Installment Plan System

A flexible, installment-based course purchasing system that broke down the upfront cost barrier for students, giving them full access to education from day one while maintaining a strong payment recovery rate through smart product design.

Context

At Shikho, the telesales team is the primary revenue channel. The team works with students and families across Bangladesh, guiding them through course selection and enrollment into academic programs for HSC and SSC level study.

For the majority of these students, the full course fee paid upfront is a genuine financial barrier. Families who wanted access to quality digital education were being turned away not because they lacked intent, but because they lacked the immediate capital. The business was losing conversions at the final step of the funnel, and a meaningful portion of Bangladesh’s student population was being left behind.

The opportunity was clear: build a system that lets students access the full course from day one while paying across a structured installment schedule.

The Problem

The challenge was not simply splitting a payment into parts. There were three interconnected problems that needed to be solved simultaneously.

For students, there was no mechanism to access a course without paying the full amount upfront. Students who committed to a plan needed a seamless experience that kept them engaged, reminded them of upcoming payments, and handled missed deadlines without creating a punitive experience that damaged trust.

For the telesales and customer experience teams, there was no tooling to create, configure, and manage installment plans. Agents needed a system that let them enroll students with the right plan, handle payment verification, and extend deadlines on a case-by-case basis without engineering involvement.

For the business, the product had to actually recover payments at a high rate. Offering installments without the right nudge mechanisms and content gating strategy would introduce significant revenue risk. The system had to be designed so that recovering payments was the natural outcome, not the exception.

My Solution

I led the end-to-end product design and delivery of the Installment Plan System, working across the CMS, the student-facing app and portal, and the notification infrastructure.

1. CMS Panel for Plan Management

I designed a CMS module for admin-level staff to create and configure installment plans per academic program. Plans are built with defined installment amounts, deadlines, and deadline extension limits. Once created and published, amounts and deadlines are locked to protect financial integrity. Plans can be toggled active or inactive without disrupting existing enrolled students.

2. Enrollment Panel for Sales and CX Teams

I built a dedicated enrollment interface for telesales agents, CX staff, and admins. Agents can search a student by phone number, select the right academic program and installment plan, verify the first payment (either through manual BKash verification with multiple transaction ID support, or a generated BKash payment link), and enroll the student in seconds. Upon enrollment, the student receives an SMS with the plan name, paid amount, remaining amounts, and next installment date.

3. Student-Facing Experience: Happy and Unhappy Flows

The student experience was designed around two clear states.

In the happy flow, students land on a homepage banner that shows the next due amount and due date. The banner is dismissible until the final ten days before a deadline, when it becomes persistent to drive payment completion. The payment flow itself is straightforward: students see the plan details, select a payment method, and confirm. The banner updates dynamically based on whether further payments remain.

In the unhappy flow, students who miss a payment deadline see a persistent banner and encounter content locks on their course cards. Access is restored immediately upon payment. I made a deliberate product decision here: missed activities are marked as missed, but the student’s remaining schedule is not readjusted. This keeps the integrity of the course timeline while treating the student fairly.

4. Notification System

I designed an automated notification system with four key triggers: enrollment confirmation, ten days before a deadline, the last day of a deadline, and after a missed deadline. Each trigger delivers both an SMS and an in-app inbox message tailored to the payment state of the student.

5. Deadline Extension Panel for CX Teams

A separate panel allows CX agents to extend individual student deadlines within the maximum limit set per plan. This gave the support team a way to handle exceptional cases with empathy without needing engineering to intervene.

The Result and Impact

The Installment Plan System launched in April 2024 and has been in continuous operation since.

The system achieved an 85% overall payment recovery rate across all academic programs, with top-performing programs reaching 89 to 90% recovery. These numbers reflect not just the effectiveness of the notification and content gating strategy, but the fundamental product insight that students who are given access upfront are motivated to protect that access.

Beyond the metrics, the most meaningful outcome was access. Students who could not have enrolled without installment options now have a path into structured, full-featured academic programs. The system turned a financial barrier into a manageable payment journey, and in doing so, expanded the addressable market for the business while delivering real educational value to more students across Bangladesh.

The Installment Plan System stands as a case study in how fintech-informed product thinking can drive both business outcomes and social impact within an EdTech context.