Use a Senior Living CRM Tool To Combat Low Occupancy

Are you dealing with low occupancy rates in your senior living community? Consider using a customer relationship management (CRM) tool to help boost your occupancy and streamline your operations. Implementing a senior living CRM tool can help you better manage your leads, engage with prospects, and track resident satisfaction.

Dropping Occupancy Rates

Senior living occupancy rates can fluctuate due to a variety of factors, leading senior living communities to underperform. The COVID-19 pandemic posed significant occupancy challenges, with many communities experiencing a decline due to safety concerns and visitation restrictions. 

In 2021, vacancy rates rose to 15.6% in senior living residences throughout Canada due to factors related to the COVID-19 pandemic. Some provinces even reached levels of over 20% vacancy despite the increase in supply.

 It is essential for senior living communities to take proactive steps to achieve more substantial occupancy rates and create vibrant senior living communities. The first step to combatting low occupancy is to proactively identify and address critical stressors that may be squeezing resident occupancy, so they can be addressed strategically. 

Factors That Contribute to Low Occupancy Rates

Several factors contribute to low occupancy rates in the industry, including:

• Competition: With so many senior living communities to choose from it can be difficult to stand out and attract new residents.
  
• Economic conditions: People may be hesitant to move into a senior living community when the economy is struggling due to financial concerns such as increasing rent.
• Healthcare policies: Changes in healthcare policies and insurance can impact the affordability and accessibility of senior living options.
• Demographic shifts: As the population ages and more people require senior living options, the industry may become more competitive, and prices may increase.
• Safety concerns: In light of the COVID-19 pandemic, safety concerns have become a major factor in senior living occupancy rates. Residents and their families may be hesitant to move into a community with a high risk of infection.

The Repercussions of Low Occupancy Rates

The repercussions of low occupancy rates can negatively affect your lead attraction rates, financial stability, and resident satisfaction.

For example, it can be challenging to maintain financial stability when occupancy is low. You may need to cut back on staff or services to stay afloat, which can hurt resident satisfaction. Decreased satisfaction can lead to increased resident turnover and difficulty drawing new residents.

Finally, when occupancy rates are low, you may not have the financial resources to invest in new amenities or upgrades. This can make it difficult to keep up with the competition and attract new residents.

How can you overcome these occupancy challenges to ensure the long-term success of your community? Utilizing senior living CRM tools is an excellent approach that keeps you one step ahead of the competition - especially if you use one built specifically for senior living.

How to Leverage CRM Tools

Leveraging the power of senior living CRM tools throughout the resident journey can help you increase your leads, support your prospects throughout their decision-making process, and increase the number of residents. Here are three ways you can successfully use CRM to reach your goals.

Create a Nurture Strategy

Generating leads is a big part of continued success in the senior living industry. But once you've got those leads, how do you turn them into actual sales? 

That's where the concept of MQLs, SQLs, and a nurture strategy comes in.

Understanding MQLs and SQLs

MQL stands for Marketing Qualified Lead, indicating someone has shown interest in your senior living community. They may have filled out a form on your website, downloaded a brochure, or requested more information. At this stage, they're just a lead and not necessarily ready to make a decision yet.

SQL or Sales Qualified Lead denotes that your MQL lead has distinguished themselves as someone who may be seriously considering your community by taking actions such as:

• Requesting a tour
• Having a phone call with a sales rep
• Requesting a personalized quote

This is when the lead becomes a serious prospect, and you should start focusing your sales efforts on them.

So how do you move someone from an MQL to an SQL in the senior living industry? It all comes down to using your sales funnel to build a relationship with them, provide relevant information, and offer the support they need to make an informed decision.

Want a crash course in senior living marketing?

The Power of CRM Tools Within a Unique Prospect Nurture Strategy

If your goal is to improve your sales funnel, one effective approach is developing a unique prospect nurture strategy and integrating senior living CRM tools into the process.

How can this help you convert MQLs to SQLs? Consider four ways:

1. Personalized communication: The data stored in your CRM tool allows you to send out bulk messages, but still customize your communication and approach to each prospect.
2. Timely follow-up: Your CRM tool can automate follow-up communication, helping you stay in touch with potential residents and provide support as they navigate the decision-making process.
3. Lead scoring: Using lead scoring techniques — a scoring methodology that uses certain criteria to rank leads based on how interested they are in your service — allows you to prioritize prospects, ensuring you use your time and energy effectively.
4. Tracking engagement: Using senior living CRM tools to track your prospect's engagement helps you identify areas where they may need more information or support throughout their decision-making journey.

With customized communication, support, and prioritization of interested leads, you can focus your time on the most promising prospects and increase their likelihood of moving into your community.

Centralize Key Prospect Information

Managing prospect information is key to keeping your community thriving; using senior living CRM tools to replace manual processes is an excellent way to stay ahead of the game.

Auditing your current solution can help you identify areas for improvement. For example, you may still be using spreadsheets to manage your leads or may have multiple systems that aren't communicating with each other. When you take a close look at your current process, you can identify inefficiencies and gaps that could be costing you leads.

Senior living CRM tools play a prominent role in simplifying audits and mitigating inefficiencies by centralizing essential information for ease of access. Such centralization can help you improve your systems by:

• Storing all prospect information in one place, including contact information, preferences, and history of interactions. This makes it easy for you and your team to access the information you need to provide personalized and effective communication.
• Automating time-consuming tasks like sending follow-up emails or scheduling appointments. Automation ensures that your prospects get timely and relevant information, which goes a long way toward building meaningful relationships.
• Tracking key metrics and analyzing your sales process. You can see how long it takes for leads to move through the sales funnel, identify bottlenecks, and adjust your approach accordingly to optimize your sales process and increase your conversion rates.
• Helping you stay organized and on top of your leads so you can easily prioritize your prospects, schedule follow-up tasks, and ensure no leads fall through the cracks.

Establish KPIs

Finally, defining key performance indicators (KPIs) — metrics that determine how your facility is performing at achieving a certain objective or goal — and using CRM software to track them can help you keep up with the performance of your community and team. 

Defining KPIs allows you to identify the metrics that are most important to your business, such as the number of tours scheduled or the conversion rate of leads to sales. These KPIs can help you measure the effectiveness of your sales and marketing efforts and identify areas for improvement.

Tracking KPIs is easier than ever with CRM software. 

A CRM tool allows you to collect data on all your prospect interactions, from the first point of contact to the final sale. You can use this data to track your KPIs over time and identify trends and patterns in your sales process. Then, you can adjust your marketing and nurturing strategies as needed to maximize their effectiveness and drive more sales for your senior living community.

Taking the Next Step

A senior living CRM is an essential tool for every senior living community. This powerful technology can help you keep track of leads, manage communication with potential residents and their families, and ultimately increase your occupancy levels. With the right CRM, you can take your community to the next level and provide top-quality care that will help you attract and retain residents.

As Canada's most comprehensive senior living technology solution, Med e-care provides tools that help you improve resident outcomes, optimize revenue, maximize occupancy goals, and retain staff. Our robust software centralizes all clinical and business workflows in one place, including profile and care management, customer relationship management, analytics for auditing, and more. 

Are you ready to leverage the power of senior living CRM tools? Click the button below to see how our targeted solutions can help you improve your occupancy rates and enjoy success in the future.