Kenyon Connects

It is with great pleasure that we present a colleague of mine, Barbara Akst with Training Unlimited. Barb’s unique insight into the process and her ability to educate and train agency personnel has proven to be a gold standard tool for success for the agencies that use her services. I hope you enjoy her article as much as I did.

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Personality Counts

Ever thought that a home care competitor was successful because of the personality of the person answering the phone? Well, you are right. Mystery shopping results in home health care show that when a person answers the phone with a warm, caring voice and a positive attitude, the caller is more likely to trust you and want to do business with you. The results also show that the most successful home care agencies are sensitive to the callers personality and modify the questions they ask in order to make the caller comfortable talking about a sensitive situation.

Personality counts, especially in private duty home care. It’s not always natural, and even for those that it is, conscious effort is required to get the most out of personal interactions. It’s not just your personality that matters, but the personalities of the potential clients who call you. Your caller will not modify their personality style so you must!

In home care, we must be especially sensitive to our customer’s personality styles and modify our own to grow our business. In this article you will learn about personality styles, how to identify your own style, and how to modify it to meet your customer’s needs.

First let’s look different types of personality styles. There are four basic behavioral styles based on two dimensions: openness and directness. No style is better than another – they are just different. Every style has advantages, and every style has drawbacks. Understanding how the types of behaviors each individual displays affects their decision making process is critical to growing your business.

Openness

Individuals show their emotions in very different ways. Some folks will tell you all of their problems the first time they meet you, while others don’t show their emotions at all. Most fall somewhere in-between.

OPEN BEHAVIORS: An individual who is considered ‘open’ shares his thoughts and feeling willingly and typically has animated facial expressions and open physical gestures. Such individuals are very people-oriented develop relationships quickly, and often make decisions based on emotion.

CLOSED BEHAVIORS: Other individuals are less likely to show their emotions. They display ‘closed’ behaviors. They often have ‘poker faces,’ and are physically more rigid and much less expressive. They are very task oriented and will make decisions based on facts.
Directness

In addition to showing emotions in different ways, individuals also show different amounts of control over people and situations. Understanding the amount of control your customer needs in order to feel comfortable is another key factor in gaining their confidence and earning their business.

DIRECT BEHAVIORS: Individuals who are very direct are often viewed as ‘forceful’ and referred to as having ‘Type A’ personalities. They confront conflict, change, and decision-making head on.

INDIRECT BEHAVIORS: Individuals who are indirect approach risk, decision making, and change much more cautiously. They are diplomatic, patient, and cooperative, and avoid conflict whenever possible. It can be difficult for them to make decisions.

Use the diagram below as a guide to understanding the different personality styles.

Socializers are open and direct. They are spontaneous, enthusiastic, persuasive, and think quickly on their feet. They are very creative.

Directors are self-contained and always in control. They like to get things done effectively and efficiently. They are good leaders and have the ability to make decisions.

Thinkers are indirect and self-contained. They are concerned with the analytical process, are persistent, and systematically solve problems. They are very organized.

Relaters are very open and indirect. They are warm, friendly, and personable. Their greatest strength is their ability to relate to, care for, and love others.

NOW – think about your personality. Where do you fit into the continuum? What about your customers? Are their personality styles different from yours? Will you be able to relate to them?

The answer is YES BUT….. You must modify your behaviors to accommodate your customers. To be successful, you must know your behavior style and be able to identify your customers’ styles. YOU must then adjust your style to meet their needs. It is not always easy, but anyone can do it. Here’s how.

Increase your Openness

If your caller wants to talk, you must ask open ended questions and allow them to share their story. You must be willing to digress from your agenda.

Increase your Self-Containment

If your calls do not stay focused on the callers needs, you may need a script to guide you. Your script should include focused, but include open-ended questions such as: “When do you think it would be best for a caregiver to be at your loved ones home?’

Increase your Directness

If you do not set up a home assessment on every private duty inquiry call, you must be more direct and ask the caller for their business with a question such as: “When would be a good time for us to come to your home for a home assessment?”

Decrease your Directness

If the caller requests information about the home care services you provide – do you give them a list? If so, you need to decrease your directness and ask your caller open-ended questions so you can learn more about their situation and share only the services you offer that are important to helping them.

Understanding how to modify your personality style is the first step to actually doing it! Now it is time to practice modifying your style and approaching your potential customer with renewed sensitivity to their individual needs. By modifying your style, you will be more successful.

For more information on how to increase your business, visit www.trainingunlimitedva.com.

By: Barbara Akst
CEO/President
Training Unlimited of VA, LLC
www.TrainingUnlimitedVA.com
Barbara@TrainingUnlimitedVA.com
703-969-0104

Now that you have determined the business structure of your home care agency and identified the lines of business to be provided, systematizing internal operations is your next step in building value for your home care agency.  A solid infrastructure reduces expenses, creates efficiencies, and allows you to deliver exceptional care to your clients.

One of the more important internal operations elements is the software your home care agency selects to run the core functions of the business. Since this is a costly item, software selection is critical to the current and future value of the agency. A robust and powerful software should first of all have at its core a solid scheduling component that is linked to the client and the caregiver profiles, thus making matching caregiver to client faster and easier. Additionally, the software should accommodate a telephony component so that task or duty sheets and payroll and billing can be accomplished in one activity. The capacity, ease of use and productiveness of the software provides additional value to the company.

The software expenditure, however, can be nullified as a value to your home care agency if it is not used the way it is designed. Too often we go into agencies to do a due diligence for sale or purchase and find they have an excellent software product, but staff is doing “workarounds” because they want data or information in a different format. Workarounds are costly because they siphon off staff time that could be more appropriately used in other functions that are critical to the agency’s financial health. With the elimination of workarounds, clerical positions may be eliminated with considerable cost savings to the agency. Therefore, I highly recommend that you do not allow workarounds to exist. If a report is needed or data delivered in a different manner, discuss this with your software vendor.

Another basic infrastructure element is the makeup of your management team. The people you have in decision-making positions can either add or detract from the value of your home care agency. When a potential buyer looks at the company, they look at the human assets as well. The assessment of the human assets includes determining who has the decision-making responsibilities and how free the different positions are to make the decisions related to their areas of responsibility without owner oversight. Frequently, we find that the owner has retained the majority of the critical decision making. This is perceived as a deficit in value because when the owner sells, there is no one left in the agency with experience in making those decisions. Invest in your managers and give them decision-making authority over their areas of responsibility. Ultimately, this makes your home care agency more valuable.

Other important elements of your infrastructure are the payroll, billing and scheduling systems. If you have selected software with point-of-care capabilities and telephony, most of this will be accomplished electronically. This does not mean, however, that there does not need to be systems that validate the data. Data entered incorrectly or set up wrong, can create both billing and payroll errors. Most software systems have validation systems built into them. An effective software system includes validation systems.

To support your billing system, you’ll want a collection process. An ideal goal for accounts receivable will be no more than 45 days. To deliver on your accounts’ receivable metric – and keep your cash flow strong – you want an aggressive collections system with well trained billers and collection staff. An agency with extended accounts receivable is considered of less value due to missing basic fundamentals.

Finally, your intake process that receives requests for services and converts them to actual cases can make or break your agency. As a result, this particular position and the success of the person(s) filling this role are critical to your home care agency success and its value. Besides carefully selecting the intake individual, it will be important to provide ongoing continuing education on customer service, agency services and successful outcomes that the intake staff can use when selling the services of the agency to prospective customers. With a successful intake department and a system of continuing staff education, the value of your home care agency goes up.

Developing a solid infrastructure can be daunting and seem overwhelming, particularly when you are trying to manage all the day-to-day events that impact an agency. If you are struggling with development of your infrastructure for either your Medicare or your private duty agency and are not sure where to begin, contact us for a free 30-minute consultation. We’re always happy to lend a hand.