Transforming services in the

new world of aged care

Australia is changing its approach to aged care and community services, shifting power and choice away from government and providers into the hands of people who actually use these services.

This shift to consumer directed care, combined with an ageing population and the proliferation of transformational digital technology, forms the trio of factors forcing aged care providers to re-think the way they work. Continuing to operate on the old model will see providers losing appeal and relevance in the communities they serve.

Similar consumer directed care reforms in the United Kingdom saw a significant shift of services from the not-for-profit sector to commercial providers, and established providers in New Zealand reported losing existing clients to other providers and new entrants.

So established care providers must adapt quickly to appeal to end users, and to compete effectively with new and innovative entrants. It’s critical for providers to build their brands and strengthen loyalty by understanding the people they serve, providing exactly what they want, and maintaining excellent relationships.

In short, aged care providers must become acutely customer focussed.

The Productivity Commission forecasts that the number of people accessing aged care services in Australia will jump from 1 million to 3.5 million by 2040.

But there’s more at play than just a larger ageing population; the profile of aged care customers is evolving too. Baby boomers are reaching retirement age and bringing their highly consumerist values and demands into the aged care space. Providers are going to need to rise to new levels of choice, convenience and service excellence or they will lose out to competitors.

So this ageing population presents a great opportunity for care providers, but it comes in the context of a highly competitive marketplace where they must appeal directly to all their end consumers, not just to a handful of government decision-makers.

The Australian Government’s shift towards consumer directed care aims to empower individuals to make their own decisions about their needs and the providers that serve them.

The changes are designed to make life better for older Australians, giving them more control and easier access to the services they want.

On the provider side, this translates unmistakeably into the need to become customer focussed, and this isn’t just a side effect: the new framework is deliberately designed to use free-market forces to reshape the way that aged care is provided by creating competition, fostering innovation and driving down cost.

Ageing population

Consumer directed care: going from ‘patient’ to ‘person’

Consumers are using technology, and this includes Australia’s ageing population. And across all industries, service providers who embrace technology and use it to operate and engage in new ways are thriving, forcing those who are slow on the uptake out of the market.

This will be no different in the aged care sector, where new entrants are already using technology to outperform established providers, offering things like efficient remote digital services and online access to budgets and care portfolios.

Providers need to take advantage of technologies that help them to operate more efficiently and improve customer experience.

There are key advantages to digitising areas like finance, scheduling, safety and security, patient management, communication and marketing. These areas can be integrated to utilise the wealth of information available to build actionable intelligence, drive customer focus and respond quickly to changes in the market.

Consumer directed care: going from ‘patient’ to ‘person’ Digital disruption

A customer-centric worldview presents some complexities for aged care providers.

For example, for residential aged care providers the future resident is the primary customer, but the purchaser is often not the resident themselves but the resident’s children. Another influencer might be the resident’s GP.

These providers need to understand the network of stakeholders and engage with each of them in a way that appeals specifically, but joins up overall to create the desired outcome.

Who are our customers?

In this new world of aged care, we must recognise the customer/supplier relationship in which customers are choosing and exchanging money for specific services. The language associated with a free market might be new to many providers in the not-for-profit sector, but the concepts of customers, segments, sales, marketing, customer satisfaction and profitability need to be embraced so providers can position themselves to succeed.

It’s no longer enough to be a great provider of services. In a competitive marketplace others will be doing the same. So services must be appropriately matched to a target group of prospective customers who need to be actively motivated to purchase them.

Especially at the highest levels of leadership, there needs to be a significant shift in thinking from the inward-facing approach of asset management and operations, towards a customer-focussed orientation aiming for long-term relationships and brand loyalty.

Consumerisation of aged care

Succeeding in a competitive market means attracting and acquiring new customers and then delivering valuable services to ensure they remain loyal…and doing so in a way that is operationally efficient and profitable.

Providers that deliver services efficiently and profitably will be best placed to strengthen their relationships with their customers.

If a provider has too many customers or lacks specific resources to deliver agreed services, this will have a negative impact on customers and the provider’s reputation.

So providers need to understand what customers need, in order to match the services required with their own strengths, resources and strategic objectives.

Acquisition, service and retentionThe customer’s journey

Decisions often take time – especially the complex and often emotional decisions associated with aged care. Each customer and stakeholder will be learning, experiencing and making decisions on their own journey of selecting, purchasing and consuming a service.

All stakeholders will be gathering information from multiple sources including government, media, competitors and other health care providers, as well as friends and family networks.

In this noisy and competitive marketplace, engagement needs to be clear, focussed and designed to make each stakeholder feel confident in their decision.

In circumstances where decisions must be made quickly by customers - for example if urgent residential aged care is needed - clear and focused engagement is all the more important.

The aged care customer’s experience of a provider can begin long before the provider knows the customer even exists. A provider’s brand is its reputation. This reputation is commonly spread through personal or social networks or paid marketing, and it plays a critical role in decision-making.

Providers need to build and manage their reputations in the real and digital worlds, proactively engaging with prospective customers well in advance of a decision to purchase, and ensuring they deliver the kind of experience that turns existing customers into advocates for the brand rather than detractors.

To paraphrase Steve Jobs of Apple: “you’ve got to start with the customer experience and work back… not the other way around.”

In a consumer-centric world, a customer’s experience of an organisation is shaped by every single interaction they and their influencers have with it. To enable every person associated with the organisation to help create a consistently good experience, aged care providers need to help employees understand each customer: their medical and personal profile, the context of their situation and their interaction history.

But for many organisations, customer information tends to fragment over time unless a continuous effort is made to manage it as a cohesive whole.

This is the role of a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) solution. CRM technology is used to keep information about customers together in single place, so that everyone in an organisation has a consolidated, complete and accurate view of each customer and a better understanding of their needs, at every interaction.

Single view of the customer

Giving employees a view of customer profiles and relationships will help them to deliver better customer experiences.

It helps in obvious ways like eliminating the need for customers to repeat themselves, and also enables more meaningful engagement by providing important context for every interaction, helping employees to determine the best next step, and directing workflows accordingly.

It’s important to plan the quantity and quality of information that will reside in a CRM solution to support various interactions throughout the customer journey. Too little won’t give employees enough to go on, while too much will be overwhelming and ultimately meaningless.

Enabling employees to be customer-focussed

The customer-centric organisation

Trends in the aged care industry suggest an increasing reliance on specialist subcontractor firms, labour hire organisations and independent specialist practitioners.

These individuals form part of the customer’s experience of the organisation as a whole. Often the customer won’t know or care that some of their carers work for different organisations, and they’ll expect the same standards of service and care regardless.

It’s critical to integrate external parties into the customer experience strategy, and provide them with the same access to the CRM system as full-time employees.

And not just employees

Digital channels are increasingly supporting human interactions. Web portals, social media, email and electronic records are a daily experience for customers and providers alike. But huge value is unlocked when the digital experience is integrated with the human experience.

Examples include applications that digitise scheduling, and family/carer and patient portals that allow viewing and management of things like current and historical services, appointments, carers and billing.

Previously, much of the benefit of CRM has been delivered through desktop PCs. This has been useful for office-based employees but where there is a large mobile workforce – for example in home-based aged care – utility has been limited. But today’s mobile devices are enabling employees to effortlessly access and maintain the single source of customer information in the CRM. As well as being able to provide consistently great customer experience no matter where they are, they can also instantly update customer information as they carry out their duties.

Integrated digital service delivery Mobile

Customer relationships in sustainable organisations

Competition in aged care will drive down prices as providers innovate to deliver valuable services in the most cost efficient ways. Whilst profit is not the primary focus of public sector organisations, they still need to successfully compete, win customers and deliver services without relying on funding from the ever-tightening government purse.

Some providers might selectively offer the most profitable services and turn away overly challenging or non-profitable cases. Others might cherry-pick services that are more profitable and use these to cross-subsidise less profitable services.

CRM provides the means to understand which customers are using which services, and whether these are being delivered profitably. This helps to clarify which services to provide as well as which customers to focus on.

With aged care there is often a finite capacity to deliver services to customers. Providers need to carefully balance the quantity and types of customer they serve, to operate in a financially viable way. This is true for both residential and in-home care.

Having too many customers leads to poor levels of service and the unpleasant need to turn customers away – both of which can be a problem for a provider’s reputation. Conversely, having too few customers jeopardises financial sustainability.

Different types of customers need different kinds and amounts of resource. For example, a dementia patient will require far more resources and budget than a low-care patient. It is therefore important to profile existing and future customers, and maintain an ideal mix of customer types.

To support a good balance of customer quantity and type, providers can use CRM to profile customers throughout their entire journey. CRM can track customers from early in the awareness and decision-making process, through to purchase and ongoing service provision. It can highlight changes in circumstance and care requirements and the impact these will have on all resources.

The right services for the right customers

The right number and type of customers

CRM helps in a number of ways:

1. More efficient customer acquisition: CRM can be designed to help aged care providers engage with prospective customers in parallel with their individual buying journeys. Using data from their CRM system, providers can create fact-based marketing plans to approach the right customers at the right time with the right information.

2. Effective delivery of services: Delivering high-quality service is critical to success in the competitive aged care market. At best, poor service delivery leads to wasted time and money as things need to be re-done. At worst, it can cause customers to leave in favour of competitors.

Evidence across many industries has shown that it’s much more cost effective to retain a customer than it is to acquire a new one. While this may not historically have been a problem in the aged-care sector, increasing competition is likely to mean that more customers respond to poor service by simply changing to another provider.

CRM provides valuable workflow management processes that ensure services are delivered in the way they were intended. It can provide alerts and escalations when there are signs of problems.

3. Automation and efficiency: In many cases, even customer-facing care providers spend significant amounts of time and energy on administration. While the outcomes are necessary, much of the manual effort can be reduced or eliminated entirely through automation with a CRM solution. This slashes lost productivity and also increases the quality of services by making processes more repeatable and less prone to human error.

4. Customer-centred innovation: In large organisations with many stakeholders and complex service networks, it can be difficult to keep track of what’s happening in the market and predict future customer needs.

CRM provides a valuable source of market intelligence as well as operational feedback, enabling aged care providers to understand how customers respond to various service offerings and the impact they have on resources.

CRM consultants to aged care providers

Loaded Technologies has been designing, implementing and supporting CRM solutions for ten years. We help our clients in both the commercial and not-for-profit sectors realise their customer relationship management strategies.

SugarCRM enables organisations to create extraordinary customer relationships with the most innovative, flexible and affordable CRM solution in the market. Sugar enables highly personalized interactions that drive customer excellence and loyalty throughout the entire customer lifecycle.

Find out how Loaded Technologies and SugarCRM can help you unlock your customers’ potential, and deepen your customer engagement.

Call us on 1300 562 333 or +61 2 8282 2900 or visit www.loadedtech.com.au

Level 5, Suite 4, 100 Walker Street North Sydney, NSW 2060, Australia

Pty Ltd ACN 107 478 535

Customer Relationship Management is the cornerstone of the consumer-centric service organisation. It’s critical that Australian aged care providers shift to a customer-focussed and sustainable operating model. Providers should be considering CRM strategies and technology that will support this transition and enable their ongoing journey through the new competitive landscape.

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