Loyalty in Childcare – Are you Driving it?

According to ACECQA, there are currently over 17,000 childcare providers across Australia. Coupled with the fact that the number of children attending childcare services continues to grow, it’s now more important than ever to ensure you are retaining your families for the duration of their child’s early learning experience and fostering your local reputation and loyalty.

So, how do you do this? Put your time and energy into developing strong personal relationships with each family and focus on providing the services that are valuable to them. But first, you have to understand the key drivers of each family’s loyalty and the factors that matter most to them.

Let’s break it down:

1. Understand the current level of family loyalty by collecting data from families – whether it’s a family survey (Google Forms is a great online collector), or simply speaking to each family individually, find out what it is that they value and their level of loyalty to your service.
2. Understand the engagement level of your families – are they more responsive to texts? Social media posts? Emails? Face-to-face communication? Are they more interested in specific subjects? This information will allow you to better understand which channels to use to communicate.
3. Understand what has been occurring with families to foster their trust. Trust is an essential influence on loyalty and one of the defining reasons a family will remain with a service – even if there are things they don’t like about it.
4. Once you have this data, put a plan in place focused on really delivering on what families identified as being of value to them. You can then set a communication plan in place to highlight what you’re delivering, using the channels with the most engagement. Remember, each service and community are different. There is no one size fits all approach.
5. Follow your plan, don’t let it slip or fall by the wayside when times get busy. Once implemented, you must be dedicated to following it through.

It may sound simple, but don’t be deceived. Driving loyalty within your service takes time and effort and with many Centre Managers pulled in multiple directions every day, is this going to be their focus?

This is where a centralised enrolments team really provides value. They are able to focus solely on developing strong relationships with families, taking the necessary time to provide a seamless, easy and most importantly personalised experience for each family. Listening to what they need and working with your team to provide it.

Get in touch and find out how we can help you drive loyalty to your service.

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