Are you implementing the right website features for your users?
As we all know, change is the only constant. This also applies to what users are responding to on your website. As the care home industry continues to evolve, so too must its digital presence. To ensure that your website is not only informative but also engaging and effective, it's essential to stay abreast of the latest trends and best practices.
In this blog post, we'll delve into the some of the essential features that are transforming the way care homes attract and engage with their audience. To provide actionable insights, we conducted a comprehensive analysis of 10 leading and award winning care home websites. Our research involved:
- Competitive benchmarking: Examining the websites of the best performing care homes to identify common features and successful strategies.
- User experience (UX) assessment: Evaluating websites from the perspective of potential residents and their families to understand their needs and preferences.
- Industry trends analysis: Identifying emerging trends and technologies that are shaping the care home landscape.
This data-driven approach allowed us to uncover key website features that can significantly enhance user engagement and ultimately convert visitors into residents. If you're interested in the full research then pop us an email at hello@versantus.co.uk
Key themes we've incorporated from our market research
Financial pressures
It's important for website managers to be able to justify digital innovation as a cost-saving mechanism and as an important client acquisition tool in light of financial limitations.
Staff engagement
User friendly websites free up staff time - from answering repetitive questions
Market differentiation
Your Care Home website is a tool to showcase your care home's unique offerings. This is a crowded market where all players are offering near identical services, so standing out is important.
1. Custom cost calculators - Simplify the decision-making process
Personalised cost estimation allows potential residents and their families to simplify complex decisions and reduce enquiries about costs. Not only this but the calculator can act as a lead generation tool collecting email addresses and offering clear transparency regarding prices.
Best practice: Offer customisable options and provide clear explanations of fees and services to enhance transparency.
2. Virtual tours - Bring your Care Home to life
Virtual tours or 3D Virtual tours were only present on 4 out of 10 of the surveyed websites, even though they significantly aid the user in the decision-making process. An initial investment in features not only demonstrates your business cares but improves how the users collect information and decide to trust your service.
Best practice: Use high quality and consistent visuals, interactive elements, and clear navigation to create a seamless virtual experience.
This virtual tour was implemented on the Allegra Care website by Versantus
3. Comprehensive property information: Showcase anything unique
Detailed property information helps potential residents understand the specific amenities and services your care home provides.
Best practice: Again, include high quality images, floor plans if applicable, and descriptions of common areas, rooms, and outdoor spaces.
4. Chatbots / live chat
In 10 competitive care home sites, only 2 had a chatbot to provide immediate responses to simple questions, even though this is particularly effective in reducing the workload on staff for repetitive questions and also improving user experience. Chatbots have become increasingly popular for providing customer service and support. However, to ensure they are effective and meet customer expectations, particularly in such a people based sector, it's essential to follow certain best practice
Best practice: Determine what tasks the chatbot will handle (e.g., answering FAQs, providing product recommendations, handling basic customer enquiries). Establish measurable objectives, such as reducing customer support ticket volume or increasing sales.
And also consider: Effective handoff to humans - Establish clear criteria for when the chatbot should transfer a conversation to a human agent (e.g., complex inquiries, escalated issues).
5. Brochure requests
Brochure requests being a commonly employed feature should be integrated into your website, as our research finds 7 out of 10 current care home providers utilising brochure requests. It's a great idea to invest your time to allow users to further read on an extremely important matter.
Best practice: Use strong, action-oriented language and place calls-to-action prominently on your website. These are most effective when easy to find and in a consistent area of the page to find, the footer, header, or on mobile within "CTA trays".
6. Call Monitoring
A third trend is call monitoring to further improve and qualify call leads, through analysis of the contact's intentions. This would help a care home's marketing team ensure leads are genuinely interested in their care services.
Best practice: Offer comprehensive training to agents on call handling techniques, product knowledge, and the importance of customer satisfaction. Select call monitoring software that meets your specific needs and provides the features you require, such as call recording, call analysis, and reporting. And don't forget to update your privacy policy and procedures if you are planning to record anything.
What's next?
If you're already making an effort to invest in a majority of what we've addressed, then a genuine congratulations to you. Whilst these care home website aspects are extremely important, they are a supplement to an effective user journey and effective UX. If you'd like to discuss our full research or talk about how we could help develop any of the features mentioned here, do get in touch.