Census and the economy

From the word on the street, if your census is strong consider yourself lucky.

It’s not enough that the economy and poor housing market is driving people to care for their own family members rather than seek care elsewhere. We’re also caring for a market sector that has other inherent issues, namely longevity. Not to be indelicate, but our residents are vulnerable. And, it seems, we lose them in groups.

My mother in law had excellent end of life care recently in a brand new assisted living community. She was the first person in the apartment, and the caregivers were incredibly kind and attentive. They only had a few residents – how few I don’t really know. What I do know is that on the day my mother-in-law died, two other residents also passed. I’m guessing that may have constituted as much as 25% of their occupancy, in one fell swoop.

In this situation, it’s the small details that count. For our family, the attention to detail was incredible. The staff not only were attentive and caring, they openly grieved with us at the loss of our mother. One of the employees even gave the eulogy at the memorial service – and it was absolutely pitch perfect.

Were we satisfied customer? Absolutely. We’ll tell everyone we can about the fabulous care provided to our family. We’ll tell you what a great company Leisure Care is, and how happy we are with the care provided by their team.

We’ve had other experiences with our family elders. We’ll tell you about those, too – and warn you away from some communities that didn’t meet our basic expectations, let alone exceed them.

Benjamin Pearce, author of the excellent book “Managing Senior Living Communities” and a member of our instructor team just developed a course on Customer Service for managers for CEU credit. Ben says, “Quality is simply the difference between what you expect and what you get. When you get more than you expect, you perceive that you’ve gotten something of value.”

If you feel you or your managers could use a little tuning up in this area, check out this course on our EasyCEU website.

With everything else working against us having a strong census today, customer service is one area we can control and improve.