In our last article, we spoke about the importance of parent communication with driving swim school customer satisfaction.

Communication about a child’s progress is the number one driver of student retention for swim schools with over 69% of parents rating lack of communication as their biggest cause of dissatisfaction in their child’s swimming lessons.

We also discussed the concept of making assessments, a communication event and sending parents a notification email every time their child is assessed.

However, this approach only solves half of the communication puzzle.

The feedback parents want is very specific.

They want to know how “THEIR” child is progressing. Are they getting better? What skills need further improvements etc. etc. etc.

Updating parents about the progress of their child’s swimming lessons can be time-consuming.

A conversation about a child’s progress can take anywhere from 1 minute up to 5 minutes.

If you consider writing a personalised email to each parent about their child’s skill progress, again this would take a minimum of 5 minutes per student. This equates to as much as 160 hours of administration time per term.

This is not scalable over 1000 or 2000 children as you don’t have the time or staffing resources to complete this mammoth task every time.

This means that most swim schools rely on the “squeaky wheel” approach to customer communication. They will focus only on those customers who complain or proactively ask. The problem with this is that many parents want to know how their child is progressing but instead of complaining, build up frustration without verbalizing it.

In order to communicate with such a large group of parents on an individual and personalized basis, swim schools can adopt a tool such as “parent portal” where parents can see real time progression information about their child.

A parent portal gives centers the ultimate communication advantage.

This is one of the features of SwimDesk software www.swimdesksoftware.com and gives swim schools the ability to exponentially expand their personalised communication capabilities.

When teachers or supervisors enter student swimming lesson assessment information into SwimDesk software, that data becomes instantly available on that child’s parent portal.

Therefore, when a parent receives a notification about the assessment taking place, the parent can log in to their secure portal to view and get an overview of their child’s skill progression.

By implementing such a strategy, you can ensure each parent receives at least a base level of communication about their child which eliminates the chance they become frustrated through lack of communication.