Situation

Casey RACE located in Cranbourne Victoria is one of Australia’s largest swim schools.

In 2013 in an effort to enhance their customer service the centre conducted a number of surveys with parents of children within their program in an aim of identifying areas in which they could improve their customer service.

The centre employed a survey technique called the “Net Promoter Survey” in an effort to get the most accurate and useable data. The NPS asks the question, on a scale of 1 to 10, how likely you would be to refer your friends and family to our service”. The responses from the NPS are then divided into 3 categories

Promoters (Those who score 9-10)
Neutrals (Those who score 7-8)
Detractors (Those who score 0-6)

The Net promoter is the number of promoters minus the number of detractors. This can be a positive or negative number depending on whether there are more promoters or detractors in the survey response.

The usable part of the net promoter comes next as detractors are followed up with the question “what would we need toimprove in order to receive a 9 or 10 rating from you? This information indicates the biggest causes of dissatisfaction to customer and hence the areas that you should focus on improving the most.

From the NPS, Casey RACE found that by far the biggest area causing parent dissatisfaction in their learn to swim program was “lack of communication about their child’s progress”- In fact, almost 70% of parents listed lack of communication as one of the biggest reasons for their less than satisfactory survey rating.

The top causes of dissatisfaction in the survey in addition to communication included lack of attention (students not assessed regularly enough), lack of progression (children remained in the one level and had not progressed within a reasonable time frame), and class changing teachers too frequently.

Casey Race set out to address these areas with a particular focus on improving the number one cause of dissatisfaction- Lack of communication

Goal- To address causes of parent dissatisfaction by focusing on improving communication with parents

Challange- With limited spare time and resources implementing such improvements without additional resources is almost impossible.

Solution

Improving these areas were going to be a monumental task as the centre only had so many staffing resources and extra time available to directly improve these improvement drivers. In fact, they were already stretched beyond maximise capacity with simply managing the day to day demands of running a learn to swim program.

In order to solve these challenges the centre needed some resources to help provide leverage that would allow them to get the desired outcome with minimal time and effort.

The Centre outlined some ways in which they could address these desired improvement areas.

Some of the key ideas included…

Sending parents emails every time their child is assessed notifying them of the result.
Sending a welcome email to parents
Sending a regular newsletter to parents
Tracking student assessments and generating a list of students who have missed assessments

In order to implement some of these ideas the centre needed the technology resources that would allow them to “automate” a number of these processes so they would continue to have the time in order to manage the needs of the centres day to day operations.

This is when the centre consulted with fitness and leisure software provider GreeneDesk in an effort to generate ideas of how these improvement goals could be achieved efficiently with the use of a software tool.

Objective

After several discussions, GreeneDesk began to customise a solution in order to address these key improvement drivers. In addition to the ideas already generated, further brainstorming by GreeneDesk’s product development team led to the development of a concept called the parent portal. Parents were not just asking  for more
communication, they were asking for “specific” and “personalised” communication about their child’s progression.

The parent portal concept was born to address this area specifically. The idea was to provide parents with an online logg in that could be access via a computer or smart phone where they could see their child’s current and historically swimming assessment results and skill development as well as information about their program and curriculum. The concept was essentially a parent’s handbook but an online version. This brainstorming and ongoing discussion helped refine the concept of a solution which would be based around the following structure….

Supervisors would complete assessments for children on an iPad whilst on pool deck- The information from these assessments would instantly appear on the parent portal. When an assessment was completed, an email notification would automatically be generated and sent to the parent which would contain their portal account log in information. The parent could then log in and see exactly how their child was progressing as well as personalised notes from their supervisor.

It was agreed that the concept was a winner and the finishing touches were put onto the solution.

Despite having an exciting concept success was not guaranteed, the next step became testing the concept in the real world.

The question became- Would this tool have a measurable impact on customer satisfaction.

Outcome

After several months of finalising software development the solution was ready to “pilot” in a real swim school environment. Casey Race commenced piloting the technology in their program. They would now complete their assessments on iPad and the parents would be notified and would receive a login to their online portal where they could track their child’s progression.

The initial feedback was positive, however, like all first version software there were many areas for potential improvement. The parent portal was welcomed by parents but the look and feel was average and un-inspiring. Further refinement was needed. Month after month the solution was refined and polished, useful reports were identified and implemented. This iteration process saw the birth of a powerful tool for improving swim school customer communication, service and satisfaction.

Parents loved the extra communication and personalised content about their child’s progress. In fact, parent portal login rates were as high as 65% meaning that out of 100 assessments 65 parents would log in at least once to view their child’s progress, in fact many parents would log in and explore the portal several times.

Parent Feedback- Casey RACE

Over several months Casey Race received outstanding feedback about their new initiatives which reflected in subsequent satisfaction surveys.

After an official launch and naming as Swim Desk, the application become available to all swim school’s as a tool to improve swimming lessons communication, progression and retention.

Today, Swim Desk is widely used by many leading swim schools and continue to grow and more and more centres realise the importance of customer service excellence and delivering personalised communication with their customers.

 For more information about SwimDesk go to www.swimdesksoftware.com or call 1300 181 665