Many of us remember a time when all that was required to run our retirement industry business was a sharp pencil, some well-organized binders and a fax machine.
Now many of our companies have gone electric. The debate about going electric rages on, as it has since July 1965 when Bob Dylan first “plugged in“ to the chagrin of many and the delight of few. Many of us recall the bygone paper-based era as a happier time, when residences were managed on the floor and the numbers were crunched by someone else, somewhere else.
Today, we accept the need to convert the accounting side of our practices into an electronic format. It makes sense to use machines to do the work of machines. So why do we balk at the thought of using similar technology to enhance the ‘people’ side of our business?
Somehow the idea of taking our entire business electric remains frightening to many of us in the retirement industry. Dylan immediately followed his electric shocker with an acoustic set, but that was 1965, and a couple years later, there was no longer any need to placate. In the business world, the monumental shift in the way things are done happened with the dawn of the Internet age more than a decade ago.
So why are we in the retirement industry still working as if it’s the late 1990s? The reasons are many, including the raw cost of upgrading, an onsite lack of IT expertise and nonadaptable software. However the real struggle against the wholesale adoption of new technologies seems philosophical. A notion exists that we serve a traditional clientele, who wants to be served in a traditional way, with a handshake, elbow grease and a whole lot of get-up-and-go. True, yet it doesn’t negate the value of techno-intensification.
Yes, we are in the people business, and we can use advanced technology to enhance — not replace — the way we relate to our residents.
Converting all our day-to-day business practices is admittedly complicated. Luckily, somewhere along the road, some clever Silicon Valley mavens found time between their 2 o’clock deep tissue massage and 4 o’clock cocktails to come up with a revelation.
They called this technological breakthrough Customer Relationship Management (CRM), and it is more real than it sounds. For developers of CRM solutions, the selling points are clear: finding new customers is way more expensive than keeping existing ones; bad word-of-mouth can kill you; and with the right information at hand, unhappy customers can be made happy.
We have all learned these truths, at some time, either through stirring victories or shattering defeats. Those victories, more often than not, come when our enterprise is “firing on all cylinders.”
It may have happened like this. The marketing manager discovers a potential resident’s food preferences and relays that information to the food service supervisor, who ensures his steak is medium rare. When presenting that steak, he discovers the potential resident’s penchant for checkers, which is relayed to the recreation manager, who signs him up for an upcoming tournament. Meanwhile, the director of nursing has sifted through a series of faxes from a discharge planner, and has created a custom-tailored care plan, which is skillfully presented by the manager to the potential resident, who in their post-meal bliss, is most impressed and signs on the dotted line. Victory!
Yes, most of us in the retirement industry have a story like this. On the flip side, many of us also have at least one tale of a dropped call, a botched fax or over-cooked prime rib, and have felt the sting of watching a potential resident walk out the door and into the warm and better organized embrace of our competition.
How can technology be used to help manage this rapid relationship evolution? In their oft-studied text, e-Business 2.0, Dr. Ravi Kalakota and Marcia Robinson describe CRM as “an integrated sales, marketing, and service strategy that precludes lone showmanship and depends on co-ordinated enterprisewide applications.”
For all intents and purposes, CRM is more of a concept than an actual technology. It describes using several technologies in unison with a common aim: Total customer satisfaction.
Many of these technologies are fairly new to the retirement residence marketplace. Others, however, may already be in place. Fully realized, CRM means linking seemingly disparate technologies such as voice mail, websites and lead-tracking software with socalled enterprise applications, such as billing software and financial
reporting applications.
The end result, if it all clicks, means that data gathered about a specific resident, at every point of contact, at every stage of our relationship to them, is organized and stored on a common platform. It is sortable, relevant and accessible by anyone authorized to use that data.
It’s a simple concept that provides a real solution to many everyday situations. Potential benefits include:
• Information is no longer proprietary to a department, nor defined by a length of time. So, every time a manager gets canned — oops, I mean “moves on” — the data stays in the system and residents and potential residents need never “remind” a newbie about their individual wants and desires.
• No more binders! More often than not, binders mix information specific to one departmen with information that is applicable to all. Save for having monthly binder parties (actually less fun than they sound), there is really no way to ensure that all pertinent data is being shared.
• Data is disseminated throughout the enterprise. For residences that are part of a bigger company, this means that all of the little bits of info we use to make our individual residents happy can be accessed at a corporate level, say for large scale marketing and sales initiatives, whenever they might need it.
When implemented, CRM unites the knowledge held by staff, technology and at the corporate level. The relationship is reciprocal.
We at the residence level also stand to gain much from accessing data organized at the corporate level.
A rosy picture perhaps but skeptics abound. What about the cost? The lack of IT expertise? The generational divide?
All good questions, and depending on one’s perspective, the answers can fuel hesitation. Yes, large-scale IT implementations — including CRM — are costly. No, the retirement industry has never been known for cutting-edge technical innovation, let alone the technological skills of its frontline managers. Yes, there is generational skepticism when it comes to the electronic age.
Banks, utility companies and retail chains — once the hallmark of customer-orientation — have computerized their processes. In many cases, this has made interaction cumbersome and confusing to those with an aversion to technology. While often used as an argument against CRM implementation within the retirement industry, the comparisons are unfair and illogical.
For those companies, the choice to opt for techno-intensification was about satisfying target demographics. They’re chasing the money, which is their prerogative. Dollars to doughnuts, we are not chasing the same customers.
Admittedly, screaming directions into an automated voiceactivated message system only to end up in a queue, waiting to repeat it all to a customer service representative, can be a harrowing experience.
On the flip side, getting seven different insurance quotes simply by entering a phone number on a brokerage website can feel pretty special.
Both examples represent changes through new technology, and both are, at their core, profit-driven. Yet they may represent very different approaches to a common goal. Any business can increase profitability by cutting costs, as in the first example, or they can ensure profitability by attracting and retaining customers, as in the latter example.
In the end, those two choices are always dangling in front of us. For an upstart e-business, the choice is pretty clear. For those of us in the retirement industry, who often struggle to balance the cost of doing business with the need to satisfy customers, investing in technology may seem like just another expense.
However, with more and more competition entering the market, fixed expenses climbing and an entirely new generation of retirees on our doorstep, we must ask ourselves: Has any residence improved its ability to meet customer expectations by cutting costs?
When all is said and done, those retirement industry companies and residences now sitting on the fence will find that implementing technology to enhance customer satisfaction is the right choice. It’s the choice that lets us continue doing what we love to do, taking care of our residents and making them happy, going home at the end of the day knowing we may have done something good, and that tomorrow, we’ll have the chance to do it all over again.
About Mark Lugowski
