🪴 Pranav Mandhare

Building for Future - the story of smart batching

2 min read

Context

One of the core education products of Infinity Learn were the Live Classes. The live class product was entirely vertically managed by the in-house teams - which meant,

  1. The business team used to decide on the market requirements
  2. Based on market requirements the academics team would design curriculums
  3. The content team would collaborate with academics and develop a course
  4. The product team would package the course into a package
  5. The marketing and sales team would bring the customers
  6. The operations team would onboard the customers onto the product (📍Smart Batching was a solution to improve student onboarding rate for this department)
  7. The academics team would continue the learning of onboarded students

The process before smart batching

  • Every time a sale was completed, the student would be instantly start receiving the services for their purchase.
  • However for live classes, students or the parents of the students would need to answer a call from the Operations team to confirm their preferred Class Timings, Day Preferences, Language Preferences and more depending on the type of package.
  • Ideally the operations team would call the parents within 24hrs of package purchases
  • Since every course had limited seats the operations team would pitch based on real time availability of seats.
  • If the parents/students were unreachable or if there were allotment conflicts - the student would have to experience their first live class 7 days post purchase.
  • This was a big problem because Live Class was a flagship product and customers would ask a refund if they could not get the Aha moment quickly.
  • Hence the goal was to improve Live Class activation while managing the complexity of preference collection and live batch enrolment and also develop flows for modification requests.

Success

Live Class Activation TAT before Smart Batching: 24hrs to 7 days in case of escalations

Live Class Activation TAT post Smart Batching: Within a few hours for 60% students. 40% cases required a manual followup

Manual followups had a productivity improvements as instead of a detailed chat on phone call, operations team would send a dynamic link which would open a dashboard for recording preferences

The internal discussions before building

There were multiple requirements presented to the product team which were directly or indirectly relating to the batching bottleneck:

  1. The marketing team wanted to display course and batch selection

Graph View