The future of Workshop Butler. Part 2

Last week I shared our vision and purpose. Today I want to talk about the path we will follow in 2019 to make our dreams come true.

Workshop Butler helps training businesses to free themselves from  administrative routine. It does it through automation and collaboration.  These two themes define most of the new features we plan to deliver  this year. Let’s take a look.

Collaboration

Last year we finalised the concept of account. There are three types of accounts available: individual trainers, training companies, and certification bodies, or brands. Any user can access several accounts and switch between them depending on the role she is playing at the moment.

For example, meet Alice. Alice is a trainer and runs workshops  monthly. At the same time, Alice helps BeAwesome company to organise  courses for its trainers. There is no need to create two separate users  for that. The BeAwesome company adds Alice as manager. Now Alice can  switch to BeAwesome account right from Workshop Butler cabinet, without  logging out and logging in again.

However, scenarios like this one are not the main benefit of  accounts. It is various collaboration options which become available  thanks to them. For example, workshops.

The BeAwesome company wants Alice to run a licensed BeStrong  workshop for them, which are licensed by BeStronger certification body.  They invite Alice as an external trainer and create a workshop on her  behalf. Now BeAwesome, Alice and BeStronger could see this workshop. The  workshop is visible on their websites (yes, all three!) and students  can register to it from any of them. If BeAwesome decides to change  dates or prices, these changes become instantly available on all  accounts and websites.

So far we have these collaboration options:

  • Certification bodies can give trainers the licenses
  • Trainers can invite other trainers to run workshops together
  • Training companies can ask trainers to run workshops and manage these workshops for them

And here what we plan.

Training Company ↔ Trainer

We will improve the management of trainer accounts for training  companies. A company will be able to add or remove workshop categories  to trainers, fire trainers or delete their accounts entirely.

The UI for workshops will be reworked. Both trainers and training companies can choose who manages a training, how gets workshops-related notifications, etc.

Training Companies will also get the ability to renew and cancel license subscriptions on behalf of trainers.

Certification Body ↔ Training Company

Certification Bodies will be able to invoice  training companies for all their trainers at once, both license  subscriptions and workshop fees. For example, if BeAwesome company has  three licensed BeStrong trainers, BeStronger can send one invoice for  all three subscriptions.

Certification Body ↔ Trainer

The renewal and cancellation UI will be improved. Trainers will be able to renew an expired license easily.

Trainer ↔ Trainer

Current collaboration UI will be reworked from scratch to make the process easier and joyful.

Student Accounts

There is a chance that we’ll introduce student accounts this year. If  you’re interested in this feature, please, reach us to discuss more.

Automation

Though there are plenty of things we want to do with collaboration,  we will spend most of our time on automating more administrative tasks.  And the brilliance of accounts plays here as well. In most cases, the  automation for one type of account can be used by other types of  accounts. For example, the subscription of attendees to MailChimp lists  is identical for trainers and training companies.

API

We will make our API more comprehensive, vibrant and open. It will be  much easier to integrate another product with Workshop Butler.

Zapier

We will open Zapier to all types of accounts and provide new actions and objects to operate with.

Invoice Automation

Certification Bodies will be able to connect their  invoice management software and send invoices to trainers and training  companies for workshops and subscriptions. They can see from the cabinet  what subscriptions and workshop are still pending the payment, and  check invoices right from UI.

Training Companies and Trainers will be able to see invoices from Certification Bodies in UI. They will also get the ability to send invoices to students,  both via connected invoice management software and created by Workshop  Butler.

Website Integration

Our website integration plugins, released last autumn, were a hit. We  will make them more configurable, SEO-friendly and more natural to set  up. We will also add several new types of widgets for you to use.

Email Automation

There are a couple of email sequences built into Workshop Butler. The  first set of messages is sent to attendees when they register for a  workshop: a welcome email, a reminder, etc. The second set of messages  is sent to trainers when their license subscription is about to expire.  These sequences are quite static, and users can change only a few  things.

We will introduce a more complex and more configurable mechanism for email sequences.

Webhooks

Multiple webhooks will become available for certain types of plans  making the integration with other products more accessible than ever.

Mix

Besides automation and collaboration tasks, we will also work on  improving user experience and some platform-related features like better  in-app and email notifications.

Of course, everything you see above is bold brush strokes. Something  else may get higher priority based on your feedback and requests.  However, it stays around our two main themes - automation and  collaboration.