Chapter 5
There is a commonly held belief that a front desk admin is always better at doing things for parents than letting parents try to do things themselves. Linked to that is the belief that well trained admins will make less mistakes than parents will. I used to believe this. I used to teach it to rooms full of hundreds of people.
Now I have data to prove that front desk admins are not better at doing things than parents who use StudioAutoPilot to self register. Admins make more mistakes because of this simple ratio. 20 to 12 or 20 to 4.
A typical registration has 17-30 data points that need to be entered. Student name, lesson length, birthdate, etc. If a studio has a more complicated registration process, the admins will fill in more things in more places.
Let’s say an average studio has 20 data points that an admin needs to enter. StudioAutoPilot only has 12 points a parent needs to enter because the lesson search process auto-completes some points as they browse for times.
So right away there are 40% fewer places to make mistakes in StudioAutoPilot vs other systems.
BUT…
If a parent has autofill on their device or computer then they are only required to enter 4 unique datapoints to register on StudioAutoPilot.
Entering only 12 points of data instead of 20 reduces the possibility of an error by 40%. Entering 4 points of data instead of 20 reduces the possibility of an error by 80%.
StudioAutoPilot is better because of that simple math.
But there is another reason that also keeps the parent error entry occurrence much lower than the admin error occurrence that we see in our data. The parent is working in a non-distracting environment. If it is 4:30pm at a typical front desk and lessons are switching it is a chaotic place. Trying to complete a registration when students are coming and going or a teacher is asking for something is a potential entry error just waiting to happen.
As a side note. When you use StudioAutoPilot I highly recommend setting up a big duplicate screen at your front desk and then get your admins to co-search times with parents who walk in.
When the parent sees a teacher and time they like get the parent to pull out their phone and redo the search or just send them a copy of the link to their phone and get them to complete their own registration.
Do not get the admin to do the registration for them. Yes, it seems very “un-customer service like” but trust me this is crucial to making StudioAutoPilot work. You will eliminate several potential errors and at the same time parents will be trained on how to use StudioAutoPilot from day 1. Do not dismiss this crucial step it makes a world of difference.
I don’t want my admins doing registrations for parents at my studios and you should not either. I know that is a total mind flip for most of you.
Remember,
Also, do NOT put a studio computer in your lobby for parents to use and do a registration. This sends the wrong message to parents on several levels. They do not need a special “school” computer. Make parents use their own device and get used to being logged in to their account. Plus, using a shared studio computer always screws up when parent A sets up an account, doesn’t log out and then Parent B comes along and adds a registration to Parent A’s account. Just trust me on this. People all have phones, make them use their own device.