Changing re-enrolment for the better – Kidsoft launches new digital re-enrolment feature

As we approach the final months of 2023 a large proportion of the service leader community across the early childhood education and care sector will be focused on securing as many re-enrolments as possible to ensure a great start to the new year.

However, achieving re-enrolment outcomes in this crucial period is often much harder than one would expect due to the traditional, often paper based processes, that just don’t resonate with today’s busy, tech savvy families.

“We operate a group of five centres in the Western Suburbs of Sydney, and to be honest we dread the re-enrolment period,” said Sandi Odisho, operations manager at Early Education Holdings.

“We know how important it is, and we know what we need to do, but getting families to engage and commit is tricky, and then processing their enrolment forms is time consuming and also prone to mistakes.”

This sentiment was echoed consistently through regular customer feedback conversations by leading childcare management software, Kidsoft.

Adrian Karzon, Chief Technology Officer at Kidsoft, says the feedback prompted him and his team to take a close look at the process and explore how Kidsoft could make this easier for their customers.

“We picked up very quickly that the re-enrolment process was a real pain point for our users,” Mr Karzon said.

“Many services were still printing re-enrolment forms off and then placing them in parent’s pigeon holes in their children’s rooms. It was no wonder this was a dreaded task, with many difficulties with parent engagement and tracking.”

“We knew we could make this process so much simpler and efficient for our customers .That’s why we prioritised a complete review of the entire end to end re-enrolment processes that were taking place across the sector and then set to work innovating”

Three easy steps to paperless re-enrolment – Re-offer, accept, update

The result of several months of development is a digital first re-enrolment process that is controlled and powered within Kidsoft itself.

“Using Kidsoft as the central hub makes lots of sense,” Mr Karzon said.

“We have the family details, we have the booking schedules, we have the parent app, we have tech smarts. When you consider it in these terms, extending Kidsoft’s capabilities to support in this area is a no-brainer.”

The three steps to paperless re-enrolment:

1. Re-offer – A re-offer communication, either email or text message, is created within the Kidsoft comms portal and sent, along with a re-offer link, to current families.

2. Acceptance – On receipt of the message the family clicks the link which automatically opens in their Kidsoft app and provides scope to enter preferences and accept the re-offer.

3. Update – The app then communicates directly back to the Kidsoft booking system which automatically updates the forward enrolment register to reflect the acceptance.

“We are very grateful to our customer community for their support in helping us build out this feature,” Mr Karzon said, “however, we also recognise that no service is the same so building flexibility and customisation into the feature was also a key imperative.”

Giving control back to service leaders – customising acceptance forms

A secondary theme that emerged from Kidsoft’s regular customer conversations was the importance of building in choices and options within the acceptance forms themselves that mirrored actual situations families may find themselves in when re-enrolling.

“Probably the largest area of focus in this secondary set of features is the ability for families, when in the process of accepting their re-offer, to request different sessions or even days, for their children,” Mr Karzon said.

But it doesn’t end there because, as was revealed, services need to have an element of discretion when processing the returned acceptances, particularly, if more than one family is looking to change around their sessions or days or if a re-enrolment is to be declined.

Kidsoft’s re-enrolment feature empowers service leaders to be in control, and remain in control, at all times with the underlying objective of maximising parent engagement with minimal service input still a core principle across the system.

“We know just how important re-enrolment time is for our customers and the broader sector,” Mr Karzon said.

“And that’s why we have built and released this feature. It will not only render photocopies in pigeon holes or attaching PDFs to manual emails completely obsolete, but will create a sense of control in the minds of service leaders that up and till now have evidently been lacking.”

To learn more about Kidsoft’s re-enrolment feature watch this video explaining how it is configured or contact the team at Kidsoft for a demo.