The Role of Aftercare in Your Funeral Home Business Plan
Chad Zollinger • April 10, 2019
Good aftercare services do exist — but great aftercare services are harder to come by.
The Key Features of Effective Aftercare
Aftercare services are any services that assist in the ongoing recovery of those suffering from emotional, psychological, or physical trauma.
Funeral aftercare is a specific type of aftercare that aids those suffering from the grief of losing loved ones. Every funeral home that aspires to be successful should implement some kind of funeral aftercare program.
Many funeral homes attempt to patch together a “homemade aftercare program,” which usually involves just a few aftercare ideas intended to help keep in touch with families.
But why are professional and effective funeral aftercare programs so important?
Effective aftercare services do four important things:
- Provide healing, support, and resources to grieving families.
- Alleviate, not add to, the funeral home’s day-to-day responsibilities.
- Bridge the relationship gap between funeral homes and their families long after funeral services are given.
- Establish an effective, unobtrusive, and meaningful communication method.
Let’s explore each of these vital characteristics of effective aftercare programs:
The problem with most aftercare ideas is that funeral homes carry the burden of aftercare responsibilities (building, implementing, and maintaining the aftercare program).
Funeral professionals generally do not have a large abundance of spare time — that’s why a good aftercare service should alleviate time while increasing leads for funeral homes.
Some companies have sprung up to plug the hole that exists in aftercare services, but they actually end up piling too many responsibilities upon the shoulders of the funeral director.
As the funeral director, it is your job to implement compassionate aftercare into your business plan effectively.
So how do you do that?
By the end of this article, you’ll know exactly what you need to do in order to create a manageable, efficient, and effective aftercare program.
Healing and Grief Support
Basic human decency demands that we help others who are in pain. As funeral directors, you see people who are grieving every day. You’ve likely been in many situations that allow you to provide support and consolation.
As the funeral director, your responsibility is to provide a meaningful funeral service that consoles the family of the deceased.
But, as a funeral director, it is not necessarily your responsibility to aid and console families in the grieving process after the funeral is over — this is exactly the reason you should try to do it.
Every effort on the funeral home’s part to console and provide grief support will be seen as “going the extra mile.”
From the business standpoint, providing healing and grief support to customers is a no-brainer.
Recipients of your healing and grief support will show their gratitude by becoming brand champions, recommending your funeral home to friends and family, and leaving positive reviews online.
Over time, your funeral home will rank higher in Google, have many more positive review than your competition, and be the preferred funeral home for hundreds of grateful families in your area.
Alleviate the Burden of Time
While good aftercare ideas can improve an aftercare program, the program itself should be as automated as possible.
Your aftercare program must not add to the responsibilities you now have. Many funeral professionals can make the mistake of neglecting their immediate responsibilities and focusing on marketing or retention.
This neglect will results in negative customer experiences. So what does this mean for your aftercare program?
It means that you need to establish an aftercare foundation that generates leads, brand loyalty, and customer retention without sacrificing your time.
Whether that means automating your marketing processes, hiring a team of marketers, or hiring a third-party marketing agency, be careful not to sacrifice your time.
Bridge the Relationship Gap
The relationship between funeral homes and the families they serve is already quite strong.
However, there is a gap that exists — this gap resides in between two points of contact: the funeral service and the follow up.
Though the follow up may seem like the natural next step, too many funeral homes make the mistake of jumping from “I’m sorry for your loss” to “could you leave us a review?”
Instead, there is an opportunity to bridge that gap by becoming an integral part of the customer’s grieving process. Your funeral home is uniquely positioned to provide grief support resources and other aftercare services.
Establish an Effective Communication Method
Mailers have long been the standard form of aftercare communication for funeral homes. Some funeral homes have experimented with hiring a specialist whose job is to call past customers and check in.
However, digital communication solutions have remained largely untouched in the funeral aftercare industry. An effective aftercare program will utilize effective communication methods beyond simple mailers and phone calls.
The purpose of Domanicare was to create a innovative new solution to all four of these vital aftercare features. By creating Domanicare, The Domani Group has seen these issues, studied them, and resolved them.
What is Domanicare?
Domanicare is an innovative new aftercare service that was created specifically to help funeral professionals establish a strong, emotional connection to the families they serve. But, it was also created to relieve the burden of time from funeral professionals.
Domanicare takes as much of the aftercare responsibility as possible. Funeral home owners are given control of the messaging in our text communication with families, while still allowing Domanicare’s Live Text Responders to do the individual texting — this gives funeral homes the overall control while placing the burden of the work on Domanicare’s shoulders.
Each funeral home is provided with a detailed monthly report that shows the text messages sent and responses to those messages from their customers — this way, funeral professionals can gain insight into how well Domanicare is working.
Domanicare includes features that strengthen relationships and provide healing for grieving families:
- Domani for Grief and Loss
- Live Text Responders
- Review Generation
Domani for Grief and Loss is a grief support platform that allows grieving families to access dozens of free online support courses. Individuals and families can also sign up for 24/7 message-based grief coaching and take advantage of one free face-to-face therapy session.
Domani for Grief also connects struggling individuals to other grieving individuals through online support groups.
As Domanicare offers services and resources like Domani for Grief, brand champions are incredibly easy to spot. These satisfied funeral home customers are more than willing to provide quality reviews and we are happy to provide them the pathway to leave positive reviews.
In this way, Domanicare covers the three vital areas of aftercare service: provides emotional support for customers, alleviates the burden of time for the funeral home, and boosts brand loyalty through relationship building.
Domanicare was never supposed to be the end of all aftercare services.
Instead, it was created to become the firm foundation of your aftercare program. Whether or not it’s with Domanicare, your funeral home’s aftercare program needs to have a strong foundation before anything else.
Creating an Effective Aftercare Program
Your job is to combine the fundamentals of effective aftercare into one program. To do that, you’ll need to choose aftercare methods that fulfill the needs of an effective aftercare program.
Remember, any effective aftercare program will fulfill the four following needs:
- Provide Grief Support
- Alleviate Time
- Relationship Building
- Effective Communication
The hope with these aftercare methods is that you can patch together an aftercare program that will fulfill all four needs of an effective aftercare program.
Once you’ve chosen good aftercare ideas for your program, it’s time to assign the responsibilities.
Job responsibility can be assigned to yourself, your employees, or hired out to a third-party company. Each one of these parties will have different pros and cons associated with them.
For example, hiring new employees to handle your aftercare services gives you complete control of your aftercare program. However, it also falls to you to pay, train, and manage those employees.
Once you’ve assigned the responsibilities, you’re well on your way to creating an efficient funeral aftercare program at your funeral home.
Obviously, there are advanced marketing techniques that you need to learn in order to turn aftercare participants into returning/referring customers. But, your effort to provide support to the grieving families you serve will attract more customers, positive reviews, and online reputation success.
As long as your aftercare program in some way alleviates the pain of losing a loved one, it will be successful.
Exactly how successful it is though is up to you.
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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.
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