Offering Great Senior Community Customer Service During The Covid-19 Pandemic
Unfortunately, offering great customer service in senior living communities is not a given. Simply making it a company value and hanging it on a wall or putting it in an annual report doesn’t make it happen any more than me creating a report where I state that I want to become nine feet tall is going to happen. There will always be a gap between our intentions and our actions. This is especially true when employee stress is elevated due to the regular demands required of employees in a senior living community. This stress is amplified due to the intensity and unique demands during a pandemic.
Any corporate values we want turned into company-wide behaviors must be consistently highlighted and modeled from the top of the corporate structure down. This is no different for the value of offering great customer service throughout your organization.
Today, I want to give you three no-nonsense, practical, often overlooked ways your organization can be intentional about offering great customer service.
Intentionally SMILE
Worldwide and across cultures, the power of a smile has exponential power. Genuine smiles break the ice, open doors, and pave the way for relationship and eventually trust. This is true for friends, customers, clients, senior living residents and their families. It is critical to note the power of a smile must be genuine and enacted in the first moments of a relationship.
So much of our lives revolve around our habits, which start in our minds: a THOUGHT becomes an ACT, an ACT becomes a HABIT, a HABIT becomes part of your CHARACTER, your CHARACTER becomes your DESTINY. For want of a stray THOUGHT, your DESTINY is lost.
Is smiling a habit for you? Or, like many people I know (including me), do you have a “resting frown face” (RFF)? Though you may be completely neutral inside, your outside first impression communicates negativity. I’ve found that the older get, the more I seem to have a RFF. Maybe its time to find a Smile Coach and put some reps in on a smile workout. After all, smiling does require muscular strength.
One of the easiest ways to begin to smile more is to have something to smile about. I'm not talking about happiness because happiness is dependent upon the happenings around you. Instead, find something that you can glean joy from—whatever the circumstances. Maybe it is thinking of a fond memory or friend; maybe it is thinking of a joke, meme, or tick-tock you’ve stumbled across recently; maybe it is allowing a much loved song to play in the back of your mind and on the tip of your tongue.
Smile with your eyes, especially when wearing a mask each day. I suggest you put your mask on, stand in front of a mirror, and see what others see. Smiling with your mouth, even though it is behind a mask, often helps your eyes to “smile.” Make sure you show smiling eyes!
Intentionally Care
Being a caregiver can be exhausting work and can often leave one feeling unappreciated. One of the best ways to ensure that you can be a good caregiver is to make sure you’re caring for yourself. It is difficult to care about someone else when you feel exhausted or overwhelmed. What do you need to do to care for yourself? Maybe it is adjusting your schedule so you can get more sleep; maybe you need to find ways to exercise to reduce your stress; maybe you need to eat healthier to help your body feel better. Whatever it is, find ways to take care of yourself so that you are in a position to truly care about the people you serve each day.
At its core caring is simply showing empathy for another. The definition of empathy is the ability to understand and share the feelings of another. In order to show empathy, first we must be intentional about reading people's feelings. As you approach a person with a smile, try to read him/her. What do his/her facial expressions and body language tell you about him/her? Does she seem different than she usually does? Assess him/her and respond accordingly. If she is in a jovial mood, find out why; allow her to share. If he is frustrated, find out why. This leads to my next point.
A big part of caring for someone is being willing to come alongside of him/her to help him/her solve his/her problem. Often this level of caring requires us to go above and beyond and outside of our job description. If we are too be intentional about caring for others, we will be inconvenienced. So, when we find a person is frustrated or overwhelmed or needs help, instead of just thinking, “It's not my issue,” we must realize that intentionally caring means we need to be part of the solution.
One example I saw was the tropic crisis hit is the restriction of visitations to seniors in Arkansas they said there would be no in-person visits for the medical community without them we can't allow families to visit through the window window visits through the shop window we allowed family member in the outside charges he assisted living senior on the inside.
Imagine works good.
I noticed that the residents in the building patrol keep hearing in communicating so I went inside and sat next to the resident use my cell phone to help help the communication process.
one time I found out my cell phone wasn't loud enough so I grab the speaker amplify the voice from this phone the family outside one time a resident couldn't see well so I did a face time meeting resume and I hooked up my phone to Z through HDMI to the TV so the resident has a bigger picture of a family member when I realized that family members felt disconnected through the window I figured out a way to make collage photos and taking a photo of the person outside and a photo of the person inside
Do a personal assessment and ask yourself:
* Do your words regularly tear people down or build them up?
*After interacting with you, are people around you more depleted or refreshed?
Imagine, if I tell you, that all of the above can be done with NoCode, Paperless Mobile CRM APP that can transform your department in a week.
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