Feedz Testimonial: Darren Talbot, Twenty20 Community Cricket

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Darren Talbot, director of Twenty20 Community Cricket Ltd, explains how Feedz took his coaches from an hour per written report to barely a minute across 270 players, and what parents said when the reports arrived.

Before you started using Feedz, what pain points were you facing?

Before we started using Feedz, we were struggling with the sheer volume of written reports and doing them from scratch to the extent that we were really being quite generic when we very much wanted to be specific about our responses and our feedback; they're kind of different from school reports, which can be very, very generic. And the sheer volume of 270 players, 3 or 4 reports a year, doing them manually, it was just, it just wasn't possible, and also the overlay of trying to make it look professional, coming from our own company with our own branding, the whole process was taking maybe up to an hour per player per report, and that was quite clearly unsustainable.

How has Feedz elevated the overall experience within the club?

The difference we've found from using the app is that we've managed to get more coaches involved because it's so simple and you know we have coaches who are maybe a little bit dyslexic, but the verbal feedback just makes it open to everybody, so instead of just a handful of us doing the reports, now any coach can do it, and the output is so slick, it's professional, it's individual and it goes straight off to parents as well, so there's no tarting up that we need to do to, to brand it. We don't have to fiddle around trying to find email addresses. It's a simple case of verbalising a report, generating a report, approving a report, and sending it off, and in some cases, that whole process takes barely a minute.

What kind of feedback have you received from parents and players since you implemented Feedz?

All of our interactions are with parents directly because all our players are under 18, and I think many parents have been shocked at the level of detail they're getting. One of the failings of sport and sports coaching, I think, is that any feedback has always generally just been verbal, and often quite brief, just the very nature of players in, players out, it's very hard to give much more than that in that environment. And the very fact that they're now getting regular feedback written with a huge level of detail is massively appreciated. I think there's a degree of shock really that we're even able to achieve that and it looks as though we've spent hours and hours on it. And as much as the thinking about it may have taken hours and hours and the experience of the coaches to be in a position to produce good reports, it's the Feedz app that actually facilitates that and helps us deliver that experience level in a way that is easily accessible for parents and then hopefully players, it's obviously down to the parents to pass that on to players afterwards, but it's just it's been a game changer.

In what ways has Feedz helped your club stand out?

Written feedback in the first place was one of the key areas where I wanted to differentiate our business from others. As I said earlier, quite usually in cricket coaching and then other coaching, short verbal reports are very much the standard and people think nothing of that because it's just what's done, and I was always very clear that what I wanted our members to get was something well over and above what they might be getting from somewhere else. So, I very much hope that the very fact that we're churning out so many of these reports with so much detail on such a regular basis helps us to stand out from the crowd as much as the standard of our coaching.

What has surprised you about Feedz?

I think the biggest benefit of the app from our perspective is that parents wouldn't know which coach has produced the report, whether it was our level 3 head coach or one of our more junior level 2 coaches. I don't think the output, the parents would have a clue which level of coach has produced it. You know, we're very fortunate that all of our coaches are very professional about the way they go about it, but the app kind of helps the younger coaches in particular to be in a position where they can get confidence that they can give really good feedback, and this has been an unexpected benefit of using the app.

If you were speaking to an Executive Director who is on the fence about implementing Feedz, what would you tell them?

I think this is a no-brainer for any sporting organisation. It doesn't matter what sport, I think this is one of the other great things we're obviously just doing it for cricket, but it's transportable to any sport, and it's so simple to use, so accessible both for the coaching end and the parents' end, and hopefully for the players as well. I think it's a no-brainer for organisations.

See Feedz on Find Your Club