Piano Lessons for Adults | Scheduling for Optimal Student Retention
This content was created for Curtis Music Academy
Continueing the conversation about scheduling, we try to limit that as much as we can on our end by doing things like. Setting these remote attacks, and that’s one of the things that reminders that I should say Google calendar with missing. We used to use another scheduling type called a point fix and a point fix had built in text so you could just put someone’s phone number in the description and it was super easy because it would text them 24 hours in advance. It would. It was the easiest thing ever. Gou calendar did not automatically have that feature.
However, there are a ton of other aspects of the calendar that we love and the reminder text feature is actually remarkably easy to fix. So you have to go to an outside source where they can use your Google calendar to set up piano lessons for adults and send texts through it. So it’s actually really, really easy. We use another thing called G reminders and it acts just like the calendar, but we input people’s information and they’re able to get a reminder text through that software. So your mind, this has been a really helpful addition to a good calendar. But one the best things about Google calendar for our perspective, since we do have ten instructors with all different chaotic schedules and everyone needs to see their schedule and a little less is the best part of Google calendar for us.
Curtis Music Academy is that everyone can see their own piano lessons for adults. So what we have set up is I have logged into Google calendar and used super permissions which thinks that the code where I am a supervisor of sorts. This means that I can access the calendars of Aunt Checkers if they grant me that permission. So I will send an email and ask for their permission. All they have to do is share the Google calendar with me and then I can put their lessons into their calendar from my end and delete their lessons if they call me and cancel.
So that’s something that’s really awesome because it would be really difficult if all the students kept track of their own schedules because then they would have to call me every time someone wanted to reschedule as like the master schedule and they would just be a big, big mess. So thankfully with Google Calendar, the best feature about it is that all of our instructors can see each and every one of their piano lessons for adults. So I put the lesson in the calendar, for example, tomorrow. It has a lesson with James at 2:00 p.m. on Thursday the 12th. So at 2:00 p.m., Garrett will get 30 minutes before that.
We’ll get a reminder on his phone that says, hey, reminder, you have a lesson coming up with James at 2:00 p.m. and that gives him enough time to hop in his car and drive over here just in the options that he forgot about the lesson. So not only is it really important to remind all of our students about their lesson 24 hours in advance, but it’s also pretty important to remind our institute of their lesson about 30 minutes in advance of their piano lessons for adults, just to make sure that in case anything came up, that we have enough time to fix a problem and they’ve got a lifetime to get here. So that’s something else that’s really awesome. Is that, again, just that I can add and delete events from their calendars from my head. So that’s really, really cool.
Another really cool feature about Google calendar that we’ve only implemented a couple of times so far because I believe that we are still testing it out and it is this appointment type thing with the calendar where we can create an event put in the location, the date, the time, all of the important stuff, and then we can add guest to it and these guests can accept the invitation. It sends it to them and then it puts it on the guest calendar. So that’s something that’s really cool, actually, and kind of understated is that we’re able to see that we’re able to put that on their calendar and then they have no excuse to forget about their piano lessons for adults.. So not only do we send the My-My detect, but when we use this appointment feature, they’re actually getting the event put on their actual calendar from us, putting it on our calendar, if that makes sense. So it’s kind of a complex process, but it’s not actually that difficult.
All we have to do is create an event and then add the guests to the event so therefore they can see the event and then they could accept or decline the invitation to their lesson. So I think that’s something that we will be rolling out here soon with our new students, because it’s obviously a learning curve and all of our students are used to the system that we’ve been using.
So we don’t really want to throw them and then make their life more difficult. But with our new students, it is going to be really easy for them to see their lesson pop up and pull up on their calendar. And I think it should really have a positive effect on reducing the amount of no-shows that we have, because when it comes to first piano lessons for adults, people do not show up. Most of the time I shouldn’t say most of the time, but about 25 percent of the time. The first lesson student just simply does not show up. And so perhaps by using this as a feature, I’ll Google calendar and schedule them where they can see it on their own calendar.
Perhaps this will reduce the frequency of no-shows when it comes to the first one hour lesson. So I’m really excited to start rolling this out and I can’t wait to see what happens once we get it figured out.