By: Avi Cohen, Director of Operations & Product Management
Community Liaisons are Your Lifeline So Be Sure Their Tools Empower Them
For many homecare agencies, their community liaison or (field) marketer serves as the primary source of patient referrals making them invaluable, yet costly assets. Therefore, it’s imperative to equip them with tools that help them work as efficiently as possible. While various factors contribute to this, I will focus on the significant role software plays in this and how it can be added to your agency’s toolkit to optimize your marketers performance.
We’ve seen this scenario unfold time and again: A homecare agency hires marketers, and immediately begins measuring their worth based on the volume of new leads they generate. This quickly turns into a game of quantity over quality for marketers which can ultimately be detrimental to agencies if other operational elements aren’t in place to facilitate such volume.
This leads to administrators to adopt two distinct strategies:
Aggressive Approach
The aggressive approach aims to secure as many leads as possible which shifts focus away from qualifying leads and lead sources. This approach relies on sheer volume, which can work if the right operational infrastructure is in place, but often, that’s not the case which leads to a severe bottleneck on the intake side that takes away focus from potential high quality leads.
Measured Approach
Alternatively, some recognize the limitation of aggressive tactics and opt for a more deliberate strategy. They task their marketers to be more meticulous when vetting leads and evaluate referral sources based on quality, rather than sheer quantity of leads they generate. While this approach offers benefits in the form of maintaining a high standard of leads, it can also stifle more explosive growth, as well as necessitate the hiring of additional marketers.
This difficult choice has plagued agency’s for years since neither approach is inherently superior to the other. After careful analysis, Bolt concluded that a third alternative was necessary, and in fact, possible, with the help of the right software tools. It’s important to note, however, that the option is not a fix-all for the two, but rather, it proposes a tool that enables marketers to pursue quantity without sacrificing quality too much.
Bolt.Healthcare Marketer App
Our goal was simple: optimize marketers efforts by enhancing efficiency and accountability in three key areas:
- Simplifying patient referrals: We built the application to make case entry simple and quick and the built in eligibility tool can turn an eligibility report into a case file with a tap of a button, eliminating the need of using easy to lose track of emails.
- Streamlining referral management: By enabling marketers to directly input key data points quickly and easily, we eliminated the need for manual collection by back-office teams. This, in turn, provides management with comprehensive statistical data on marketers and their respective referral sources, facilitating focused growth efforts.
- Centralized communication: Marketers gain access to their caseload, tracking progress and relevant case notes, giving them the ability to keep referral sources up-to-date with ease and communicate with back-office teams without hassle. Additionally, marketers are also given access to our dynamic files system to assist back-office teams for any signature forms they may need from patients
Results speak for themselves
Since the launch of the Marketer app, Bolt has garnered overwhelmingly positive feedback from customers who leverage its full capabilities. Users have reported a notable improvement in lead quality and streamlined communication, empowering marketers to nurture and enhance relationships with their top referral sources.
Additionally, it has enabled management to optimize marketing strategies by meticulously evaluating and eliminating underperforming referral sources. Collectively, these benefits have provided agencies with a competitive edge previously unavailable to them.
