7 Benefits of Online Booking Plugin for Childcare Business

If your business services are centered around the well-being and skill development of children or parent consulting, it’s no doubt beneficial to optimize your service booking procedures online with a booking plugin.

Our today’s article is devoted to why and how you can integrate it, and what it can potentially mean to your childcare business.

What is an Online Booking Plugin?

Online booking software allows you to set up your working hours availability on your website and enables customers to book available slots for the services they choose. The main benefit of it is that businesses don’t need to manually process every booking, the information about customers is collected via automated online forms.
In WordPress, this booking software is commonly known as a ‘plugin’. But it’s not just a booking request form, it normally integrates payment methods, creates accounts for customers and employees, provides calendar connection tools and SMS services integrations, and that’s only if we scratch the surface. All in all, it’s a holistic customer and booking management platform.

Which Childcare Businesses can Benefit from an Online Booking Plugin?

That can literally work for any business but here are some examples:

• Daycare centers – allow working parents to book full-time or part-time care for their kids.
• Preschools – allow parents to schedule skill development lessons for kids.
• Enrichment programs – enable parents to enroll kids into different types of classes.
• Parent consulting – if you are consulting parents, it’s easy to automate appointment scheduling on one or different topics (including virtual meetings).
• Gym for kids – enables parents to book on-site childcare services in gyms or other sports institutions for parents.

7 Benefits of WordPress Online Booking Plugin for Childcare Business

To better understand the benefits and how the online booking plugin works, let’s highlight the key capabilities of one of the most used software, BookingPress for WordPress.

1. Reduced time for availability scheduling with automated tools

When you set up your schedule with an online booking plugin, such as working days/hours, and breaks/vacations, this is automatically reflected in the availability form clients see on your website.

Quick and precise scheduling of appointments, classes, or childcare sessions eliminates the need for manual coordination of this central process. For example, with BookingPress, you can create unlimited services and set up various durations and costs for them. Even more so, you can allow your clients to choose the length of the consultation or childcare services.

2. Centralized bookings and clients

Put the most advanced booking engine to work for you and help you centralize all your bookings.

By visiting just one online booking plugin dashboard, you can see numerous tools to help you:

• visit menus associated with your bookings, clients, payments, and more.
• view statuses of bookings and payments.
• send invoices and control payment methods.

They all are interconnected within just one dashboard and make it easy for admins to track all the processes happening with your childcare business.

3. Convenient booking experiences for modern parents

The WordPress booking plugin like BookingPress adds an intuitive and convenient booking form to your website, which accelerates the booking process for parents.

In addition to the general step of choosing a service and time, you can add detailed service descriptions and images to help customers choose what they need right in the childcare service reservation form. Furthermore, you can sell both real and virtual classes or consultations, which might be super handy for modern parents.

4. Better business marketing opportunities for your childcare business

Thanks to multiple automated processes and extra marketing-focused apps, you can foster your efforts when it comes to reaching out to your existing clients via SMS or email, sending invoices, etc. But not just that!
You can boost low-performing hours with the ‘happy hours’ pricing, enable online tipping, provide custom coupons, and overall plan your marketing activities with the right tools at hand, all within your online booking plugin.

5. Simplified automated communication

For every interaction with the booking form, there is a dedicated trigger that sends an email, SMS or WhatsApp message to your customers. You don’t need to manually send updates on canceled or confirmed appointments!

Of course, you can still add reservations and clients manually from the dashboard, but the communication for such bookings is also going to be automated.

6. Secure online payments

As a childcare business, you want to be sure that an appointment is prepaid; customers want to secure their booked time and also want to have safe payment options on your site. An online booking plugin for WordPress is ready to cater to both needs.

For example, with the online booking plugin by BookingPress, you get one of the biggest ranges of payment gateways provided, 15, which include PayPal and Stripe among them.

7. Increased business scaling opportunities

An online booking WordPress plugin also helps you grow when your business grows, it smoothly adapts to the needs of businesses of different sizes thanks to the smart core tools:

• If you have multiple teachers and instructors, you can enable them to use their own accounts and control their availability and upcoming bookings.
• Thanks to the flexible timetable scheduling system, you can create timesheet variables for many people based on the location.
• Easily integrate with apps you might need along the way with Mailchimp, AWeber, Zoom meetings, WhatsApp, Google Meet, Zapier, and more.
• Study the performance of your business with an analytics dashboard and use the data to improve your business routines.

Conclusion: Why is it so beneficial to integrate an online booking plugin into the childcare business website?

With WordPress booking plugins like BookingPress, your childcare business gets tons of opportunities to save on operational costs, reduce no-shows, sell virtual consulting services, automate processes, optimize the schedule and availability, and overall optimize marketing resources.

This translates into significant operational cost savings as manual booking systems are replaced, freeing up staff time and boosting your bottom line as a childcare business. An online booking plugin on your website won’t just modernize the way you deal with clients and schedule appointments, it will – basically – save your business a lot of money.