This article is sponsored by Accushield. In this Voices interview, Senior Housing News sits down with Ben Fairless, Director of Inside Sales of Accushield, to learn how his experience in hospitality as a property manager has influenced his approach to senior living. Fairless also shares the next step of Accushield’s work with its Reputation Accelerator tool, and why operators need to clock 100 Google reviews per year.
Senior Housing News: What career and life experiences do you most draw from in your role today with Accushield?
Ben Fairless: Oddly enough, I think my time in hospitality really served me well. As you know, senior living operators are superheroes. They’re pretty much running a hospital, a hotel and a restaurant all at the same time. I think that culture of creating a valuable experience for someone and tailoring to their needs in a special way or, even better, anticipating those needs has served me well in putting myself in an operator’s shoes each and every day.
Now that operators have dealt with the more — hopefully — challenging portions of the pandemic, how are they using Accushield beyond health screening and vaccination protocols?
Fairless: We’re really just getting back to our roots here. Accushield has been around for almost 10 years now, and long before the pandemic, we were helping communities and facilities truly know who’s in their building from a visitor management perspective.
That doesn’t just mean visitors who are coming to see their loved ones. This is about your third-party health caregivers, your service providers, your agency staff. Knowing who people are, where they’re from, what they’re there to do and how long they’re there is extremely valuable. We help operators track that so that they can keep their vendors honest and ensure that they’re not overbilled each and every month.
Tell us about the Reputation Accelerator. What is it, who is using it and what are they using it for?
Fairless: Reputation Accelerator is Accushield’s answer to communities emerging from this incredibly difficult time, maybe the most difficult time the industry has ever seen, where reputation and public opinion really took a hit. Senior living has never been portrayed in the media in a positive light. Most of the time people are talking about shortcomings, things that have happened or regulations that are preventing people from administering the care that they’d truly like to.
What we would like to do is help these communities take control of that narrative and put their best foot forward for when someone is searching for care or a community to live in. That’s what Reputation Accelerator is. It not only improves your reputation on sites like Google to help get more prospective residents, it also enables you to improve your reputation on places where you’re looking for staff. Any place where reviews are captured — Glassdoor, Indeed — we can send your happy campers there and ensure that they are singing your praises, ultimately leading to more move-ins with better and more satisfied staff.
We can even use this for a survey component. This is something that can replace those semi-annual or annual paper-based surveys that your staff and resident families are completing. Not only can we eliminate the paper from that, we can give you considerable cost savings. Our industry has never really put a huge emphasis on online reputation. Word of mouth, involvement in the community: these are things that have driven move-ins up until now.
But today, prospects are baby boomers, and that means you’re talking to their adult children, who are millennials. They utilize these reviews for every aspect of their lives. I think it’s imperative that communities and facilities understand that that is where they are going to be finding their next resident to fill that next room. We want to ensure that the impression they make when that search is done is a good one and that that leads to more move-ins, not just to click through to go to the next community.
What does the future hold for the Reputation Accelerator feature and the operators that use it?
Fairless: In its current form, the Reputation Accelerator is helping take the top of the funnel off all these people who represent potential reviewers and make that as big as possible so that we’re giving communities exposure to gain as many possible reviews as they can. The benefit to that is they’re going to get more reviews. Moving forward though, we want to be an all-encompassing reputation management platform. We want to be the one-stop shop for you to garner more positive reviews and respond to reviews that are posted on sites across the web wherever you collect reviews and ratings.
Essentially, we want to give communities the power and reporting to act upon those in their day-to-day initiatives as far as their outbound marketing goes. That’s the ultimate goal here. If you’re interested in implementing this in your community, you should reach out to surveys@accushield.com or you can give me a call at 304-545-1277.
What are the most exciting outcomes that senior living operators are seeing right now with the Reputation Accelerator?
Fairless: The most exciting outcome is that of the 600-plus communities that are currently using this feature, on average, each is generating five positive reviews per month, either doubling or quadrupling what they were doing before.
The number of reviews in general is growing rapidly from when we implemented this in January of this year. We’ve increased the number of ratings received by six times, 49% of unique visitors to communities with Reputation Accelerator just last month left at least one rating and less than 1% of those ratings fell into the bad or poor category.
Most of these people are rating positively, with 52% of the Google reviews that were generated in the month of September alone can be attributed to Accushield. The number one way for communities to accelerate their reputation is Accushield, plain and simple. No other reputation management tool is producing this kind of volume at scale for each and every one of its users.
What’s next for the Reputation Accelerator?
Fairless: Next month, we’re releasing a new version that gives people more control over the analytics. We’re also going to allow them to rate on more than one aspect of the community. For example, if you’d like, in one snapshot, someone’s impression of the cleanliness of the community, the friendliness of your staff and their experience in the dining room, we can do all of that.
Finish this sentence: “The top strategy that senior housing operators should employ in 2022 to best prepare for 2023 is…”?
Fairless: I think the most imperative thing is that you’re generating a minimum of 100 Google reviews per 12 months. That is the minimum number of reviews required to impact your search engine optimization. Google doesn’t even view you as a legitimate business until you’re generating that volume of reviews. If you truly want to harness the power of SEO, you need to produce that many each year. The average number is somewhere in the 40 to 50 range in terms of total reviews. Accushield has the product that can help people get to that level and beyond.
Editor’s note: This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Accushield’s tablet-based kiosks replace the manual paper logbooks with a streamlined sign-in and health screening process for all visitors, staff, third-party caregivers and residents who enter and exit the building. To learn more about how Accushield can help your communities across your portfolio, visit Accushield.com.
The Voices Series is a sponsored content program featuring leading executives discussing trends, topics and more shaping their industry in a question-and-answer format. For more information on Voices, please contact sales@agingmedia.com.
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