Childcare customer relationship management (CRM) is the official term for managing all of your setting’s related contacts, from your early lead enquiries through to longstanding clients and suppliers.
It also includes the children within your setting, always attached to a parent or guardian for the purposes of communication. It’s called ‘relationship management’ as it’s tied to the goal of being better for your clients.
And who doesn’t want better relationships?
How does a childcare CRM work?
Aside from the background technological magic, CRMs work by tying the way you gather contact information, with the place you store and use contact information. At its most basic, think of a newsletter signup form where all you enter is an email address. You want this to go to the place you send emails from, and that’s the base level of most CRM systems.
Within childcare, this is usually bringing your enquiry forms into your nursery management software. From there, you might be able to see how many enquiries haven’t been processed, or how many you got this time last year, and start building a picture of when you’re most popular and if you’re booking as many children in as you could be.
Because eventual bookings are tied to filling in a form, you don’t need to worry about contact data getting lost, mistyped or otherwise going wrong. You can edit it to correct it of course, but if it’s already right then you’re set. No need to worry if that former staff member’s handwriting is meant to be an 8 or a B!
Why do I need a childcare CRM system?
Depending on the size of your setting, manual management of contacts can quickly become unmanageable. With an advanced level of skill with Outlook or other out-of-the-box mailing system you can create groups and separate by Rooms or age of children, but unless you’ve got it tied to some system tracking birthdates, room moves and more, your groups will be outdated before you can blink.
CRM systems tie communications information (like emails and phone numbers) with other information of importance (like children’s ages or special needs), all protected for GDPR purposes behind controlled logins and access rights. Data is either linked according to likely use cases, or bespoke according to your needs if you’re a business expert.
Through this linked data, you can communicate with specific groups, or all of them, as needed.
Say one of your nursery rooms is out of action but this won’t affect the rest of your operations. Through a childcare CRM system you can communicate exclusively with parents who have children in that room. Without the system, you have to share the news with everyone (unnecessary panic) or manually check who’s in the room or who isn’t (time-consuming) before messaging.
Where can I get a childcare CRM system?
Wouldn’t you know it, Blossom offers a CRM system through our enquiries and platform. Put our form on your website using some easy-to-place code (simply copy/paste where you need it) and enquiries will automatically get pulled through to your Blossom platform.
If you don’t have Blossom, you should be able to find it within your chosen nursery management software. Don’t have nursery management software? Book a demo with us and we can show you how great it is!
See our Childcare CRM in action
