Renee W. Devine Senior Manager Technical Training renee.devine@siemens.com

Improving customer satisfaction with the registration process for Siemens Power Academy TD North America’s courses was a key driver behind T&D Service Solution’s initiative to enable online credit card payments. Additional goals included:

• improve our customers’ online buying experience
• reduce registration confirmation and order fulfillment processing time
• increase the number of customers using a credit card as their payment method
• improve customer communication
• improve operational efficiencies

The value of this project was clear prior to its February 2009 kickoff. The current means for course registration was a labor-intensive, manual process. Customer touchpoints were excessive, and it took several days before the process was complete so that a receipt could be forwarded. In the U.S., a seamless online credit card buying experience is a requirement to operate in the virtual business world.

For the Siemens Power Academy, a key component enabling this project’s success was the development of a new Learning Management System (LMS), hosted by CourseWebs, which allows all course registrations to be processed in real time through an online registration system. The new LMS links from the Siemens Power Academy courses (www.usa.siemens.com/energy/pti-education) and redirects students to the associated course on Siemens.CourseWebs.com. There students can view schedules, search and filter by date, search by location or course prefix, and then register for courses via a shopping cart feature. To complete the registration process, students create or log-in to their account profile and elect a method of payment. The “Pay Now” option provides a secure gateway for credit card transactions whereas the “Pay Later” option allows students to be invoiced and process purchase order or wire transfer payment. Students will then receive a transaction confirmation and two system generated e-mails: the first confirming registration selection, the second with attached receipt confirming payment or containing a registration (invoice) receipt. All this occurs in about three minutes. Other benefits of the LMS include access to enrollment history, supplemental course materials and discussion forums. As a result of this new system, manual transaction processing has been reduced from days to minutes.

In 2010, Siemens Power Academy will be including a subscription-based digital library in the LMS, where enrolled students can access electronic course notes and track progress toward one of the new Siemens certifications.

Download document as .pdf