Improving Services – What are the Benefits of your organization?
What are the benefits that your setting provides for parents? How do you translate these into your unique selling points and promote to future customers?
Considering the benefits associated with your organizational approach and attitude to delivery of early learning and childcare activities is often taken for granted because you do it naturally every day and therefore may assume that parents understand and can clearly see the benefits for themselves. The reality is that new customers can only make choices about which childcare provider to choose by reviewing all your marketing information and talking with your team, or other current customers, and it’s difficult to get all the key benefits across in your marketing materials or short conversations with likely customers. Some benefits are hidden and need a spotlight on them!
Equally, it is important to back up or prove how you can provide the benefits you claim in any marketing messages, but demonstrating just how you can deliver excellence it is what will set you apart from the competition. Be careful not to “over promise” on benefits that you cannot later validate in practice, people will call you out and that’s not good for business!
Compile a list of benefits
a) Hopefully you will have a view on your main benefits, but consider that you are not only trying to show more appealing benefits as compared with other similar providers, but also consider any benefits that are advantageous over different types of childcare settings or home / family care solutions as well.
b) You are probably targeting customers who are currently at home with their young child and have yet to use childcare. They may be considering staying at home full time so what benefits could you offer them?
c) Review you most recent customer feedback information or surveys you have done, are you offering benefits which concur with trends, or perhaps individual needs that their feedback has identified as important?
Is it a “feature” or a “benefit”?
Be clear in you mind what the benefit of the feature is!
For example – If you employ more staff than you need, that is a feature of your operations, but what is the benefit of more staff... What does the customer get?
Prove your benefits are genuine
The first question I would ask of any supplier of services that really matter to me would be, “How exactly can you demonstrate that I will gain this benefit?”
I am sure many parents would like assurances about such an incredibly important aspect of theirchild’s life too! So it’s very important to identify where evidence of the benefits associated with your childcare organization can actually be realized. For this you need to look into the records, outcomes and tangible information that underpin your claims such as, feedback from parents on specific subjects, references and testimonials, inspection reports, certification, awards or data analysis which shows performance levels of key benefit areas.
Summary
Having a strong understanding and ranking of your key benefits is essential and like many other business activities, something you need to refresh regularly to keep up with changing family life. Just reviewing your benefits is an opportunity to see if you are in synch with new parents and where there may be areas for business improvement. It will certainly help you update your marketing messages and revive your image.
