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| Credit: WikiHow |
This is because most agencies do not measure their satisfaction. If you want to grow faster and leave your competitors behind, it is important that you focus more on your client experience. If you can improve it, it will provide your business with the best foundation that will ensure long term growth.
There are lots of things that you can do to build such a foundation for your home care agency but the level of experience that you provide to your clients is the most crucial aspect. It is therefore required that you perfect his aspect and the best way to do this is by doing two specific things namely:
• Listening to what your clients have to say about your service and
• Measuring their level of satisfaction using proper metrics after considering different parameters.
You can take cue from different online resources, use different tools and software for that matter and even learn and follow the footsteps of reliable and successful caregiving agencies such as Myallamericancare and its likes.
Take a look at all their care giving programs to get the best statistics and ideas to measure satisfaction.
There are several other ways in which you can measure the satisfaction level of your clients and achieve more sustainable growth for your business by providing much better care.
However, apart from being proud of the programs that you provide, you must ensure that you take feedback from your customers from time to time.
Reasons to measure customer satisfaction
The importance of measuring satisfaction is very simple. Anything that is measured can be improved and so is the satisfaction level of your clients. Typically, this should be your North Star. There are several other useful reasons to measure customer satisfaction.
• You must keep in mind that caregiving is a continually evolving process where every day has something new to teach. If you can identify these and use it in your learning curve, it will facilitate your success graph move upwards.
• When you show your clients that you are willing to listen to their issues and work on they feel more comfortable and confident to approach you directly when any issue arises.
Moreover, caregivers in particular feel disinclined to approach their management because they are more worried about their job and their standing.
If you demonstrate that you welcome such feedback then you will be almost automatically rewarded with the respect and trust of both the caregivers as well as your clients.
Beat the competition
The caregiving industry as such is highly competitive and every year the level of competition is on the rise with more such agencies coming up. If you care for customer satisfaction as well as that of your staff it will act as an effective tool that will help you to beat such competition and differentiate yourself from them.
Satisfaction management is very important these days as without it you cannot differentiate your business from others and without any differentiation, you will stagnate. To ensure that you measure the satisfaction level of your customers you may follow these steps:
• Read client testimonials and feedbacks.
• Prepare regular satisfaction reports.
• Analyze them from time to time to identify the areas for improvement to enhance quality.
• Try to gain eligibility to qualify for awards and accolades such as the Best of Home Care awards.
• Obtain certificates such as Trusted Provider certifications and other membership to demonstrate quality and…
• Use thee all in your marketing efforts to earn more credibility.
All these efforts will prove its worth as these will keep you well aware of the blind spots. Rest assured that every agency has these spots and every agency has to eliminate them fast to grow their business.
These blind spots may include:
• The after-hours answering process creating angst among your caregivers
• The training may be perceived as inadequate and ineffective by and for the caregivers
• The benefit programs may be missing and the caregivers need these badly and more.
Remember, it is not easy to realize things that you are not doing or doing wrongly but this is essential to make any service useful and effective whether you provide it to the care recipient or to your caregivers.
Save money
You can literally save thousands of dollars on your annual turnover. Surprising as it may seem to you, it is true. The following example will make it clear to you.
• Ideally, the cost of replacing a caregiver on an average is estimated at a whopping $2,600. This high price is due to the combination of indirect and direct costs associated with it.
• This will also result in other issues such as decreased quality of work as you never know how good the new caregiver will be.
• It will also lead to client frustration as they will not get the type of service they are looking for.
• Frequent replacing of caregivers will also factor in loss of morale in others.
• In addition to all these it will add to your cost in things like overtime as well as cost of new hiring.
According to studies it is found that an agency may experience a loss in their annual turnover by as much as 10 to 15% for these changes. This will add up pretty fast if you continue losing more caregivers in a year.
Multiply $2,600 with the number of caregivers left your agency last year and you will be surprised to see the figure. Few other sources place the cost of loss of each caregiver even higher at $3,500. The annual cost in caregiver turnover in that case will be higher.
All these will add to your loss year after year which you can save if both your clients as well as your caregivers are satisfied.
Apart from that you will get better and more online reviews, more referrals, long staying clients, and build a solid strategy and foundation, all of which will ensure your business growth.
