Home to nearly 500 competitive athletes and over 600 families, PCT Cheer & Tumble was a growing organization. Delivering a seamless and positive customer experience had become a pressing matter that could no longer be overlooked. PCT was looking for a cheerleading online solution that would help the staff reduce time spent on repetitive administrative activities. Time wastage caused by process inefficiencies had become the source of long registration queues, documentation errors and employee stress. PCT found Amilia to be the ideal partner to help them elevate their processes and customer experience.
In the beginning with a small customer base, PCT had been able to get away with manual registrations. But when it came to registering more than 400 athletes every season, manual registrations didn’t just become impractical, but they also started having a negative impact on PCT’s customer service. After using products that were either very disjointed or suffered from downtime, CJ, Natalie and Nicole, co-owners of PCT Cheer & Tumble were looking for a solution that was less labour intensive and allowed for automation.
PCT reports that since switching to Amilia in February 2017, they have been able to bring admin-led registrations down to 5% from 70% as 95% of their customers now register and pay online, any time they want from the comfort of their homes or on-the-go.
Before Amilia, PCT would assign 6 people to handle registrations during peak periods and registrations would run from 10 am to 8 pm for 5 days. Even then, it was challenging to collect all the data they needed such as t-shirt sizes, emergency & medical information, policy acceptance etc. CJ and his administrator would then spend up to 2 weeks auditing the data collected to ensure there were no errors and going back to customers to collect information that was missing.
When the cheer gym switched to the new management software, our implementation specialists worked with CJ and the team to streamline operations and create a frictionless registration experience. Their next challenge was to migrate customer data to the Amilia platform. They decided to take advantage of PCT’s end-of-year banquet since most of the customers attended the event every year. Everyone attending simply had to set up their account on PCT’s Amilia organization which would cover everything from basic profile and contact information to clothing sizes, payment & medical information, as well as policy acceptance. When the registration period began, customers were able to directly register for the programs without having to submit any information at all since PCT already had everything they needed to know.
Now that registrations had been automated and required minimal staff involvement, PCT was free to work on ways to improve efficiencies and focus on growing their business.
Summer camps had been in an integral part of PCT’s offering for 15 years but it was a program that barely broke even. CJ tried to find the root cause for its lack of profitability but the only thing that seemed to be a problem was customer experience. The registration experience for camps was time consuming, cumbersome and even looked unprofessional which would cause PCT to lose clients during sign-up.
Amilia helped PCT create a professional branded online organization that made the registration experience easy and quick. With Amilia, CJ could offer add-ons, multi-purchase options as well as set up pre and early registration windows. The all new online experience didn’t just help PCT get more registrations for camps and reduce the fallout, it helped them make 2018 their most profitable summer in 15 years.
One other element that witnessed the biggest transformation was PCT’s private lessons. Private one-on-one classes saw the largest transaction load meaning it was one of PCT’s most in-demand offerings. But setting up private lessons was a nightmare because the administrator would need to create approximately 150 private lessons each week based on the coaches’ schedules. Private lessons were then sold to customers as one-off classes.
Amilia helped PCT automate private lessons - all they had to do was set up their private lessons and then coaches could update the calendar based on their own schedules. By leveraging our digital class packs and drop-ins feature, PCT was able to sell private lessons with ease and in bulk. Customers could book as many private lessons as they liked by seeing a schedule that updated in real-time. This freed up the staff’s time so that they could focus instead on program development and customer engagement.
The process optimization and automation that PCT has undergone with Amilia has helped them reduce costs and boost revenues. In fact, PCT has enjoyed a 33.95% revenue growth over a 3-year period at an average of 10.37% year-on-year.
When PCT was looking for a new solution, one of their main criteria was scalability. In the past, the staff time that PCT invested in registrations and other administrative tasks only went up with an increase in the number of customers. The co-owners knew that the model wasn’t scalable.
Before Amilia, CJ and his team would collectively spend between 250 to 350 hours each month on administrative tasks. This not only caused stress levels to soar and messed up their work-life balance, but it also kept them from focusing on the things that truly mattered – creating value for their customers. Through the process automation and customer experience improvements as well as the initiatives CJ, Natalie and Nicole have been able to implement due to time saved, PCT’s return on investment in Amilia over a 3-year period stands at a staggering 1,055%.
When asked about how much time Amilia has helped PCT save, CJ’s response was that it was impossible to calculate. To him, Amilia made it possible for him and the team to save time not just on a month-to-month basis but for as long as PCT partnered with Amilia.
Established in 2004, PCT Cheer and Tumble is the premier cheerleading and tumbling facility in the GTA. Located in the Winston Churchill and Dundas Area of Mississauga ON, they teach life lessons through the sport of cheerleading – confidence, self-esteem, work ethic….and so much more.
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