Sportball has been teaching children the fundamentals skills in sports since 1995. Their multisport program has put thousands of Children on the path to healthy, active living and a life-long love of sport.
The Sportball Laval franchise was looking to streamline their communications with parents to include automated email and SMS capabilities. They chose Activity Messenger to help them achieve better customer support and save admin time communicating with parents.
The team in Laval serves over 5,000 families every year offering multisport and soccer programs for kids 2-12 years old. Olivier wanted to bring the organization up-to-date with the best practices for communicating with participants.
This meant improving how Sportball communicates at the time of registration but also for reminders, cancellations and other types of communications.
Having a small admin team serving thousands of families every week, it was important to find a system that could:
Sportball chose Activity Messenger as there all-in-one communication toolkit. The benefits of this solution have resulted in immediate cost and time savings.
Of course, saving time is always great but when it comes to the Sportball’s mission, customer happiness is the priority. With a mission to make everything as seamless as possible for busy parents, their improved communication system has gotten a lot of praise.
“Parents are so happy to get an SMS about a rescheduled or canceled class when they missed the email. No more angry parents showing up at the wrong time saying they never got the message.”
The feedback they got from parents have been so positive and has helped Sportball with retention.
“As one parent put it, the service at Sportball is exceptional from the time you register up to the coaching on the field. The automations have allowed our team to increase focus on training and class management.”
Activity Messenger’s built-in automations have translated into significant time savings. Prior to using Activity Messenger, confirmation emails had the invoice, minimal details and were not customizable.
Since confirmation emails have a 90%+ open rate, this was a huge missed opportunity. Olivier wanted to add a link to the parent guide, frequently asked questions and links to their different blog articles.
With Activity Messenger’s automation and customizable templates, they were able to create the perfect confirmation email. They can even show off their company’s one-of-a-kind brand and personality using the Canva integration.
“When we set this automation up, we saw it as a great way to share information with new clients. We never expected to see a dramatic reduction in post-purchase questions from parents. This has saved us hours in repetitive communications and parents got the information right away.”
Another added bonus of automating communications with Activity Messenger, was the end-of-session email/SMS. By setting up a message to go out to all participants a few days before the last class, Olivier was able to automate 3 important tasks in one automation:
This automation helped improve customer satisfaction, collect customer feedback and increase registrations for the upcoming session.
“Parents are busy and have so much on their plates nowadays. They love getting reminded that the session is ending, many are happy to share feedback and others are grateful this notification reminds them to sign up for next session before classes fill up”
Automating end of session surveys simplified gathering data on customer satisfaction. This really helped understand our clients needs to keep offering high level quality programming.
Olivier was also able to drop other communication softwares and bundle everything in one place.
“The money saved from dropping Mailchimp, SurveyMonkey and SmartWaiver is great, but the real value lies in having everything in one place with all the built-in automations we need”
After using Activity Messenger for two years, Olivier can’t envision a world without it.
“A lot of my business processes are in my head. I am now able to set them up in Activity Messenger and let the system do the heavy lifting. By automating our communications, we save time, avoid errors, improve customer happiness and our bottom line”
Activity Messenger has played a big role to play in helping the Laval team expand to new territories in Ottawa & Quebec City. And with so many kids programs out there, offering exceptional communications to families helps increase customer satisfaction and retention.
