How To Guarantee Prospective Move-ins Don't Slip Through The Cracks and Your Marketing Team Capitalizes On Every Inquiry Call To Your Community or Facility

Senior Care Professional:

Your referral hotline is the lifeblood of your business…are you really leveraging every call-in?

It's critical to your facility or community that at least 75% of all inquiry calls are converted to admissions or live tours.

It's no secret that referral sources and families have many options when transitioning patients or loved ones into a new community.

The first phone call that a family member or referral source makes on your referral hotline is absolutely the most important point of contact to profitably build your residency.

If your marketing team is not maximizing every call-in you could be missing admission opportunities that your competitors are taking advantage of.

The challenge with lost inquiry opportunities is that you don't really know what you're missing and it likely has nothing to do with your marketing team' s desire to help prospective residence.

Here are some of the challenges that senior care companies have with referral hotlines and in-bound call management…you may be experiencing the same difficulties:

• Inquiry calls come at all hours of the day and night and many communities are not properly staffed to handle the calls on off hours and unfortunately many inquires are simply missed altogether.
  
• Inquiry calls are handled by the wrong people who are not trained to take the calls and prospective admissions or tour opportunities are lost or delayed.
  
• Marketing personnel are not aware of where calls are coming from and have no way of following-up with prospective resident families or referral sources.
  
• Marketing Managers don't always know for sure when peak call-in times occur in order to properly staff the phones to handle inquires.
  
• Marketing Managers don't have a way to easily determine which referral sources are generating the most inquiries.
  
• Training staff to effectively handle inquiry calls can be hit or miss, in which case you don't have a consistent message and strong sales approach.
  
• Manager don't have an easy and constructive way to coach people on actual calls and hold people accountable for census results.

Be brutally honest with yourself.

If you have a sneaking suspicion that you're not taking full advantage of every inquiry opportunity you're probably right.

The painful reality is that often your Marketing Team doesn't get a second chance to take advantage of a missed or mishandled inquiry and prospective move-ins could be slipping through the cracks.

But there is an inexpensive way to easily improve and maximize your in-bound call management and dramatically increase census without having to reinvent the wheel or spend tons of money.

If you're like most senior care companies your focus is on helping families and prospective residence, but sales and marketing doesn't always get the attention it really requires and you don't always have the tools and information to make the marketing side of your business operate consistently.

The truth is, effective and consistent sales and marketing allows you to help more people and have a lasting positive impact on your community.

So it's worth reiterating, the inquiries from your referral hotlines are the lifeblood of your business!

Here are 7 keys for senior care companies to effectively manage and capitalize on in-bound call inquiries from referral hotlines:

1. 100% of in-bound calls from a referral hotline or listed phone number must be answered.
   
2. People answering the call must be trained to effectively handle the inquiry and convert it to an admission or tour.
   
3. You need to know peak call times (monthly, weekly and hourly) to staff the phones with the best people during those times.
   
4. You need to determine which referral sources, marketing material or advertisements are generating the most calls and the quality of those inquiries.
   
5. Your marketing teams needs to have a record of those people who call. This should not be left up to chance, critical prospect information needs to be in an accessible database.
   
6. Managers need to have a system for actual customer call reviews and inquiry audits (not just mystery shoppers) to help improve call quality and move-in conversion.
   
7. All inquiry calls need to be tracked and future marketing programs need to be designed to target and increase calls from the richest call sources.

Doing all of these things is easier than you might think.

It starts by incorporating a call tracking system into your existing marketing and sales effort.

Here's how you can easily start tracking all of your in-bound calls from your referral hotline, squeeze more admissions out of your existing marketing effort and use new tracking information to build marketing programs that generate more referrals:

New Call Solutions offers senior care companies a practical web-based monitoring system for inbound phone call tracking and recording.

You'll get your own unique tracking phone number(s). You have the option of using toll-free (800) number(s) or a local number(s) to insert into each advertisement or campaign you wish to track. You also have the opportunity to track your existing telephone numbers.

Calls to these numbers route through our tracking system and ring to your existing phone line and marketing personnel.

Calls can ring to any phone and you don't need to change your phone system or service.

You'll have the ability to track, capture, chart, record and organize inbound inquiry calls in real time.

We will work with you to determine how many numbers you need and how and where to place your tracking numbers.  Once your tracking numbers are established and ringing you will receive email reports with:

• Call recordings
• Missed call notifications
• Call time reports
• Names and addresses of those people who call

We help you to review and analyze your call tracking information and show you ways to increase your response, generate more tours and increase census.

Part of our review process includes an inquiry audit where we'll listen to an actual recorded call to determine how effective your marketing professionals qualify prospects and get them to tour your community.

Contact us today to learn more about New Call Solutions (call tracking for senior care companies) and squeeze more admissions out of your existing marketing effort and use new tracking information to build marketing programs that generate more referrals.

Copyright © New Call Solutions 2007

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