Keeping pace with enquires

Remember the last time you called or emailed a company and gave up after waiting for them to respond? Or the time you were looking to change your mobile plan or power provider, and went with a provider just because they got back to you?

As e-commerce, email, and online transactions continue to dominate the way we get things done in the world, customers have come to expect snappier response times from organisations, and kindergarten is no exception. Connecting and building relationships from the very first contact is what we have built our reputation on – we care.

Customer Relations Management software service Hubspot found that around 90% of customers rate ‘immediate’ responses from a service as important or very important, and 60% of people define ‘immediate’ as 10 minutes or less. Thirty percent want a response to an email in an hour or less.

It’s not always easy in a busy kindergarten environment – but the faster you can get back to a prospective parent, the more likely it is that you’ll capture an enrolment. So, think in hours, rather than days, and same-day wherever possible. Delegate, share the load, many hands make light work! Our Facebook message response time is usually hours to same-day, and that’s a model we’d love to see across the network.

It’s not just the speed of their query being answered that is on the minds of customers – ‘experience’ is the word-of-the-moment in marketing, with more prospective customers looking to sample the product or service they are buying. Our Stay and Play sessions are still on hold, but one-on-one tours, and even video tours offer customers a peek behind the kindergarten gate, and we are noticing a big increase in the number of people wanting to book-a-tour before committing. Think deliberately about how you word your response to ensure your customer knows we care and that we want them to be part of our whānau…. For walk-ins and phone calls, make sure to reinforce the key messaging about what we have to offer – don’t assume that your customer knows we offer 20 hours free to ALL children, or that we take 2 year olds. In any communications you use, try to include a “call to action”. "Come visit us next week, enrol now (include link to apply page on website), ring me tomorrow, email, ask me about..., come to our..., etc."

At Kidsfirst, we use a mix of centralised responses to customer queries, with Head Office responding to those that come through the website and our digital advertising, and direct responses from kindergarten teams approached by whānau directly. We’ve looked into centralising a lot more of the marketing, to try and ease the load for kindergartens the way many private providers do, but, we know that whānau are ‘buying’ an individual kindergarten or team as much as they are choosing the brand – they want to connect with the people who will be taking care of their child. So, we try to get prospective families in touch with teaching teams and into kindergartens as soon as we possibly can. There’s a lot of competition out there, and we want every child to have the chance to be a ‘kindy kid’.

Even if your waitlist is really long, none of it counts if you lose the children to another centre before they start. So keep in touch regularly – diarise time to do this each month, invite families in for a visit, an event, or send out some pics of what’s been happening at kindy lately. Once they feel like part of the whānau, they’re far more likely to wait for a space.

Manaakitanga is never in short supply in our day-to-day kindergarten lives, but it can feel a little stretched sometimes when it comes to the outside world. Ideally, every prospective family would get to feel the warmth, encouragement, and excitement that are so prevalent in our kindergartens, every day of the week.

Looking to make some changes? Now’s the perfect time for you and your team to put together a plan so you can be more responsive when our Spring marketing campaign brings customers calling. It’s a bit more mahi to invest up front – but we know from the kindergarten teams who do it that it makes a real difference. Email jenny.pitama@kidsfirst.org.nz now to set up a team session.

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