Providers with high occupancy have these traits in common

Every residential care operator knows that sustainable financial performance starts with maximising income from residents. To do this, you need high occupancy rates of 92% or more, yet average occupancy is declining. 

This suggests there is a significant opportunity for providers to implement strategies that are proven to deliver high occupancy, which will translate into more revenue and improved sustainability. In this insight, we will share our tips on the three key drivers of high occupancy:

We have found that providers who focus on continuous improvement in these drivers by embedding robust capability in their people, systems and processes consistently achieve high occupancy.

An effective enquiry generation and management system 

For providers, rather than use the term CRM (Customer Relationship Management), we prefer to focus on EMS (Enquiry Management System).

All EMSs encompass the following steps:

Admission of a new resident is the culmination of these four critical steps taken by the resident and or their family. A potential resident can fall away at any of these stages.  Evaluating the effectiveness of each critical step in your enquiry management system is how you ensure you maximise the number of new admissions.

While monitoring the number of tours that result in an admission is quite common, analysing steps 1 and 2 is often missed, which can result in your facility not generating the enquiries needed to achieve the admissions that will support your occupancy target.

The following table provides a summary of the goal of each step and the key system measures that allow those with responsibility for occupancy to have confidence that your EMS is working to support the goal of high occupancy.

Investigation stage - ask a friend or phone an expert

Asking a friend whose loved one you know was in a facility, consulting your doctor or hospital, searching on Google for "Aged Care facilities near me," or acting on advertising you've seen...

If you've ever been in a position where you or your loved one needed aged care and didn't know how to proceed, you likely started with one of these options. Unsurprisingly, this is what people requiring aged care typically do, and most won't visit the My Aged Care website.

How you manage these channels determines how many people will include you in the initial investigation stage. As no one can get to second base unless they get to first base, knowing which channels cause your name to come up when people are investigating their options is essential.

Channel management, including reviewing referrer engagement, goes beyond hospital discharge officers or social workers. It includes community engagement relevant to your market and how many of your current and past clients are promoters of your service. A channel management program ensures you know which channels are working and, just as importantly, which ones are not.

The perception of your facility or organisation held by the referrers is critical to your reputation. For example, do they know what you offer and what your care expertise is?

Having clear responsibilities and measuring activity and outcomes positively impacts the number of times your facility comes up at the investigation stage.

Enquiry stage – the fish are biting

Having found you in the investigation stage, if the channels represent you favourably, then you get an enquiry. This is the start of your journey of managing the individual opportunity.

Moving into residential care is a complex decision, this means it is multistage and multi-factorial. If you want to convert the enquiry into a resident, you have to know how to “play and land the fish”. This involves understanding the decision drivers, pacing out objections, highlighting benefits and, most importantly, maintaining momentum.

This is where the formal EMS system is gold!

Common shortcomings in enquiry management we see include:

• No email response to website enquiry
• No or slow return phone call
• No provider initiated follow-up contact (and none defined as an expectation)
• Lack of product and service knowledge by staff responding to enquirers
• Enquirers being passed from person to person for answers to questions

Evaluation stage – simplicity and confidence rule

The evaluation stage is where the enquirer reduces their options, typically from four or five facilities to two they will compare and contrast to decide which facility to go with. Your goal in the evaluation stage is to be one of the final two and then to win at least 50% of the time.

When confronted with complex situations, we tend to choose the outcome that appears simple and clear and allows us to feel confident that we’ve made the right choice.

Knowing this, we are constantly surprised at how complex providers make the entry process, from explaining the costs using jargon (RAD/DAP, Combo, MTCF, BDF) to those bulky enquiry packs.

Providers with high enquiry conversion rates talk about benefits more than features.

We are working with a number of providers to help them develop a means of giving enquirers an estimate of the total monthly cost they will have to pay rather than telling them about all the individual costs and allowing them to try to figure it out. Taking away the risk of higher costs is a major positive decision factor for residents.

Selection stage – success is winning some of the time

Being selected to provide care for a resident is simply a result of your management of the first three steps. If you are in a two-horse race, then you’d be happy to win 50% of the time.

The trouble is that most providers don’t know or even have a goal for the number of enquiries they want to convert to new residents. Of course, this means they don’t know how many enquiries they need to generate to achieve their occupancy goal.

So, if you’re struggling with occupancy, perhaps the first place to start is to measure the number of enquiries you get and, of these, how many you convert to residents.

Clearly, being more effective at moving people to the next stage is the easiest and most controllable aspect of the EMS.

People talk – high customer satisfaction and active engagement is critical

At the start, we said that another way we gain confidence is to read the stories of other users of a service – enquirers often ask a friend. This means the voices of your customers within the channels of our EMS are critical.

Residents’ loved ones are often the most vocal advocates or complainants, and health professionals don’t want someone to come back to them with negative feedback on a facility they suggested.

To manage this, you need regular customer feedback, and one method to calibrate this into a meaningful measure is the Net Promotor Score. The other key activity is to share the results and positive stories with your channels. This turns them into advocates for your service.

You don’t actually have to do many things well to get positive ratings from your customers. Figures 6 & 7 from Research Paper 6 by the Royal Commission set out the things you need to do well to get positive consumer ratings, as either a satisfactory or high-quality rating.

Figure 6: Relative importance of attribute levels in determining aged care quality rating (Satisfactory quality compared with Unacceptable/Poor quality)

Figure 7: Relative importance of attribute levels in determining aged care quality rating (High/Very High quality compared with Satisfactory quality)

Source: Royal Commission into Aged Care Quality and Safety - Research Paper 6

Of course, once you ask the question, the critical issue is how you address negative views.

Because enquirers have no experience with your facility, consumer stories and consumer ratings are extremely important inputs into their decision.

Good customer service

There are many definitions of what constitutes good customer service. Customers include all relevant stakeholders to the business – your residents, their relatives, community groups and referrers, suppliers and colleagues.

We know what is required to deliver good customer service/experience:

• Empathy through connection and positive relationships with your customers
• Delivering service that meets or exceeds our customers’ expectations
• Proactive engagement with customers, you need them more than they need you
• Reacting promptly to address and resolve customer complaints

To deliver good customer service, your front of house staff need:

• Active listening skills
• Great communication skills
• Product/service knowledge
• The understanding of key decision drivers of enquirers
• To ‘ask, don’t tell’

Unless your EMS includes training staff in how you want them to deal with enquirers, then they will do what they think is right. Moving enquirers through the decision stages is critical to occupancy and financial sustainability.

Are you confident your front-line staff are interacting with enquirers and customers to maximise your occupancy?

How we can help

For providers looking to review and build improved structure and outcomes influencing resident satisfaction and occupancy, Pride Aged Living offers support through our Sales and Admissions service in Occupancy and Accommodation Revenue. This includes: