Developing Your Business- A Guide For Nursing Care And Senior Care Facility Owners- Part 2
Ok, so in my last article I looked at where I could find your care facility in a metaphorical sense, whether in the yellow pages, or as is increasingly the case, through the internet. I have the list of homes, which I have either copied from the yellow pages, social services or printed from the internet, that I intend to visit, so I decide to ring you up to perhaps be offered a brochure or book a time to visit. I ring your facility, and ring, and ring. There is no answer, so I move on to the next facility in my list of ten; you’ve just lost me as a customer.
If I had a pound for the amount of care facilities that haven’t answered the phone... Care facilities are extremely busy environments, in which the welfare of the residents should always take priority over everything else, but of course, you can’t tell me that as I’ve already moved on to telephoning the next place on my list. There is no simple answer to the issue of telephone answering in care facilities, as every place is different. However, a couple of pointers:
• Check your telephone system actually works! It might seem ridiculous, but I once rang a care facility time and again without anyone picking up, because the number I had acquired, from some piece of literature at some time, had actually disappeared into the ether somewhere during the development of an extension. The telephone number ringing out at my end was nowhere to be found in the home, and to my knowledge, to this day still hasn’t been found.
• Is everyone in the building confident in answering the phone? If not how will you resolve this? Will you put training in place to ensure that everyone becomes confident and can take basic message details, or will you have designated phone answerers on each shift?-Whatever works for you. It could be as simple as getting every member of staff to spend five minutes with the facility administrator so that they feel confident in answering the phones, or putting a laminated 'phone answering guide' next to every phone. Equally, if a telephone can’t be heard in certain areas of the building, how can you resolve this? Is it possible to use portable phones, or even transfer calls to a mobile phone which is given to a designated person on each shift?
These are the basics about the initial means of contact with your home. In the next article I will discuss what actually gets delivered to me in the form of your literature, and also, once I get in my car, will I actually manage to find you?
Lisa O'Neill is founder and managing director of www.whereforcare.co.uk and www.whereforcare.com , the online ratings and information resources for care homes and childcare across the UK and the US. After spending three years working for one of the UK's largest care home providers in the fields of sales, marketing and business development, Lisa took the decision to use her 10 years experience in the healthcare sector to establish the Whereforcare websites and develop a senior care consultancy
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