SwimDesk Client interview- SA Aquatic Centre
SwimDesk interviews Tiffany Oldrey- Swim School Coordinator from the SA Aquatic and Leisure Centre, one of Australia’s largest aquatic and leisure centers about the center’s experience with SwimDesk software.
| Interviewer: | The first question I have is…. What were you hoping to achieve by implementing SwimDesk at your centre? |
| Tiffany Oldrey: | Definitely, communication to the parents regarding the progression of the children. Because we have big swim school, it’s hard to get around to every parent. This delivers that constant feedback to them. |
| Interviewer: | Has that improved since implementing SwimDesk, How has it been addressed? |
| Tiffany Oldrey: | I do think it has been addressed. I guess what we are struggling with now is that the parents do want both. They want that personal touch as well as the communication that get through SwimDesk as well. SwimDesk is there and they love it, but they feel sometimes now like we don’t talk to them enough at all. |
| Interviewer: | Do you have any ideas of how you may tackle that? |
| Tiffany Oldrey: | We have. Due to the size and the number of people coming in, we have actually put an extra person on assessing what has cut down the classes. We could be running anything between eighteen to twenty-three classes in a time slot. For one person to get through all those classes in a month’s rotation, it’s a lot, especially with feedback. We have actually put another assessor on deck in that time, so we have then got allocated pool areas where they’re assessing. There’s a constant face on those pool areas and the same person assessing. |
| Interviewer: | You’ve accompanied SwimDesk with more resourcing from a supervisor point of view. |
| Tiffany Oldrey: | We’re really focusing on retention now and making it a service, I guess, as good as it can be from a customer service point of view. That’s the next step I think as well. |
| Interviewer: | Has SwimDesk, in addition to the communication, produced any other outcomes or benefits that were not really expected before you implemented? |
| Tiffany Oldrey | I think KPIs for our assessors on the deck, it has definitely helped with that! To set those. It has also set a KPI and a benchmark for how many kids we should be assessing every month. I guess that does create that number to work for. It does keep us trying to move forward all the time. |
| Interviewer: | How do you think SwimDesk can be improved? |
| Tiffany Oldrey: | We have spreadsheets that what we basically do is I have got an A3 sheet and I have all my classes on it for the whole day. That is laminated and after we have assessed it, we put a date on the top of it. So, we know where we are up to. Is it possible to have an overview of all the classes on one day that we could maybe stamp or time stamp over the top of when that class has been assessed last? |
| Interviewer: | When they have been assessed last? |
| Tiffany Oldrey: | Yeah. The day of their last assessment. Then I guess sometimes we have got a lot of classes. Some classes can be overlooked and unless you click on them, it actually does not say when it was assessed last. |
| Interviewer: | Final question. Could you quantify the main tangible benefits that you have seen from the implementation of Swimdesk? |
| Tiffany Oldrey: | I think the massive thing is it moved us into teacher land. |
| It moves us to look more professional with the reports that we are sending out to parents. I have been in the Swim industry for a long time where we just spoke to people and you can never speak to everybody. I always say to my swimming teachers, “You are not just an instructor. You are a teacher.” This tops on all of that. It gives parents that feeling of being informed. It does open up the question which means that they are going to come to us and ask questions that they may not otherwise asked us. There may not have been any communication. We just find that a great selling point. Parents love it. |
