On the pinnacle of wellness, yoga provides that channel to attain not only a healthy body, but also the kind of serenity and peace we all want to strive in our lives.
What if you seek to get more out of it, not only the most rewarding yoga experience in terms of achieving that difficult pose, or engage in gentle meditation or calming breathing exercises, but also enjoying the kind of personalized care and attention wherever you may be.
Indeed, this is what yoga+ wants to achieve – doing more for its yogis (students). And it achieves this even more through its extensive use of information and communications technology.
It’s about customer experience
“We try to make a lot of innovations to make it easy for customers so they won’t have any worries and just do yoga,” said Dinah Salong, yoga+ Managing Director. “It’s all about customer experience. How does the customer feel when they interact with you? Not only during the time when they take a class, but in different stages, when they buy a package, when they get their towels, the small things.”
yoga+ began operations in 2010 but opened its first studio in February 2011 in Bonifacio Global City. Ms. Salonga formed the school with a group of yoga enthusiast friends. She is a certified yoga teacher, having completed her training in Thailand in 2010.
Dependent on the Internet
“Information and communications technology is critical for us because we use the cloud. We also use it for our mail, storing documents, and calendaring. Also, through this, we log data on enrolment, sales, and attendance. We make use of social media, such as Facebook, Twitter, Instragram. So we are really dependent on the Internet,” Ms Salonga said.
yoga+ depends on PLDT SME Nation’s Small Business Bundle in achieving the reliability it needs to take advantage of its cloud applications. But, more than the benefits of innovation to its operations, yoga+ saw its advantages in pushing for more effective customer interaction and engagement.
Text messaging
yoga+ communicates with its yogis through the one prevalent innovation available anywhere – text messaging. However it has to deal with growing numbers of students, their “first-timers”, to keep this effective.
“We send messages for the first-timers to encourage them to continue with their practice. You can just imagine, we have 10 first timers. What we do every day is to each send them a text. Of course, they will increase. Today 10, tomorrow five will sign up, so you have to text a total of 15. The next day, 3 more first-timers will join, so you would now text 18 in total. So it becomes tedious.”
According to Ms Salonga, this challenge was so glaring because they had to text their yogis one by one, and this challenge was so daunting when the numbers hit the hundreds.
“We started with just regular texting. We text one by one and send them out individually. It was so difficult. It required a lot of effort. If you assign it to just anyone in the organization, you can’t be sure if the message was really sent.”
“We started out from a competitor. Then we encountered problems with them in terms of performance so I sought alternatives,” Ms Salonga said.
Message Cast
This was when yoga+ turned to Sun Business to subscribe to MessageCast, which conveniently allows them to broadcast a message to all their yogis with just one send.
“It’s really nice to have branding in MessageCast. When our yogis receive the message, it says yoga+ and not a strange number. And, it is really useful in sending urgent messages like class cancellations due to bad weather. Also, it is very easy for our front desk to use.”
Since using MessageCast, it was easier for yoga+ to interact and communicate with all of their present roll of 300-400 yogis, using the company name as the sender, and enjoy flexibility of scheduling the text messages on a specific time and date.
Future for yoga+
What’s the future for yoga+ and its pursuit of health and wellness for all? Aside from expanding its reach with more branches, it seeks to firm up its communications capabilities internally to ease coordination, and the development of a mobile app to provide more convenience to yogis with self-serve features, such as booking classes.
“The enhancements we will do will really require technology so we may seek more solutions that will help our operations grow. But more than that, it’s the partnership. If the Internet or telecommunications become unavailable, it will affect our business. I think partnering with a reliable company or brand, such as the PLDT Group, ensures that our operations are okay.
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Fellow business owners like Dinah were treated to an exclusive Wellness Event sponsored by PLDT SME Nation, Smart Enterprise and Sun Business at yoga+ Makati on July 26, 2014. The event featured a lecture on Stress Management and Nutrition by Dona Esteban and a yoga class by Ria Tirazona. Cocogreen provided a healthy lunch after the informative yet relaxing event.
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