Whether you are starting your home care agency, looking to grow your existing business, or are worried about the client turnover spike hitting a five-year high of 76%, knowing how to acquire new clients is crucial for your success.
In this article, we've gathered helpful tips and strategies on how to get private home care clients. You will also learn how current technology solutions, such as Timeero, can help you achieve this goal.
If you're wondering how to get private home care clients, always remember that word of mouth can either make or break your business. All your marketing efforts will be useless if you're not providing exceptional care for your clients. Make it a top goal for your home care agency, and focus most of your resources on achieving it.
Your clients and their family should receive the best possible treatment from the first interaction with your agency, continuing through every subsequent touchpoint with your employees.
Besides providing exceptional care to your client, you need to provide the same quality to your employee caregivers so they can achieve the level and quality of care you require.
You will have to hire excellent staff and onboard them to address clients' needs with the respect and professionalism they deserve.
If your clients and their family members are satisfied with the quality of the services you offer, the referrals will flow in regularly, and there will be no bad reviews that could tarnish your reputation.
Below, we offer you not-so-obvious tips on how to improve the quality of the care you're providing.
If you are wondering how to get private home care clients by improving your service, start with regular surveys with the client, family members, and employees to measure the quality of care. They will give you valuable insight into your agency's performance in different areas. Based on their feedback, you will be able to continually improve your care and achieve the reputation of an agency that prioritizes quality.
You can ensure your survey results are usable and reliable if the whole interviewing process is anonymous and the questions are focused and easy to understand.
Also, be sure to include some open-ended questions, such as What can we do to improve our services? Or What do you like best about our agency? that can give you a lot of actionable information.
Staff management software can help your agency improve the quality of care your clients receive and, consequently, your reputation.
Your nurses and caregivers are your front-line team, doing essential work in the community. They must have all the tools they need to manage their professional tasks efficiently. It's essential that both your carers and staff trust your agency. Technology can play an important role in achieving that by enabling smooth workflows.
Using staff management software, such as Timeero, you will lift a significant burden off their shoulders and leave them more time and energy to develop relationships with clients. Timeero will let a carer know about all tasks they must complete for every home visit and provide them with clients' home locations in an EVV-compliant manner.
For example, using Timeero, caregivers can completely forget about minor but essential tasks, such as time or mileage tracking. The app will segment their working hours into time they spent travelling and the distance they covered, and the time they spent on certain locations, visiting their clients. This way, during their shifts, they can focus on what they do best - providing care for their clients.
Let's dive deeper into answering our crucial question - how to get private home care clients and the issue of improving the quality of care. One of the aspects of providing quality services is the quality of relationships between your clients and your staff. And it's hard to form a meaningful relationship if your caregivers quit after a short time working for your agency.
One of the ways to prevent their churn is by improving your onboarding and recognition processes, which would empower your employees and improve their engagement.
To learn more about improving the onboarding process of your nurses and other employees, check out the article Nurse onboarding: How to do it properly in our Blog section.
Starting a recognition program that would acknowledge and reward carers meeting your KPIs is also a great idea, as it can motivate others to do the same.
To learn more about the importance of KPIs, read our article Key Performance Indicators Home Health Agencies Must Track.
So, above, we've discussed how to get private home care clients by improving the quality of your services and ensuring word of mouth works in your favor.
We move to referrals as one of the most budget-friendly and effective ways to build and expand the base of private clients for home care. By improving the quality of your care, you will get good referrals from the clients and their inner circle of friends and family, but you must go beyond that.
Acquiring professional referrals is undoubtedly one of the sure ways to get private home care clients.
To achieve this, you should nurture strong relationships with your area's professional healthcare services and doctor offices. To provide you with their referrals and recommend your services, professionals need to trust that you will take good care of their patients.
So, don't knock on everyone's door - choose one or two reputable offices of respectable professionals in your area, and establish a connection with them. Also, be sure to provide their offices with brochures they could pass on to their clients.
Leaving the flyers in hospice care centers and hospitals for nurses to hand over to patients who can benefit from your services can also get new clients.
So, we are still on referrals as one of the best ways to get private home care clients.
You can get more home health aide private clients by partnering with other companies and reciprocating referrals. If you come across a person who can benefit from your partner's services, you refer them to your partner. And they, in return, do the same.
However, be aware that your reputation is at stake here, so approach it with utmost care and be very selective when choosing your partner.
If you refer to a company and it doesn't meet the person's reputation, your reputation will take a blow. But if your referral helps someone solve their problem, your reputation will grow—the same stands for your partner.
Another approach to the issue of how to get private home care clients is by improving your agency's visibility and reputation in the local communities. You can accomplish this by showing you care for the community and participating in its everyday life.
For example, you and your employees can volunteer in certain activities - spend time in soup kitchens or homeless shelters or organize clothing or blood drives. Such actions will help you get your name out and build trust among people, as they will know you are the agency that cares for their well-being and gives back to the community.
To get ideas about volunteering, you can contact food banks, schools, churches, and NGOs and determine your community's essential needs.
Sponsoring different events, such as local foot races, is another way to become a visible subject in front of your local target market. As branding improves visibility, have banners and wear T-shirts with your agency's name and logo. If budget allows, you can even consider handing branded T-shirts out at these events.
Although your clients are most likely local seniors, your target audience is much broader. Your potential client's family might live all over the country, and you can't reach them using face-to-face techniques that boost local visibility and reputation.
So, a family member helping the relative find services they need will look for them online. Even if they've heard of your agency, they will do their job thoroughly - research you and check out the reviews.
So, how to get private home care clients using digital marketing?
Advertising is one of the ways to get private home care clients. As it can be expensive, ensure your ads hit the right audience.
Besides online advertising, which needs to be broader, target your other advertising campaigns locally, where your agency provides services. Consider local newspaper and radio ads, bus stop advertisements, billboards, and leaflets. You can print business cards with a special offer to attract new clients and still make money.
So, reserve and strategically plan some funds in your advertising budget to acquire new private clients for home care.
There is a good reason why improving the quality of your services is top of the list when talking about how to get private care clients. If the quality of the care your nurses and careers offer is low, there is no ad or digital marketing campaign that can have a positive long-term effect.
Timeero can help you boost the quality of the services your agency provides. It streamlines routine but necessary tasks and processes and lightens your employees' workload.
Here are just a few examples of how Timeero can take over the workload from your field workers and yourself:
As they can complete all these tasks with a single click on their phones, your nurses and carers can focus only on their core, vocational tasks. They can build relationships with the clients, improving their satisfaction and chances for genuine and authentic referrals.
Timeero will also leave you more time and energy to commit to other more profitable tasks, such as planning for growth or networking.
Natasa is a writer specializing in the IT and software industry with 6+ years of experience in content writing and online marketing. During that period, she wrote more than 1,000 articles and several ebooks. She majored in English language and literature and loves cats, sneakers, and candy. When she's not working, she's probably binge-watching Netflix.
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