7 Ways to increase the home care experience and make your agency shine in the eyes of your patients & clients.
When you think of companies that you’ve interacted with as a customer, Which ones have made you feel special and more valued than others. Who comes to the top of your mind?
Is it Disney, Amazon, or your local coffee shop or restaurant?
Business owners are all trying to provide that shining and memorable customer experience to help increase their brand loyalty and customer retention. This loyalty drives overall increased business growth, customer retention, and exposure via word-of-mouth.
To rise to the top of your local market as a home care provider and agency, you need to continually be working at increasing customer loyalty. Creating this positive customer experience that makes your clients, their family members, and your referral partners feel valued needs to be one of your top efforts.
In a crowded market that many home care agencies operate, taking time each and every day to work on your customer experience and engagement will be a key component to rising above your competitors and growing your business.
Here are 7 really easy ways for you to improve your customer experience and make your clients and patients feel special.
Listen to your clients and their family – In other blogs, we talk about how listening is key to customer and caregiver success. Listen to a broad group of your customers, paying attention to what they are saying and not saying.
Reach out to them and ask them what they think. Randomly picking up the phone or sending them a quick email will give you great insight into your business and their value of you.
Monitor the social media channels – Stay up to date on the social channels in your market, reviews and direct commutations with them. Social channels can be a great way for you to engage your customer, and get direct feedback. It’s also an excellent place to see what they are sharing about you with others.
Do a quick search to see what others are saying about your home care business. Do the same for your competitors and gain some further insight into where you stand relative to your competition.
Pay attention to your clients, their families, and your referral sources – When a customer calls, make sure you take it, respond to their voicemails, texts, chats, and emails promptly. Pay attention to what they are saying.
Ask them, “What do you think we are best at?”
and then ask “What do you wish we did better?”
Those two questions will give you great insight into your value.
Train your caregivers and staff – We often say the competence gives confidence. And a confident well-trained team will deliver more value to your clients. This goes beyond just training them on how to do their job as caregivers. Think like Disney, they spend a significant amount of time training their staff on genuine courtesies. Thank you, smiles, and offers to help go a long way to increasing customer loyalty and the value they find in your business.
Support your Clients – Work with your caregivers and staff to provide a high-quality level of home care service. This is the foundation of customer value and loyalty. Use your home care software to engage your customers through communication tools like a family portal and caregiver to family chat messaging.
Reward your long-time clients – This is often neglected in the home care market by agencies. Use your home care platform to track metrics like how long a customer has been with you and celebrate special days with them. Creating a personalized message at those key times is a great way to make them feel valued. You could even give them a small inexpensive gift as a thank you for working with your agency.
Be transparent – When something happens that you didn’t expect or your team messed up. Reach out to your customer and discuss what happened and what you are doing about it. Caregivers miss shifts, that’s going to happen but how you react to it will have all the difference in the world to the client and their family’s perception. Be humble and transparent to increase their loyalty and value of your agency.
Customer loyalty doesn’t happen overnight. It takes time to grow and need constant nurturing by you and your entire home care team. But if you focus on it you will find that it is one of the least expensive ways to grow your business and jump in front of your competition.
Smartcare Software can provide solutions that will help you and your agency prepare for the future of homecare. Smartcare offers an easy-to-use enterprise solution to manage, schedule, and operate everything you need for your homecare business. Smartcare is currently offering our COVID-19 Toolset at no charge to all homecare agencies. The Toolset App includes reminders, agency notices, symptom checks, contact tracing and other important virus risk mitigation tools to help you manage your response to the pandemic.
We are in this together. To find out more about Smartcare Software, email covid19@smartcaresoftware.com and let us know how we can help.
To find out how SmartCare™ software and support can help you differentiate your service and strategy, please contact us at 1+ (800) 450-9104 or via email: hello@smartcaresoftware.com
