Is there a place for customisation in the childcare industry?
What exactly does customisation mean in childcare?
Let’s break it down.
Childcare centres are a vital part of the community. And they need to be able to efficiently manage their leads. Your center already relies on a childcare management system...but lead management software helps centers create a unique, tailored experience for families.
A customised lead management system encourages your centre to reach our enrolment goals by personalising centre email templates, workflow automation, drip campaigns, reports and more.
Some childcare lead management software providers will offer some level of customisation but it’s important to find a platform that can create a personalised experience for the families inquiring about your center. Ready to dive in?
Importance of customisation in the childcare industry
The childcare industry is unique, with its own specific challenges and opportunities. As such, it's important to consider how you can make your software work for you, your team and your families.
By customising important steps in your enrolment process, you can create a personalised experience for families and build brand awareness. Make parents and guardians feel connected, and ultimately become loyal customers.
Each childcare business goal is clear: they want to create an experience where parents felt like they were being interacted with directly rather than using an impersonal tool which offered no emotional connection.
Customising Email templates
The most common area for centres to customise and personlise is their email templates. These email templates are automatically sent out throughout a standard enrollment process that looks something like this: first enquired, tour booked, tour completed, waitlisted, registered, and enrolled.
Although these emails are quick and automated, that doesn’t mean they can’t have a personal touch! Here are the most beneficial and important sections to customise in your email templates:
- Family’s name (parent specific)
- Child’s name
- Child’s age
- Signature with centre location
This may sound like a lot of work, but LineLeader will do it for you! Simply place what content you would like in each section and the variable tag will change for each receipient, making every single email unique and different.
Before sending out email:
After sending out email with personalisation:
Customising your workflow automation
Workflow automation is an important part of any childcare centre's software. It allows you to set up specific rules that will automatically trigger tasks when certain events occur.
For example, you can set up a workflow rule to send an email reminder to parents who have an upcoming tour within the week, or if they have not engaged with the centre about their enrolment within 2 weeks. Before customising your workflow your centre will need to do some research and see what is working for them.
Ask yourself these questions:
- When do my families’ like to be communicated?
- Which communication do my families engage with the most? (Separate or segment into different categories, phone call, email and text messages)
- Does my centre team have the capacity to follow up with families?
- When does my centre team have the time to follow up with families?
This will help you and your team create a perfectly automated enrolment experience. Enroll more families, with less work. Each centre should factor in family engagement, staff productivity, team bandwidth, and enrollment capacity. For example, if families are known to not pick up phone calls or call back, create a texting workflow option so they can respond to that instead. This change in the workflow will increase engagement rates and satisfy parents more as they have another quicker and easier way to respond to the centre.
Another part of the workflow automation that you can adjust to meet your centre team needs in the language being used in the database. Not all centres are the same, so you need to make sure that your team knows exactly what you are talking about without miscommunication or misunderstanding. Update any terms in your system such as job titles, task types, assigning reasons and more to fit the current language and terms you use in the centre.
See image above – you will see that the Tour Task Group can be adjusted to what is appropriate to your centre. Whether you might call the second stage of a tour a “Stay and Play” or “Orientation”.
Example enrolment workflow
Drip Campaigns
More than 90% of consumers say they’re more likely to be loyal to companies that remember through personalisation tactics. Drip campaigns are an efficient marketing tool for multi-centre childcare organisations. They’re highly targeted texts or emails that provide families with a tailored experience.
With drip campaigns, families in your enrolment pipeline receive unique emails and text messages, that is triggered by an action by the family. If one parent clicked the blog link in your email, they may be considered engaged. Automate a follow-up text with information about your toddler class. The parent who opened the email but didn’t click could instead be sent additional articles (how to prepare their toddler for the first day of care, generally continuing the conversation about the centre, until they become likely to enrol.
Create reports that fit your needs as a childcare business
Customising the reports is an important step in growing enrollment and managing your center. You want to make sure that you are getting the information that you need from the system, and that it's formatted in a way that helps you see what’s working and what’s not for your childcare business. Check out why customised reports are important for your childcare buisness:
- Enhanced visibility into the performance of your childcare centre through detailed data that is specific to your operations
- Comprehensive insights into how your childcare centre is performing against key metrics
- Better management of your business through actionable insights into areas for improvement
Centres can customise their reports by adjusting filters, adding fields that will create more value to the report, changing the dates to see successes during a particular time and displaying a report so that everyone can easily understand.
We understand that not every childcare business is the same, which is why we take the time to get to know your needs before making any changes. We believe it's important for you to feel comfortable with our software and its processes so that everything runs smoothly when we launch it into your business. Want to see more ways you can customise your LineLeader system?
Schedule a training session with your customer success representative or read more resources here on our website.
