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3 Signs Your Funeral Home Needs Appointment Setting
Peyton Walbeck • Jul 14, 2020
Funeral homes across the country are turning to appointment setting services to complement and boost their preneed efforts. Here are three signs that appointment setting would be perfect for your funeral home:
Here are three signs that appointment setting would be perfect for your funeral home:
1. Your preneed counselors calendars are frequently empty
Many funeral home employees only work on preneed efforts part-time while they attend to other at-need services in the funeral home. Other more pressing at-need services often push back preneed on the list of priorities. The result is an empty calendar, with appointments scattered here and there.
An appointment setting service
like Domani allows for calendars to be filled with a steady stream of appointments as dedicated planners make numerous calls and texts to families from multiple lead sources.
2. Calendars are full, but counselors spend the majority of their time setting appointments instead of meeting with families
What if your calendar is already full of quality appointments? This likely means your counselors are spending a fair amount of time working to schedule those appointments. Unfortunately, this means less time spent meeting with families.
Appointment setting services allow preneed counselors to prioritize their time and sell more preneed by meeting with more families.
3. You have a stash of untouched leads, or have only had time for one or two attempts at contact
More leads
are only helpful if somebody is consistently following up on each of those leads. Domani Planners use a state-of-the-art CRM
system to keep track of leads and nurture each family into a quality appointment. Leads often need consistent communication over a period of months before an appointment is scheduled. An appointment setting service ensures that leads are never wasted.
Funeral Home Articles
If there's one thing we've learned in 2020, it's that it's difficult to predict the future, and there will all be surprises that lie ahead. Businesses and individuals need to stay agile and adaptable to be ready for whatever life throws at them. 2020 has been a challenging year for the funeral profession and others as well. Still, we've seen that those funeral homes and funeral professionals who have focused on making their consumer experience as comforting and easy as possible are those that are winning. At Domani, we exist to help funeral homes help their families have a better experience. Through the power of text messaging, we follow up with families and give them the support and resources they need following a loss. That great experience then leads to a positive online review and helps others looking for a positive experience to find that funeral home. It's a virtuous cycle that helps grow a funeral home's at-need business. When it comes to preneed, the same principle holds. If funeral homes can provide the experience a family is looking for, that will be the funeral home that wins. During 2020, our preneed appointment setting team has found great success in scheduling remote appointments. Funeral homes that have been willing to adapt and find new ways to do business have grown even during difficult circumstances. We firmly believe that technology will help us as a funeral profession provide those better experiences for families, but simply using technology for technology's sake is not the answer. We need to leverage technology to help provide personal, engaging experiences with families. We shouldn't use technology as a crutch or an excuse. It's another way to help the ones we serve and provide them the support they need during a difficult time. As we approach the end of the year and look forward to 2020, take some time to think about how your funeral home is providing meaningful experiences for families and how/what you can do to improve that in the coming year. If you're interested in learning more about Domanicare or Domani Appoinment Setting, please schedule a demo by clicking the link below.
By far the most effective way to create a sense of loyalty to your funeral home is to perform an exceptional service for that family. However, there’s more that you can be doing to establish credibility with families. Here’s three easy steps on how to develop loyalty to your company and ensure your customers come back for your services when a loved one passes.
The vast majority of people in the US and Canada use smartphones. Almost everyone has a smartphone nowadays. Remember when the first “smartphone” came out in 1992 and cell phones like the BlackBerry and iPhone were considered luxuries when they were first created? Now it’s a common sight to see an iPhone. Most funeral homes and cemeteries haven’t even scratched the surface of text-based aftercare, but with 80% of the U.S. population owning a smartphone, and that number expected to rapidly grow.