Summer 2018

FEATURE ARTICLE Did you know that likelihood of converting a lead drops 50 percent after one hour? Why? Home care is a hyper-competitive industry. Lucy Andrews in Santa Rosa, CA noted that when she started At Your Ser- vice Home Care in Santa Rosa, California, there were only a few agencies in the area. Now there are over 60 local agencies! Similarly, in franchising, twenty years ago there were only a handful of home care franchises running marketing campaigns and building national brands. Today there are over 70 home care franchises. For both caregivers, turnover is on average about 67 percent per year while for clients it’s about 100 percent per year. So if you have 200 clients and 240 caregivers, that means you must find 200 new clients and 160 caregivers in the year ahead just to stay the same size! How do you win? And if you are a national franchise with 100s of locations, it gets even harder. How can you standardize the best practices that will enable you to win across all of your markets? Follow the Leaders The leading home care innovators are leveraging technology to standardize best practices in pipeline optimization. Imagine what it would mean for your business if, across all your locations: • Leads automatically drop into your scheduling platform or to a centralized call center • Lead management tasks are automati- cally assigned with escalating internal alerts—eventually alerting the owners— tied to timely response • Response times are tracked in your scheduling platform automatically • Leads are dropped into “nurture” campaigns with a platform like Marketo or Hubspot if they didn’t move forward with care • Automated “Welcome” communications are sent when a family begins care • You were able to analyze the data at every stage in the pipeline, across all of your locations, to further test, monitor and optimize lead management best practices These pipeline workflows are tied directly to growth and can be optimized for both clients and caregivers. An increase in any one stage of your pipeline impacts the overall pipeline production. For example, let’s say you think of your pipeline as a series of conversions: Inbound Lead to Successful Contact Contact to Assessment Assessment to Contract Contract to Scheduled 1st Shift Scheduled 1st Shift to Ongoing Care Now, let’s say you increase the rate of “Inbound Leads to Successful Contact” from 50 percent to 75 percent by simply improving response time (a 50 percent improvement to that stage of the process, in our example). That single optimization of that single step of the pipeline flows through every other stage to yield a 50 percent increase in clients as the increased lead volume flows toward the bottom of the “funnel.” WINNING IN OUR HYPER-COMPETITIVE MARKET 8 HCAOA The Voice