For families searching for the right senior living community, the first step is often a phone call. In fact, 75 percent of prospective residents and their families prefer to call rather than fill out an online form. Yet many senior living centers lack visibility into how these calls are generated, missing key opportunities to optimize marketing efforts and improve patient conversion.
That’s where tools like CallRail’s Call Tracking come in. It helps your team understand the impact of your advertising campaigns so you can make data-driven decisions about what makes your phones ring. Easy to set up and use, Call Tracking can deliver the missing insights your center needs to better engage prospective residents, enhance the service you provide them, and increase returns on your marketing investment.
Why your senior living center can benefit from Call Tracking
Senior care centers can benefit from marketing their services directly to the community they serve, but for budget-conscious care operators, where and how much to spend can be a tough question. When marketing spend needs to be balanced against profitability, every dollar you invest in outreach needs to count. Call Tracking helps senior care centers refine their marketing approach by delivering insights about which marketing channels are driving the families of prospective residents to reach out to your team.
With Call Tracking in place, you can see at a glance which ads and sources are leading to phone calls and which are not. You can make decisions faster and with more authority, tweak ad spending to better serve your goals, and leverage call recordings to convert more resident leads.
How Call Tracking helps serve prospective residents and their caregivers
Call Tracking helps your reception team connect more effectively with incoming callers by providing valuable insights about their needs. With features like whisper messages, your team can see exactly how a caller found your center — whether through an online search, a specific ad, or a referral. This detailed information helps your staff prioritize calls and address the caller’s needs more efficiently, saving time and improving multitasking in a busy reception or senior living office.
Call Tracking includes call recording, which can be used to provide better staff training. For example, transcripts from call recordings may show that your front desk employees regularly receive calls from prospects with questions about private insurance, but these calls often fizzle out because your staff aren’t equipped to answer them, given their lack of knowledge of the nuances and complexities of various providers. This would show you that investing in training your reception staff to give them a more advanced understanding of private insurance providers and policies may be beneficial to converting more leads.
In this way, Call Tracking helps increase over-the-phone appointments, which directly impacts your center's revenue targets. Families looking to find appropriate care for their loved ones will also feel far better when they receive helpful information over the phone and will retain a positive impression of your center as they narrow down their decision.
How Call Tracking works
Call Tracking matches incoming phone calls directly to online and offline marketing campaigns, taking the guesswork out of evaluating the success of marketing ads.
Call tracking software can even enable visitor-level tracking. With visitor-level tracking, each unique visitor is assigned a unique phone number, allowing you to see exactly where a potential resident or family member found your senior living community. This sophisticated form of call tracking allows you to see at a glance which marketing channels and keywords deliver high-quality leads over the phone. A simple JavaScript snippet installed on your website ensures a specific phone number is shown to every visitor, enabling the collection of data about that visitor, such as their referral source, the pages they visited while researching care options, and more.
If you prefer a simpler approach, you can get started quickly with static or source-level call tracking. Create a unique call tracking number for use in print brochures, community events, direct mail, or any other marketing efforts designed to reach families considering senior care options. This way, you know which marketing sources are driving leads to your business.
Your Call Tracking dashboard indicates the number of calls coming from each channel. This data-driven insight allows you to focus your marketing efforts on the most effective channels and maximize your occupancy rates and marketing return on investment.
How Call Tracking can help keep private information secure
The privacy of health information is of the utmost importance in a senior living environment. Many operators are weary of call tracking and recording due to the potential privacy implications. After all, tracking means the creation of more records, which opens up the potential for more risk in the event of a data breach.
Senior living centers can be complex environments to maintain HIPAA compliance and remain PHI secure. The unique security protocols may vary between the external healthcare providers you collaborate with. You may face challenges maintaining appropriate HIPAA security training for new staff when many other urgent priorities need to be addressed during onboarding. The need to keep health information secure, while still allowing autonomy for both your residents and their families can be complex.
For these reasons, CallRail’s Healthcare Plan has been specifically tailored to meet the unique needs of healthcare providers by allowing them to take advantage of all the benefits of call tracking without taking on additional risk. For example, our Healthcare Plan can automatically redact sensitive patient-protected health information from call transcripts, enforce obligatory log-outs to prevent PHI from becoming public, provide full audit trail logging, and even feature unique logins and credentials for every user, which helps eliminate the potential for PHI to be accidentally exposed to employees who don’t need access to that information.
Call analytics
Once your facility’s marketing campaigns are backed by Call Tracking, the system automatically collects data as phone calls come in. When your team examines the call data gathered, or reviews reports put together by your marketers, you will have access to several key metrics:
Number of first-time callers
This will allow you to immediately evaluate if a campaign is driving new business opportunities for your center.
Visitor-level tracking
When using dynamic number insertion, keyword-level tracking can help you understand the primary needs of your prospective residents and their families, which can inform your future advertising strategy.
Landing pages
If your center has multiple landing pages advertising various services, Call Tracking will tell you which ones resonate most with website visitors.
Visitor timeline
Call Tracking can show how a prospect arrived at your website, which website pages they viewed before a phone call, and what actions they took on your website before, during, and after the call.
For example, a Google search for senior living returned one of your ads. A prospective resident viewed your community and amenities page and then called to ask what private insurance plans you accept.
In this situation, reviewing the visitor timeline shows that adding private insurance information to the website may be valuable. This will help patients determine if you accept their insurance, so they donʼt need to call and ask. This frees staff to devote more time to caring for your existing resident community.
Lead quality
Call Tracking allows you to mark calls as having a good lead/bad lead status based on the recorded call session. This can help you refine your advertisement sources by seeing which channels deliver the best leads, not just the highest number of calls.
Staff performance
When the reception area is busy, staff may struggle to provide high-quality service for prospective residents and their caregivers both over the phone and in person. If new callers canʼt get through to speak with someone, they may contact a competitor. Call Tracking features, like missed call reports, will allow you to view at a glance how many of your calls are going unanswered or are being sent to voicemail so you can make necessary changes to staff availability.
Call recording helps analyze callers' needs and the performance of reception staff. If you find many callers have the same question — say, about hours or directions — you can add a service menu or a quick welcome message to the phone system. This eases the demand on your reception staff, keeps callers engaged, reduces missed calls, and ultimately helps your staff provide better service to every current and prospective resident as well as their caregivers.
Make smarter decisions with Call Tracking
Call Tracking delivers the insights and information you need to make smarter decisions for your senior living center. It will help increase your appointments and recruit new residents. Stop wasting time and money on efforts that do not pay off. Instead, learn from quantifiable data and call recordings collected via call tracking, then replicate your successes to boost your return on marketing investment.
With actionable insights just a click away, why not get started with Call Tracking for your center today?
