In every business, a quality customer service is essential for its success and daycares are no exception.
Running a daycare is not an easy task. If you want to keep your daycare full, you don’t only have to focus on increasing your enrolees but keeping your current numbers as well.
When a child starts attending your daycare, parents are part of the package deal, so it’s essential to develop a positive relationship with them as well.
Any concern or doubt would probably draw away your current customers and keep away new ones.
Here are a few ways to keep your daycare full:
Create A Welcoming Environment
Creating an appealing ambiance for your daycare centre is essential.
You can choose a warm and inviting color scheme for your play and learning area to make the room appealing to children.
A welcoming environment where children would feel happy and at home would make them want to come back and hopefully bring their family along with them.
A child-friendly environment could also help.
Since the children would be spending a significant amount of time at the daycare and these ages are interested in playing more than they are at learning.
Combine education with fun by having the right tools such as coloring books, storybooks, toys, and other learning activities according to their ages and personality.
Parents satisfaction would also increase when they see their child enjoying their time at the daycare.
Encourage Family Participation
A way to build relationships with the parents is through including the whole family in classroom activities.
Remember that families are vitally important to the education of young children.
Encourage parents to come and visit to read a book at circle time or participate in a career day.
This would not only be fun for the children, but it would also give the parents a role in the child’s learning process.
Furthermore, these activities would engage families, build trusts and creates a more welcoming environment.
Although, some families may not have flexible schedules to participate in any classroom events, so you don’t have to pressure them for involvement either.
It might make them feel ashamed of not getting off work or necessary appointments for a daycare activity.
Communication
It may be a constant challenge to build the trust of customers towards your daycare centre, but frequent contact with the parents might go a long way in creating a lasting relationship with them.
Parents want to be kept in the loop of all the progress their child at the centre, so you should communicate with them on a daily basis or have frequent meetings as much as possible.
Give them updates on the general progress and growth of their child and keep them informed on even the minor things such as the child’s eating and sleeping schedule.
You can fill them in on any form of communication they would feel most comfortable with.
It can be through social media, email, text messaging, or better yet, via face to face.
When requested or necessary, organise a parent conference so they could voice out their concerns.
It’s essential to sit down with parents now and then to hear about their concerns. Through this, you would be able to measure the level of customer satisfaction.
If there are any concerns, you can understand what the parents exactly want for their children and improve your customer service from there.
Knowing that their opinions are being heard and acted upon would ensure the parents’ happiness and satisfaction.
Have A Well-Trained Workforce
The success of your daycare centre relies on your workforce.
Having responsive and caring staff is basically one of the essential parts of a child care program.
It’s hard to top a centre where parents know their child is well-cared for and treated with love and respect.
Managers need to properly check all the processes and ensure proper training for the staff.
Employees invested in improving your daycare could develop new and creative ideas by attending childcare training courses, which will help your centre to become more successful.
It could lead to your preschool becoming more innovative, efficient, and productive as a whole while becoming more attractive for parents.
Before hiring, make sure that the applicants have the right qualification.
Parents want quality teachers and caregivers for their children every day.
The people you hire should know how to care for different types of children and have experience in handling them.
Ultimately, hiring well-equipped childcare staff would be able to provide outstanding care and enhance the children’s learning experience.
Through investing in your staff, you’d be able to provide a positive customer experience and gain the trust of parents.
Maintain A Healthy Environment
It’s inevitable for most children to get sick during their time at a daycare while their immune systems grow stronger.
While it’s normal for them to feel under the weather in a daycare, it doesn’t mean that daycares should be alright with the children they care for getting sick nor will it stop parents from worrying when they see their children get sick.
It might even tempt them to pull out from your daycare.
There are certain things you can do to reduce the number of sick days of your childcare centre.
Hygiene should be one of your top concerns.
You should always ensure that the premises are clean, and your maintenance crew is still on the job.
When a child shows signs of sickness, call in the parents to come for them before it spreads throughout the class.
Promote Your Daycare
Of course, retaining customers isn’t the only way to keep your daycare full.
Any effort of building a quality centre would go to waste without new enrolees.
Just like any other business, you need to promote your daycare centre to draw in new clients.
For schools and daycares, one of the most effective forms of marketing is Word of Mouth (WOM), but in this digital age, it’s more common and simple to rely on the internet to reach out to more people.
The internet gives you different platforms where you can share information, photos, and videos to use to attract interested parents to your childcare centre.
Most forms of social media are easy and free to operate so you wouldn’t have a hard time figuring it out.
It also allows real-time interaction with your prospects, so you’d be able to engage and answer their enquiries immediately.
Building your online reputation in review websites is also a common way to attract more enrolees.
Online reviews matter.
In a 2017 survey by Bright Local, 97% of people admit to checking out businesses’ online reviews before engaging with them and daycares wouldn’t be an exception.
For this method, you have to rely on the parents in your daycare to help you with it, and it’s simple.
All you have to do is ask.
Some families might need a small nudge, but most of them would be up to it, especially if their kids enjoyed your daycare.