How GoCardless helped us during COVID-19

Note: This is a guest post written by Hugo Shephard, Managing Director at Role Models - a provider of children’s education and creative childcare, and a GoCardless customer.

When the COVID-19 lockdown was announced by the Prime Minister on March 23rd, businesses across the UK feared what the future would hold for them and their customers. Those that rely on face-to-face interactions were especially hard hit, and without a clear end in sight for a return to normal, pivoting to the new digital, remote world became harder and harder to ignore.

What we do at Role Models

Here at Role Models, we’ve been on a mission since 2014 to give children the key life skills needed to succeed in the 21st century - in addition to the academic focus they receive at school - to improve their happiness, academic success, and overall achievement and fulfillment in life.

Our business has two sides. On one side, we’re an education provider that runs both in-person and online life skills courses for children, such as building resilience and adopting a growth mindset. On the other side, we’re a creative childcare company that inspires children in what they love doing.

How we use GoCardless

We’ve been successfully using GoCardless for almost 5 years, to help us easily collect payments from our members via Direct Debit.

Previously, we had been invoicing our clients each month, requiring them to manually pay us - a hassle for both them and us.

With GoCardless, payments are now a breeze.

How COVID-19 is affecting us

During the beginning of the pandemic, most childcare clients were not able to use Role Model’s childcare service, since nannies were unable to visit family’s homes.

We knew that we could no longer ask our clients to continue to pay their memberships, and many began to ask for their accounts to be deactivated or cancelled. However, the process involved was going to be a long-winded, manual task, and when the lockdown gets lifted and we can resume offering these services again, our clients would have to go through payment setup again.

Not to mention the risk we have of losing those customers to this barrier of friction.

How GoCardless helped

Fortunately, GoCardless offered a solution where we were able to pause all our clients’ memberships temporarily, enabling us to resume payment collection with ease once lockdown is lifted.

Without this feature from GoCardless, the process of cancelling so many memberships and later having to recreate them would have been troublesome and time consuming. And not the smoothest solution for our clients.

GoCardless’s solution has had a huge impact in helping us retain a large percentage of our clients during this difficult time, and without such a solution we would have struggled to keep loyal clients satisfied and supported.

In a time when so many businesses are in need of support, GoCardless’s solution is simple and stress-free - which is refreshingly welcome to us and our clients.