The Swim Academy is arguably Queensland’s largest swim school and one of the largest in the country.
In the back half of 2024, The Swim Academy rolled out First Class software to enhance their customer experience and reduce their admin.
In peak times, the Swim Academy have up to 2500 students in lessons across 6 locations.
The Swim Academy were managing a lot of their bookings in house, which was taking a huge amount of admin time.
By implementing First Class and notably a branded “Swim Academy App” developed by First Class. The Swim Academy was able to pass off responsibility to the customer for several key scheduling elements.
Two elements have had a profound impact on their administration efforts.
We will explore these two elements and dive into their specific numbers.
The first thing The Swim Academy was to roll out was make up lesson bookings through the app.
Customers can report an absence in exchange for a makeup lesson token (provided it’s within the allotted time requirements)
Customers can then book their child in for a makeup lesson by browsing available times and dates.
In term 2, 2025, the Swim Academy had 1314 make up lessons booked via the app or online portal of First Class.
If these bookings were done manually over the phone or when talking to a customer its safe to estimate they would take at least 1 minute per booking and sometimes even more.
Based on this, we estimate that they saved at least 21.9 hours in admin time across term 2 and probably more with this one move.
To compound this, the Swim Academy added another scheduling automation in term 2 that promised to save further time.
By using the “move booking” function, the Swim Academy customers are able to move their bookings.
For example, if their children were booked into a Tuesday 4pm class in level 1, they would be able to move their booking into another day or time within the same level.
This is useful when customers have a changing schedule, such as a new sporting season starting or a music lesson.
Over the course of term 2, The Swim Academy had 614 online moved bookings.
We estimate that this would equate to at least 10.23 hours in saved admin.
In the words of Swim Academy management, the results from this feature were “a game changer” for their business and overall admin load.
Let’s review the overall results with just these 2 scheduling enhancements.
Scheduling Time Savings
Online make-up lessons: Hours saved per term, 21.9
Booking moves: Hours saved per term, 10.23
Total admin time saved (per term) 32.13 hours
Estimated cost savings $900-1200 per term
By handing off 2 scheduling tasks back to the customer, The Swim Academy was able to find huge savings in time and costs. By implementing First Class, they have also been able to save time in other areas including invoicing, payments and delivering progress reports.
To find out more about First Class software go to www.firstclassretention.com