1. A senior housing call center is always available to answer calls
What is your current contact rate? What about your speed-to-lead? These are important metrics to measure the success of your sales team’s availability to answer inbound inquiries. If you’ve done any secret shopping at your communities, you may have been surprised to find calls don’t get answered, and you may not get a call back until 24-48 hours after you left a message.
Even if you have a dedicated salesperson or two per community, they typically work 9-5 and aren’t available to answer calls that come in after hours or on the weekends. With a senior living-specific call center, you have a dedicated team of agents working on behalf of your sales team to answer calls after hours, on weekends, and even on holidays.
Being there to answer someone’s call immediately is actually very important for move-in rates. Our data shows 75% of families go to the first communities they talk with and make a meaningful connection. What is it costing your community to miss a call?
2. Outsourced call centers free your sales team to focus on revenue generating tasks
How much time is wasted each week chasing unqualified leads? You want your sales team to be focused on doing what they do best, building relationships, doing tours, and generating referrals.
With a senior housing call center, your team can hand off the initial legwork and get back 10 hours of your salesperson’s week. For example, with the VIA contact center, our agents will do all the legwork from the first call to scheduling a tour on behalf of your community. We take on the call strategy, calling your leads up to 20 times in a 90-day period. We call a lead back within 10 minutes compared to the 24-hour lead time from a community without call center support.
“Having the VIA Contact Center as the extension of my sales team gives me back time in my day. Instead of spending my time calling and chasing leads, I now have the time to go into the field and generate professional referrals.” Janet Moxley, Senior Sales and Marketing Director, Charter of Edgewood
What would it look like to have your team completely focused on building relationships, instead of being glued to their phones?
3. You will always make a great first impression with the right call center
With a senior living community practically on every corner, first impressions matter. If an adult daughter calls your community on behalf of her mom and has a poor experience, what is the likelihood she will want to come in and tour your community?
When selecting a senior housing call center, there are several important factors to consider making sure your leads will get world-class customer service.
Don’t do this
- Never go with a call center that is not senior living specific
- Never use a senior living call center that reads from a script – authentic relationship building is everything in our industry and reading from a script is transitional and won’t build trust
Do this
- Use a senior housing call center that will act as an extension of your brand
- Use agents who are emotionally intelligent, and can provide excellent customer service with knowledge of the senior living industry
- Make sure your sales team is received detailed handoff notes, so your sales team doesn’t need to re-do the initial discovery call with the lead
- Use a senior housing call center that provides detailed KPIs to help your sales and marketing notice trends and adjust accordingly
With VIA Contact Center, you can expect to save your sales team 10 hours a week and see 2+ move-ins a month. Our US-based Advocates are an extension of your sales team. We’ll get back to your inquiries faster than you can get through a Chick-fil-A drive-thru. And when we pass on a qualified tour, you’ll have everything you need – it’ll be like you had the conversation yourself. Ready to increase your occupancy through a trusted senior housing call center? Schedule a demo today.