If you’re reading this, you’re likely a senior living executive focused on increasing occupancy and streamlining the technology and services to run your communities like a well-oiled machine. You know occupancy drives everything, and relationships drive occupancy. That’s why investing in a call center can feel daunting. Your leads are precious and deserve the best first impression. How do you know that the call center will be able to handle your leads like your team? How can you get buy-in from your sales team to trust someone else with their leads?
These are valid questions we get all the time at Serviam. However, with the right call center as the extension of your sales team, you will increase your move-ins all while saving your sales team time to focus on important, revenue-generating tasks.
So how can call centers increase senior living move-ins? Let’s get into it.
Using a senior housing call center will drastically increase your contact rate, thus increasing the likelihood of move-ins.
You don’t have a lead problem; you have a lead management problem.
We get it: If your company is anything like most senior living operators, you’ve got more leads incoming than your people have the time and manpower to manage effectively.
Does this story sound familiar? A call comes in and it goes to the receptionist at your front desk. If the receptionist is away, the caller will most likely not leave a voicemail. The lead is dropped. No one calls back.
Now let’s say the receptionist is at the desk and answers the call. He is unable to connect the lead with your Community Sales Director because they are busy with a tour. The receptionist does the best he can to get her name and number on a sticky note. He puts it on the Community Sales Director’s desk and hopes she will call back. The Community Sales Director gets busy, the lead gets lost, and your contact rate drops.
Now let’s talk about leads already in your system. You paid a lot from third parties to get the leads, but your sales team is so busy that they get lost in your CRM and remain uncontacted and forgotten.
In contrast, senior housing call centers have a high contact rate. Our VIA Contact Center has a 90+ contact rate. When you have a dedicated call center, you always have a sales team to answer calls and make outbound calls on behalf of your community. A call center will work a proven contact plan to make sure you never miss a lead. Our contact center data shows it takes an average of 12 attempts to reach a lead, but most salespeople give up after 3 tries. With a senior housing call center, you can rest easy knowing you have a dedicated team working a call strategy plan to contact every lead.
Get top speed to lead with a call center
Most senior living communities take 24-48 hours to respond to an initial inquiry from an interested prospect. That’s a HUGE problem because 75% of families move into the first community they talk to.
The right senior housing call center will prioritize speed to lead, getting back to your leads in minutes instead of days. The VIA Contact Center’s speed-to-lead in 2022 was only 5 minutes! When leads get prompt, personal attention, they are more likely to want to schedule a tour with your community. In 2022, our VIA contact center advocates scheduled 10,961 tours on behalf of our clients.
More opportunities for tours = more opportunities to seal the deal and get more move-ins.
Track attribution for better ROI
Now you may be convinced that hiring a senior housing call center will streamline your lead management and save your sales team time. It will improve your contact rate and increase your speed to lead. All of those things will help with your move-in rate.
But perhaps one of the best reasons to use a senior housing call center is for the data it will provide you to see what’s working down funnel. Many senior living communities are burning dollars without being able to track the attribution. Not all call centers will help you see attribution. However, with the VIA Contact Center, you get instant access to our platform to see what marketing sources are converting best to tours and move-ins. Our client success team will also have monthly reporting calls to go over the data and help your sales and marketing teams see what’s working and what’s not.
When your marketing team can see what’s converting, you have smarter marketing spend and more move-ins. Read how our contact center helped one of our clients, Arrow Senior living increased occupancy to 99% with the VIA Contact Center.
