1.The Service…Start with Self-Reflection

Before seeking external feedback, begin by assessing your current service delivery. This requires vulnerability—being open to recognizing shortcomings and embracing opportunities for growth. Evaluate your processes, interactions, and touchpoints. Where could improvements be made? Honest reflection sets the stage for meaningful progress.

2.Gather Client Feedback

Once you’ve acknowledged areas for improvement, the next step is to collect insights directly from your customers. Customer satisfaction surveys are an excellent tool for this purpose. These can be distributed digitally (email), via text, or through traditional mail (paper).

Focus on these key areas:

• First Point of Contact: Often the lowest-rated section in surveys. Ask how the family’s initial interaction with your business felt and identify gaps.
• Arrangement Process: Gather feedback on the ease and efficiency of the arrangement process.  How did the arranger listen and provide the options?
• Facilities and Appearance: Evaluate impressions of your facilities, vehicles, and surroundings.  Have you provided a comfortable and quality environment for the customer.
• Service Experience: For those who utilized your service, dig deeper into their experience.

Further questions should include perceptions of the overall value, how customers discovered you, their willingness to leave online reviews, and suggestions for additional services (lead generation).

3.Act on Feedback Quickly…Real Time Data

In the movie, “The Godfather”, bad news was expected to be delivered promptly! Similarly, receiving real-time data allows you to address issues immediately rather than letting them go unchecked.  Johnson Consulting’s Performance Tracker System allows you to leverage the latest technology, providing a rapid response to customer concerns.

4.Analyze the Data

Collecting feedback is only valuable if you analyze it effectively. Use robust reporting platforms to:

• Filter data by time frame, location, or region.
• Identify trends and actionable insights.
• Generate reports in real time for prompt decision-making.

5.Deploy Actionable Improvements

With insights in hand, it’s time to implement changes. Review the data with your management team and assign tasks for execution. Ask:

• What improvements can we make?
• Who will be responsible for these changes?
• What is the timeline for implementation?

Accountability and clear timelines ensure that your efforts translate into measurable results.

6.Invest in CX Performance Improvement

Customer experience (CX) isn’t a one-time fix; it requires ongoing commitment. Consider hosting Johnson Consulting’s CX performance improvement workshops to bolster your service culture. John DiJulius’s book “The Customer Service Revolution” is an excellent resource for understanding how to create a customer-first approach.

7.Generate Leads Through Exceptional Service

Satisfied customers naturally become ambassadors for your business. By prioritizing CX and deploying actionable improvements, you create raving fans who are eager to share their experiences. Encourage them to leave online reviews and share testimonials. This not only generates leads but also strengthens your reputation.

Conclusion

Customer service excellence is a continuous cycle. Start with honest self-assessment, gather and act on client feedback, analyze data, and implement changes. Invest in your team’s growth through CX workshops, and reap the rewards of lead generation from loyal, satisfied customers. Then, begin the process again to ensure ongoing improvement.

By following these steps, you’ll not only elevate your service standards but also foster a culture of excellence that drives lasting success.

The post The Ultimate Guide to Elevating Customer Service Through The Feedback and Growth Cycle appeared first on Johnson Consulting Group.

From a productivity standpoint, implementing these conversations fosters a performance culture and improves the workplace environment.

By adeptly implementing staff evaluations, your team will have yet another tool to succeed. Here’s how to do it right. 

Make It Regular

Some businesses formally review their employees as often as every quarter, while others opt for yearly reviews. Regardless of the frequency you choose, the important thing is to establish a regular review period, allowing your team to know what to expect and when to prepare. 

That said, if your leadership team opts for annual reviews, then you should still conduct less formal check-ins on a monthly basis. This type of meeting will allow you to address smaller, more immediate concerns. Often known as monthly 1:1s, these check-ins help employees understand where they stand and address any issues before the more formal annual review. 

Standardize

When conducting annual reviews, you’ll want to follow the same format each year so team members know what to expect. Additionally, this will help you maintain a level of consistency and ensure you don’t miss any important steps. 

To accomplish this, funeral businesses should develop a written outline for the review format. On this outline, you should note each area in which you’re evaluating team members. For example, you’ll likely want to touch on communication, problem-solving, and punctuality in every team member’s review. 

We also recommend including self-assessment as part of the process. Have employees evaluate themselves prior to the review, then discuss the employee’s self-assessment. From there, the manager can provide additional comments and feedback.

Focus on the Positive

When conducting evaluations of team members, it’s essential to focus on the positive aspects of the review. According to research from Harvard, top-performing teams give each other about 5.6x more positive feedback than negative feedback. That means it’s best to provide employees with almost six positive comments for every piece of criticism.

Even if there are areas where the employee could improve, setting clear expectations and providing a supportive learning environment can turn the feedback into a positive experience rather than criticism.

When providing feedback, it’s important to focus on the work being performed rather than the person. Otherwise, criticism may feel like a personal attack. For example, rather than saying, You are unprofessional, you might consider saying, Your frequent tardiness to team meetings has hindered our ability to work together. 

Along with feedback, take some time to acknowledge and reward everything the employee does well. Employees who understand their strengths can lean into those and continue accomplishing exceptional work in their role.

Provide specific examples when possible. Rather than telling a team member that they consistently demonstrate empathy toward families, point out a particular instance in which they went above and beyond to make a family feel special. Rooting your feedback in specific actions helps your team understand how they can continue to excel where they are strong and troubleshoot areas in which they fall short. 

Receive Feedback

In the same way that you must evaluate your staff, you should also give them an opportunity to evaluate your performance. Being a good manager means ensuring that your team has the tools and resources they need to perform. Receiving feedback from your team will allow you to see how you stand to grow as a leader. 

Often, it’s helpful to request this feedback anonymously, as team members are often hesitant to critique their superiors.

Make an Action Plan

No employee evaluation is complete without a follow-up plan of action. After finishing an employee review, you’ll want to create goals and expectations for the following year.

These goals can take many forms. It may be an opportunity to work on individual challenges, or better align employees toward the goals of the company as a whole.

If an employee has performed exceptionally in their role, you can create a plan for them to take on additional responsibilities. Alternatively, if a team member’s performance has lagged, you can outline expectations they can strive for to improve performance. 

In either case, your leadership should offer the training, tools, and resources the employee needs to succeed. Listening and offering this sort of support is crucial to employee morale and retaining top talent. 

Document Everything

Every component of your staff evaluations should be documented. The evaluation itself, your staff’s feedback for leadership, and the goals you put in place should all be accessible to the relevant members of your team. 

This gives you something to refer to during the next annual review, and it will answer some key questions:

• Did the team member meet their goals?
• Were issues of the last review addressed?
• Did leadership provide the extra support that was promised? 

Annual reviews will provide the benchmarks of success for each of your team members. 

Reward Your Team

In many cases, positive annual reviews will come with a raise or bonus commensurate with the employee’s performance and the overall success of your funeral home. Another way to reward your team members is through introducing incentive compensation plans. By creating a system in which team members are rewarded with bonuses, you can motivate exceptional performance, while aligning them with the companies goals. 

Our team at Johnson Consulting Group, the nation’s leading death care consulting firm, can help your funeral business more effectively manage its people. Whether it’s constructing an incentive compensation plan or helping you implement the best practices of staff evaluation, our experienced team can help you refine the approach of your team. 

The post Annual Reviews: The Ultimate Staff Evaluation Checklist appeared first on Johnson Consulting Group.

Desert State Mortuary

Sun Belt Funerals and Cremation

 

As the results for Sun Belt Funerals and Cremation prove: Left to its own devices, a search engine will always make some dicey choices. It’s an algorithm, after all, not a person who understands that “Willie X of Abbeville, LA” is not the same as “Willie X of Port Arthur, TX.” Because Desert State Mortuary syndicated their notices with a distribution partner, they successfully owned the content from the first result down. Their name was front-and-center. Not only did the results prominently display their website, but the rest of the front-page results were also accurate and branded to their funeral home. Desert State Mortuary ultimately owned 87% of the click-through rate for the test search. That’s a lot of clicks, and a lot of people. And the funeral home that isolated their obituaries, Sun Belt Funerals and Cremation, left 70% of them behind.

Get Them In the Door

Obits are branding for your funeral home. The more someone sees your funeral home name as they read notices, the more repetitive marketing they’re exposed to. This puts you top-of-mind when that obit reader needs end-of-life help.

But obits are also a vital link for your most important source of leads: in-person services. That’s because 85% of people are still far more likely to share news about a death via an online source than anywhere else (Legacy.com survey of end-of-life consumers).

The best marketing is traffic through your doors. Getting those visitors requires broad distribution and reach for your brand in your community. Obits are ideal for this role: people can’t attend services they don’t know about. The more they read your obits, the more likely they’ll come in to your facility and be exposed to your business and brand. We know in-person services will be coming back soon. Are you ready to reach all the people who want to attend?

And those pre-planners who make your budgeting so much easier to manage? Obits are key to their leads, too. Remember, the #1 prompt for funeral pre-planners is the death of someone they know (Source: 2019 Legacy.com pre-planner consumer survey).

Which path will your funeral home take?

 

 

Powerful, Simple, Cost-Effective: What’s Not to Like?

When someone searches online for one of your funerals, what will they find? With syndicated content, they’ll find you. Then they’ll walk through your doors and become the next family you meet.

“Your website is only one tool, and it isn’t even the most important one,” says Welton Hong,  CEO of funeral home marketing service provider Ring-Ring Marketing. “You need people to see your name, as often as possible, all over the place.”

Leads. Brand exposure. Revenue opportunities. Traffic and market insights. Syndicated obituaries deliver all these benefits, at no-cost and with no additional effort.

“The purpose of an obituary is to tell the community, ‘This person died, funeral services will be held at this day and time at this funeral home to remember them,’” says Buddy Phaneuf, president of Phaneuf Funeral Homes and Crematorium. “Your potential for future business are the people who walk through your doors. Why wouldn’t you want to share that information with as many people as possible?”

The question isn’t whether or not syndication works. The question is, are you syndicating? If not, why not?

 

This blog is contributed by Legacy.com

Learn more about Legacy and all the Johnson Consulting Group Strategic Partners now.

The post Unleash Your Obituaries appeared first on Johnson Consulting Group.

It is an honor to work in the funeral and cemetery profession. Providing professional and compassionate service to a family during one of the worst times of their lives is truly a higher calling. 

However, designing personal and memorable funeral experiences shouldn’t take a backseat to measuring customer satisfaction. Families that are satisfied with their funeral home experience are more likely to share their story with others and recommend your services to the community. This kind of organic advertising is the best way to sustain financial success.

Get Honest Feedback

So how does a funeral home go about measuring customer engagement and satisfaction? To start, you need to have something to measure. Funeral directors can collect meaningful data by simply asking clients for feedback on their overall experience with the funeral home. You can request customer input in person after the service or via online surveys that can be filled out on your website. You can also mail out survey forms to your families, but make sure you include a pre-paid return envelope.

What kind of survey questions draw out sincere responses and honest feedback? Here are some useful ideas and strategies that can help you get the right data inputs to help you measure your funeral home’s customer experience. 

First Impressions Count

As the saying goes, “You never get a second chance to make a first impression.” A family’s first contact with your funeral home, whether it’s on the phone or in person, is a crucial building block. Some questions that can help you analyze a customer’s initial thoughts might include:

• How was the family greeted? 
• Is the greeting consistently applied at all times? 
• How responsive was the staff?

Managing first impressions can provide meaningful data on how well your funeral home interacts with pre-need and/or at-need clients.

Arrangement Conversations

The arrangement meeting can make or break a family’s opinion of your funeral home. Funeral directors are trained to effectively manage the planning conversation, but there is always room for improvement when it comes to enhancing the experience for the bereaved family. 

Strong communication skills are vital to this process, for example, how attentive are you to the customer’s needs? Do you ask open-ended questions that allow the family to share stories about their loved one? How do you show that you are listening? Funeral arrangers must be able to listen well, show empathy, and recognize body language cues to drive the conversation on a deeper level.

Another element to consider is organization. Ask, is the arrangement conference well structured? Does the family understand all of the product and service options available? Clear communication of what your funeral home offers enables the family to make informed decisions based on their personal and financial preferences. Combining all of these elements into the arrangement meeting will have a positive impact on customer experience and provide valuable insight for enhancing the conversation.

Do Looks Matter?

The appearance of your funeral home definitely matters. Customers judge the presentation of your staff and facilities, and if they see something they don’t like it’s often the first thing they share with others regarding their experience. Unfortunately, bad news always spreads faster than good news, so funeral homes need to manage all aspects of their image accordingly. To prevent bad news, ask yourself these crucial questions:

• Is your funeral home clean and well-maintained?
• Are your funeral vehicles comfortable and in good working condition?
• Is your staff professional and accommodating?
• Are your facilities clean, organized and accessible?

Paying attention to the small details will keep your customers happy and improve your funeral home’s performance reviews. These metrics can be easily measured with survey questions or a simple feedback form.

Price vs. Value

A funeral is an expensive undertaking. Funeral directors should inform families about all the available options and discuss the costs and fees associated with each choice. Planning a funeral or memorial often causes emotional and financial stress, so it’s important to clearly explain the value of your funeral home’s services and expertise in relation to price

Once the arrangements are finalized and the pricing is set, the funeral home must ensure that everything goes smoothly. Exceeding expectations is the best way to build customer loyalty and satisfaction. It’s analyzed by looking at the performance and execution details before, during and after the service, and measuring customer perceptions of value received for money paid.

Customer Experience Tracking Tool

Measuring customer experience metrics is an established management strategy that can improve business operations and elevate your funeral home’s reputation. The Johnson Consulting Group’s  Performance Tracker™ customer survey and sales analysis tool helps funeral homes track performance metrics with user-friendly features and reports that provide accurate and timely measurements of customer satisfaction. Learn more about how Performance Tracker can help you grow your business.

The post Your Funeral Home Should Measure Customer Experience: Here’s Why appeared first on Johnson Consulting Group.