Recruitment and Retention (and a well flagged sales pitch)
Recruitment in the social care sector is more challenging today than it has ever been. Social Care has to compete on many fronts and the pipeline for new carers is not looking great. The recent headline about ploughing money into social care was warmly received until we read that only a small proportion would be going into social care, with the NHS taking the lions share. Professor Martin Green of Care England commented that the government treated social care “like the child they are irritated with” while the NHS was “the favoured child”
This is nothing new but the impact in the current climate is that the NHS are recruiting hard. Providers of social care find that they are unable to compete with the pay and benefits afforded by the NHS, or indeed Local Authorities who themselves increasingly provide social care services. (It is important to note that Local Authority care services cost the public purse significantly more than services from private providers. The prospect of social care being nationalised is not a financially attractive one).
If the pandemic has taught us anything it is that social care and the NHS are inextricably linked. Taking jobs from social care into the NHS adds more pressure on the NHS.
So, we have an increasing demand for care and a reduction in the supply of carers. Is this a blip or is it structural? There is no doubt that pushing carers into vaccinations is having a negative impact on staff retention. However, less than a year ago, social care providers based around the c4b office didn’t have enough work for their carers so I’m going to take the optimistic view that we need short term answers in this blog.
So, what can we do about it in the short term? How do we provide the level of care that our clients deserve over the coming weeks and months? Without a fresh supply of carers entering the industry, we are competing for a diminishing pool of carers. The hard fact is that you are in competition with every social care provider in your area. In reality, it’s even more competitive as social care pay is often lower than many unskilled jobs in your area. Luckily, good carers love what they do and pay is not always a factor.
My first recommendation seems obvious. Retain the carers that you already have. Pay the best rates and benefits in your area; provide opportunities for progression (a career lasts longer than a job); make the job enjoyable and promote, promote, promote (in a marketing sense). You need your enterprise to be a place where people want to work and are proud to tell other people about. Social Care staff are under-valued and under-paid…. but that’s another blog!
Less obvious are the practicalities of recruitment. Getting ahead of the competition requires something different.
For many of us, job sites are a permanent monthly subscription – check.
Careers page on the website – check.
Social media – check
Open days – ?
Referral incentives – ?
Local paper – ?
Consider the ‘customer journey’ for a carer looking for a job. Let’s assume they are new to the area, have no recommendations from friends and family but want to work locally. They search for care jobs on the internet, they ignore the ads and the job sites and they identify who operates in their area. They see 4 care homes and 3 domiciliary care agencies. They take a look. First site looks a bit rubbish, move on. Second site, no careers page and no Call to Action for job applications, move on. Third site, (and here is the sales pitch) …a chat box pops up and asks if they need assistance. They engage, answer a few questions and get passed through to the recruiter who agrees a date and time for an interview.
Since the beginning of this year, 37% of all engagements with our chat service are care staff looking for work. (52% are for admission enquiries).
Our service engages immediately with a website visitor, qualifies their details and experience and invites your recruitment team to join the chat. This is followed up with a branded email and chat transcript.
One of the unique functions of C4B Connect is that we invite your sales team to engage with the website visitor whilst they are chatting. If your sales team engage at that time, the success rate goes from just over 40% for a traditional web chat enquiry to 75% for a C4B Connect enquiry.
Looking to implement chat onto your website but not sure where to start? Launch a chat now to speak with a member of our team or contact us here.
C4B – We Power Chat that Drives Sales
The Ultimate Guide to Optimising your Online Chat
Why chat?
Chat is rapidly becoming the communication channel of choice for customers. Reports suggest there has been a 24% rise in chat usage in the past 3 years and that trend is set to continue. It is a marketing and sales channel that every business needs to be using. Read more about why your business needs chat here.
The basics of chat
Before optimising your chat, it is absolutely essential to get the basics right.
Firstly, you need to ensure you are using a chat product that works on your website, is easily integrated, and is useful for your team. A chat product that is difficult for your visitors and team to use won’t be used and may lead to a poor customer experience and potentially lost opportunities.
Secondly, your chat needs to be useful. Automation and bots are cheap and practical solutions, however, it is essential to ensure these are programmed to actually be helpful. An alternative and more impactful solution is using a chat solution that is managed externally or by a member of your team. Read more about the benefits of managed chat here.
Thirdly, if you are going to implement a chat product, it is important to understand why you are implementing the solution and what your desired outcome is. Chat can be a great tool for customer service and is a great channel for supporting enquires, but the real benefits of chat are its ability to support a customer throughout their buyer’s journey.
Optimising your chat
Once the basics of your chat are in place, the next step is optimising your chat. As every business is different, there are countless ways in which you can optimise your chat. However, based on our experience, these are the key areas we most commonly advise businesses to improve on:
A fast response time
Ensure your first response time is super quick! It is critical that your visitor knows their enquiry has been received and someone is helping them. Once the customer is engaged, speed becomes less important but promptness is still essential.
Delivering relevant responses
Whether your chat is automated, managed by your team, or managed externally, it is essential to deliver relevant responses to your visitors. Acknowledging information, personalisation, and correct answers are imperative to ensuring your visitor feels understood and assisted.
Directing enquiries to the right place
Your chat is likely to receive a wide variety of enquires nd it is important to ensure these are directed to the appropriate departments of your business. As chat is your first point of contact, it is essential your chat prioritises and passes enquires to the right people through the right channel.
Qualify your visitors to identify new leads.
One of the biggest mistakes businesses make with their chat is failing to properly qualify and follow up opportunities. Although chat is good for customer service, it is a brilliant sales tool and needs to be optimised to support sales. Visitor’s using your chat to enquire about your products and services are likely to be in ‘buying mode’. It is therefore critical that your chat qualifies and captures your visitor’s information, producing a qualified lead.
Tailor your chat to reflect your brand.
Having developed your brand, it is essential for you to extend its values to your chat. Ensure your logo, colours, and customer experience is applied to your chat. Failing to do so risks invalidating the trust you have carefully built with your customers, potentially alienating new leads and leading to churn. Ensuring brand consistency across communication channels is an essential part of your marketing strategy and needs to be carefully maintained.
Looking to implement chat onto your website but not sure where to start? Launch a chat now to speak with a member of our team or contact us here.
10 Point Guide for Optimising Chat in your Sales and Marketing Strategy
This article follows on from “why chat? The essential reasons why you need chat on your website”
We have described the power of making your website interactive and why that leads to increased sales. Just loading chat to your site is not enough and can damage your brand. Here is a 10 point guide to getting your chat service right.
1. Get your website noticed
Getting your website noticed has spawned it’s own an industry. This summary merely attempts to provide a brief overview.
Websites are like shopfronts; they need footfall to be effective. Every good web designer will know how to provide the metrics you need to know if your website has that footfall. The majority of our clients use Google Analytics which enables them to know how many visitors they are getting over a period of time. There are also tools that can analyse the web traffic of your competition so you can compare.
This footfall is generated in a number of ways.
Organic traffic is a term used to refer to visitors who have landed on your website as a result of unpaid searches. They tend to come through search engines such as Google and Bing and are not referred from another website. The algorithms used to find your site use various methods of ranking but generally if you have a good design, good content, relevant keywords and add fresh content regularly to your site, you will improve your relative rankings over time. This is not a quick fix.
Improving your ranking is known as Search Engine Optimisation (SEO). Your web designer can provide more detail as to how you rank now and what you can do to improve. If you’re hands on, there are tools available that provide a checklist of tasks to improve your score.
Registering with industry sites and business directories will assist SEO and may generate immediate results.
There is a lot more to SEO and if you need help, please contact the team at c4b.live
For immediate results, you may consider Pay-Per-Click advertising (PPC). Most common is Google Ads. By paying the PPC provider, you can put your company at the top of a search. If someone clicks on the link to your website, you will pay for that click. Again, it’s not straightforward and an industry has built up around creating PPC ads.
2. Answer every chat
Users love chat when they get an immediate response. However, many websites have chat that is unattended and unmonitored. Seeing a chat widget raises the prospects expectations and a poor experience can be a damaging first impression. Generally, no chat is better than bad chat.
3. For sales, steer clear of bots
Chat bots can work well when assisting an information search or routing visitors to other destinations. However, similar to IVR (Interactive Voice Response), it is important to keep it simple and avoid too many options. Website visitors have choice and it’s important to make the experience as positive as possible to keep them engaged with your chat service.
4. Privacy – be clear about what you’re doing with the data
Trust is key to selling your product on the internet. Add a privacy notice to explain what the visitor can expect their data is to be used for.
5. Establish the reason for the chat
It is important to establish early on whether you can help the website visitor. If you are focussed on sales, capturing a visitors details before finding out they are carrying out market research can be frustrating.
6. Gather contact details
A great enquiry is worthless to you if you lose contact and are unable to follow up.
7. Keep the conversation flowing
Ideally, a hot prospect should be handled whilst they are online and in buying mode. Taking a message and telling them that someone will get back to them at a later stage is not what they expect. If you can persuade them that they are talking to the right person, you can help them end their search then and there.
8. Know your subject and understand the customers needs
The best people to sell your product are your sales team. They have access to relevant and current information, and they know the details of the product and the company. If you use a managed chat service, ask if your sales team are able to join a chat when a hot prospect has been identified. Otherwise, ensure they know enough about your business to competently assist a prospect.
Almost all private enquiries will be part of an emotional, high involvement decision. Building trust and rapport is key. Asking open questions and listening to your customer is crucial. Help them to see that your product fits their needs.
9. Agree next steps
You may have had a great chat lasting 15 minutes with 40 interactions. However, Chat is unlikely to be the final step in the sales process. Ideally, you will have built enough trust and rapport to book a visit or a viewing to move your prospect along their buying journey.
10. Wrap-up the conversation and follow up immediately
Confirm your agreement from step 9 with a follow up e-mail. Most chat services will have the option of a chat transcript. Attach that to an email as a reminder of the chat and the agreements.
Summary
Web chat can be a great sales tool. Outsourcing the service is an efficient and inexpensive way of extending your sales team. Most Managed Chat Services use software designed for support purposes and are lacking in a few key areas. C4B Connect is designed for sales. Simply by clicking on a text or an email, your sales team are able to connect directly to a well-qualified online visitor. Wrap-up emails and transcripts are all automated. Put simply, we qualify; you sell; we wrap-up.
For more information, contact James Lloyd on 07710 311577; james@c4b.live or chat with us at c4b.live.
2022 is the year of the omnichannel
Your customers want to be able to contact you on their own terms: when where and how they wish.
Customers do not take a straight path to organisations anymore. Instead, they engage with companies on several channels whilst pausing and resuming their journey along the way.
Over the last 10 years, the way people communicate with business has transformed dramatically. We now have more ways to contact companies than we have ever had before. For example, in person visits (either in stores or in office), phone, email, live chat and social media.
With so many communication channels, both businesses and customers now find it a lot easier to communicate effectively. To ensure your business succeeds you must choose a few means of communication, and make sure the way you communicate with your customers is consistent at every point. This is where omnichannel customer engagement can transform your business.
So, what exactly is omnichannel customer engagement?
An omnichannel customer engagement strategy, in its simplest form, is a marketing strategy that focuses on creating a seamless transition between channels by managing them from a single and integrated platform. Essentially providing consistent interactions with customers regardless of the communication channel they use.
Why should you care about omnichannel experience?
Customer experience has fast become a top priority for businesses and 2022 will be no different.
Customer service research by Microsoft found that 95% of consumers say that customer service is a relevant factor in their choice of brand and their ongoing loyalty. Additionally, statistics have shown that an impressive number of 65% of customers say that good customer service is a decisive factor to buy something. Another 67% note that good service will encourage them to buy some products even if they didn’t plan on doing that (CSA).
Customers no longer base their loyalty on price or product. Instead, they stay loyal with companies due to the experience/customer service they receive. If you cannot keep up with their increasing demands, your customers will leave you.
So, how do companies meet these customer expectations?
Firstly, your business needs to adopt an omnichannel approach to your marketing, sales, and customer support to provide a connected and seamless customer experience. Adopting this approach can increase your company’s reach and boost overall customer engagement.
Current customer engagements drive the demand for omnichannel engagement. Businesses ensure omnichannel engagement is the standard, since many customers use mobile devices, smartphones, laptops, social media, chat, email, self-service, and websites to interact. In addition, they keep in mind that their customers expect their interactions to flow seamlessly from one channel to the next, for example when their customers change from browsing their website to live chat support.
However, when adopting an omnichannel engagement approach, you must recognise the importance of brand consistency and acknowledge each channel as part of an interconnected system. This requires all your business’s brand messaging and image to be highly consistent across platforms. For example, visual design, content, tone of voice, and functionality. Creating consistency among these elements on every channel improves the customer experience, your brand image as well as building trust with your consumers.
With C4B managed chat you can personalise the chat widget with your company logo, brand colours, and fonts. You have total control of the chat widget and chat window to ensure it looks great on your website and is consistent with your brand image. We will work with you to understand your companies’ requirements, providing a bespoke chat solution which meets the needs of our customer.
It is also important to note that consumers expect experiences to be personalised because they know companies gather data from multiple channels. By C4B connecting your team directly with the website visitor in real time, you can build a relationship with your new sales prospect and invite them to the next stage in the sales process.
Looking to implement chat onto your website but not sure where to start? Launch a chat now to speak with a member of our team or contact us here.
C4B – We Power Chat that Drives Sales
lead generation up 103% for porthaven
Objective
To maximise Porthaven’s online investment thereby increasing occupancy and improving online customer experience.
Background
Porthaven is a well-established and growing provider with 17 care homes located throughout England, providing residential, nursing and dementia care. Porthaven homes provide support for wide-ranging needs on a long or short-term basis. Their website plays an important part in providing information for prospective residents and their families looking for care.
As one of the top providers for care in the UK, Porthaven is always looking to adopt innovative solutions to improve their business.
Challenge
The company wanted to enhance the way they communicate with prospective residents and their families. They wanted to find a way to be more accessible to their prospects and at the same time provide outstanding, high quality, personalised support on their website in real-time.
Implementation
Chat 4 Business worked with Porthaven to understand their requirements and develop a solution customised to those requirements.
The solution included a tailored qualification process; customised paging to the Porthaven care team; and a follow up email sent at the close of every qualified sales lead.
The team at Chat 4 Business designed a chat widget, chat transcripts and follow up emails that are branded for each Porthaven care home, incorporating their logos and corporate colour scheme.
Results
Chat 4 Business’s fully managed sales chat provided a great solution for Porthaven. The chat offered the care homes a lead generation solution with an important empathetic, compassionate, and human touch. The follow up email ensures that every admission enquiry is immediately progressed.
Porthaven began using Chat 4 Business Connect back in April 2020 and in the first few hours received an enquiry that converted to an admission. Since then, the homes have received both resident and recruitment enquiries for all 17 of their care homes.
Chat 4 Business Connect is now an integral tool on the Porthaven website and adds another means of contact for prospective residents and their families who have need of immediate advice or assistance.