Context

Scholar Basketball Academy (SBA) is a Singapore-based basketball academy for students aged 7 to 18. As the academy grew, many of its daily operations were still managed through a mix of digital tools and manual processes. Course bookings, merchandise purchases, payment tracking, attendance, notifications and customer updates were handled across different platforms, making the overall experience less efficient for both staff and parents. SBA wanted to build a more connected digital ecosystem where parents could book courses, shop for merchandise, make payments, earn points, receive updates and access fitness content with greater ease.

Challenge

SBA’s internal admin process was heavily manual and time-consuming. Important conversations with parents often happened through WhatsApp, making it difficult for the team to track, review and organise information properly. The existing website was mainly used for form submissions and enquiries. Booking a course or making a purchase still required multiple steps across the website, WhatsApp and staff follow-ups. This created extra workload for the team and made the customer journey less smooth.

Jobs To Be Done

For internal coaches and admin staff, the goal was to create a more accurate and centralised way to manage data. By reducing repetitive admin work, the team could spend more time coaching, planning and improving the learning experience for students. For parents, the goal was to make booking, payment and communication easier. They needed a simple platform where they could receive updates, manage their child’s activities, make payments and access information without going through multiple channels.

Research and Prototype

Through surveys, staff interviews, user personas and SWOT analysis, the team confirmed that a mobile app would be valuable for SBA’s customers. However, the research also showed that placing too many functions into the app could make it cluttered and harder to use. To solve this, we proposed a centralised Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system as the core infrastructure. The CRM would manage and organise key data, while the website and mobile app would focus on user-facing tasks such as booking, payment, attendance, notifications and content access. This created a clearer digital ecosystem, helping SBA improve internal efficiency while giving parents a smoother and more secure experience.