

Even if we could do a report like this, the fact people can be automatically enrolled if someone pulls out last minute is that we could end up charging someone who only found out about the course 2 hours before.

The cancellation charge really helped the culture change, but now we are unable to track and charge we have noticed the no shows creeping up.  

The other thing that would be good is if managers were notified of a last minute cancellation.  again another thing that we can’t do.  so would be interested in any tips on alternative methods for monitoring last minute cancellations.  

Update: We added an acknowledgement quiz that asks for the learner’s manager’s approval to take the course. The learner has to acknowledge that their department would be charged if they cancel the session. Finally, we created a special un-enrollment form that requires a manager’s approval to unenroll.

Because it is really hard to track and execute charging the departments for no shows, this is not actually being implemented. We also created an ILT unenrollment policy for the course and included it in the acknowledgement and course description. 

We had thought to use the audit trail to identify those who unenrolled from a session within 5 days.  Although the trail tells us who unenrolled and whe, it does tell us which session (rather the audit trail CSV shows a session ID which i can’t find in the properties of the session itself). 

If anyone knows how to decipher this code id be interested.  if we can identify the session then we may be able to identify late cancellations.

{"course_id":56,"course_name":"Living our values - creating a value-led environment","session_id":549,"level":"learner","status":"subscribed","enrollment_date":"2022-03-23 11:13:54","enrollment_date_begin_validity":null,"enrollment_date_end_validity":null,"subscribed_by_id":14361}

Hello all- it seems we have a similar use case and concern. I opened a new idea about adding a dynamic cancellation date and a status of “cancelled” for those who cancel out of a course so we can more easily run reports. Please update this idea if you agree.