You certainly know that a CRM will help your senior living organization align across stakeholders, improve census, strengthen communications, and marry operations & marketing data to inform go-forward decisions. Now, you have to find the right CRM that’s tailored for your unique requirements.
Your CRM will need to serve stakeholders on multiple levels. Between workflows, efficiencies, and performance measurement, this decision-making process will introduce an overwhelming amount of considerations. Choosing the right CRM solution takes time, but it’s time well spent when you consider the long-term benefits that include:
To narrow the field of options for your organization, we’ve compiled a list of considerations to help your selection team. In this post your organization will learn:
Your senior living CRM of choice will only be as valuable as the data that can be gleaned from it. Ease of use and everyday functionality cannot be understated. In that vein, the following elements are essential:
When choosing the right senior living CRM solution, customization is key. Being able to view data to create reports with the functionality and ability for granular customization will help every level of your organization stay productive and strategic. If your organization has a definitive answer to this question, it will be one step closer to choosing the best CRM that matches the growing and evolving needs of your senior living prospects and staff.
The CRM your organization decides on will have to make dashboards and reports user-friendly and accessible to all who need them. Between the C-suite, your senior living marketing & sales teams, and operations team, you will need to identify the reports and dashboards that spark healthy discussion and ultimately, action. Which reports are necessary to your success? Which ones are time consuming to mine for trends and insights? What dashboards are “must-haves” versus “nice to haves” for visualization and communication purposes?
These questions are necessary to have answered as your team narrows down its picklist of top senior living CRM’s. Manual data entry can be cumbersome and time-consuming, however are a necessary part of the reporting and communications process for senior living organizations with locations distributed across the U.S. This is an area where the right CRM will create added efficiencies. Does your senior living organization spend time with manual data entry in the following areas?
In addition to identifying the time-consuming pain points a senior living CRM can assist with, it’s also important to have a hierarchy of key team members on every level who will receive a license. This step will take the investment from theoretical into practical, and will hone the opportunity to streamline reports & dashboards on the following levels:
The organizational map your senior living enterprise drafts should outline the hierarchy of permissions & access on each user level. For example, Executives in your C-suite may be able to view the regional or individual user level of dashboards if they’re curious, but the user level wouldn’t need to log in to view the dashboards at the Executive level.
Each level within your organization will have different needs, and a senior living CRM that allows for customization and caters to each level with unique dashboard and reporting capabilities will help your organization make the most of the investment.
Beyond reporting and dashboard capabilities, a senior living CRM can seamlessly integrate data and software across your organization through what is known as an “Application Programming Interface” (API). Every major CRM has an API, but not every API will fit your business needs. For example, consider legacy systems that a new CRM will need to talk to. Do your legacy systems support custom integration? Are your legacy systems still actively supported?
Legacy system or not, be prepared to invest in custom integration when piecing together different operational platforms. When shopping for your next CRM, look for these API features and capabilities:
For questions regarding integration capability, mobilize your marketing technology team and reach out to your sales contact for your potential senior living CRM. They should be able to articulate the specific API integrations available, including any systems that are specific to the senior living industry that the CRM can be used to integrate with.
We covered many of the variables your organization will need crossed off its list to maximize the investment of a senior living CRM, but hope this post helped your selection team narrow down the elements that matter most. Back in January, we took a spotlight to CRM’s and the benefits that senior living marketing teams could expect by making the investment. Feel free to refer to that resource for background context.
Of course, if your team needs additional clarity beyond the elements addressed in this post, contact our team. We’ll dig into your specific questions to help you choose a senior living CRM that fits the unique needs of your organization. Here’s to your future streamlined sales and occupancy success!
