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by Ty McDowell, on Monday October 26, 2015

What really excites parents and helps you improve their experience in your facility

It’s not buying new lobby furniture, offering free wifi or even providing Starbucks coffee and donuts. It’s making their experience with you awesome. Creating your own mobile app gives you the technology platform for doing this.Parents want to use their smartphones for everything. It’s mainly for convenience. Your presence on their smartphone screen alongside banking apps, weather apps, home security apps and social media icons is huge and it changes parents’ perspective of your facility and how much you care about their business. Read how Brian Foster at Stars & Stripes Kids Activity Center does this.You want the operations side of your business to run as automatically and smoothly as possible so that your staff can get away from their computers and interact with parents and students. You could say this is also about convenience since these actions make tasks much more convenient for your staff to accomplish, but it’s really about customer service.

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Better customer service happens when you make it as easy as possible for parents to do business with you: when you offer options make their needs and demands a priority, not yours.  Read how Frank Kudlac at Achievers Gymnasticsand Sara Batchelor at PRO Swim Academy do this.

You can use mobile apps to do this because they give you the platform to offer opportunities for parents to view and receive vital information, skills, videos and pictures, enroll and pay on their smartphones.

Better customer service also happens when you and your staff have time to be involved in conversations, answer questions and discuss progress. It happens when you have the mental bandwidth to remember details about families and students and make specific details happen that have special meaning to individuals. It happens when your parents feel informed. Read what Chris Fossan at Houston Swim Club and Mardi Obray at Peak Kids say about communicating via their mobile apps.

You can use technology to free up time for you and your staff by allowing parents to do many administrative tasks for themselves on their devices, and automating or simplifying communications via their devices.  Face-to-face relationship development can take priority when parents and students are in your facility – as it should be. The value of their experience increases and your exceptional customer service is the reason. Read what ASI Gymnastics believes about delivering value.

All things considered, your mobile app can really be more about elevating the customer experience than driving revenue or marketing or many other purposes that we’ve heard mentioned for their mobile apps. Scott Barron at Barron Gymnastics liked seeing revenues increase after implementing his mobile app but the bigger reward was the level of elation his parents expressed about their experiences with Barron. It created a defined differentiator that is priceless in a competitive environment. Read his thoughts on how his mobile app enables these improvements.

Learn more about best practices that can ensure that you create a mobile app that can be a catalyst for improving customer service.