5 Tips to Improve Care Occupancy & Care Hours

5 Tips to Improve Care Occupancy & Care Hours

Do you want to know the quickest way to increase your occupancy or  care hours?

STOP LOSING THE LEADS YOU ALREADY HAVE

Yes I know that is all in CAPS LOCK and appears a bit shouty, but it really needs to be heard.

However, you cannot stop losing those precious leads if you don’t know where the leaks are.

A really slick, professional process for dealing with leads is essential to your business and needs to operate 24/7. Yes, 24/7.

Here are my top 5 ways you could be losing clients RIGHT NOW

1. Not answering the phone

Enquiries don’t only come during office hours. Many enquirers have 9-5 jobs so will enquire out of hours and at weekends. Who is answering your phone? How they do it is directly affecting your business. My experience of Mystery shops over the last few weeks have highlighted MAJOR shortfalls in this area.

2. Not calling enquirers who have given you their number

You may not want to appear too eager or salesy, but this approach is seriously hampering your ability to acquire new clients. They have made an enquiry, they have GIVEN you their number so you CAN call them. Give them a ring, be helpful, make a friend. For many this will be a traumatic period and they may need a lot of advice and support. The business will go to the person they feel they can trust the most. Will that be you?

3. Waiting too long to return an enquiry

Did you know, there is a Golden 10 minutes? If you call your prospect within 10 minutes of the enquiry you have an 85% chance of making a sale. This drops to less than 30% after 3 hours. These figures have been gathered and tested over hundreds of calls. There really is truth in the saying ‘The Early Bird Catches The Worm’.

4. Not following up effectively

Ask yourself 2 questions

1. Is my / our approach ‘professional’. You may think so, but what woud an enquirer experience?
2. Am I thinking and acting like an investor? Adopting the viewpoint of an investor in your business should give you an entirely new way of look at your processes.

Act promptly. For instance, Autumna will send red-hot leads direct to your inbox.

What are you doing with them?

How are you monitoring your response over the weekend?

If an enquiry comes in on Saturday and you do not respond until Monday it is very likely to be far too late. (see point 3 above)

You could set up a simple mail rule that will direct every Autumna contact to the Customer Relations lead, Duty Manager, Owner or all three.

Make contact quickly, give good, useful advice. Become someone the enquirer can trust. Autumna has done the hard work for you. Don’t lose the potential customer through sloppy follow-up practices

5. No USEFUL brochure or information pack to send out to interested parties.

In general, without even looking, I can guess your brochure will:

1. Contain lots of stock images. They stand out a mile and look fake
2. Not explain what is UNIQUE about you.
3. Be written from the perspective of the home, not the enquirer
4. Not answer the fundamental questions any enquirer may have
5. Be far too bland and vanilla

Have a look at your brochure, or better still get someone else to look at it. If you took off your logo it is likely it could be replaced with another company’s without too much trouble. (And yes, this does happen!)