How to Increase Client and Caregiver Satisfaction Using In-House Surveys

After talking with thousands of home care agencies, we’ve found a common problem with in-house client and caregiver surveys – they’re too broad. Here’s how to get more actionable feedback.

Did you know that it takes 12 positive experiences to make up for one unresolved negative experience?

While that may sound excessive, it’s important to remember that by surveying your clients and caregivers, you’ll be able to get a good grasp on satisfaction and hopefully improve any areas of concern before those negative experiences pop up again.

Note: Activated Insights offers client and caregiver surveys; however, we know that this won’t necessarily fit into every agency’s budget or timeline. With that being said, because of the value that these surveys bring, we want to help you develop your own methods.

Here’s how to survey your clients and caregivers and get feedback that you can use to improve your home care agency.

Benefits of surveying your clients and caregivers

The long-term success of a home care agency is determined in a large part by how well it commits to client and caregiver satisfaction; however, you can’t do this if you’re not actively surveying your clients and caregivers.

The information that clients and caregivers provide you through surveys is critical for growth and can make your agency more competitive. Getting the right feedback at the right time can be the difference between a happy client/caregiver and a lost client/caregiver.

Benefits of a survey program include:

Of course, gathering data is always going to be useful, but it’s what you do with that data that’s going to make a real difference. You should always be asking yourself, “How will we use this information to improve our services?”

By asking for client and caregiver feedback, you’ll be able to identify and focus on what they love, find ways to improve your business and anticipate future problems that could arise.

To make the most of your feedback, we suggest putting together an internal team that meets regularly on satisfaction to review scores and feedback and take action based on the findings.

5 questions you should be asking

After talking with thousands of home care agencies, we’ve found a common problem with in-house client and caregiver surveys – they’re too broad.

By getting down to the nitty-gritty and asking a small set of concrete questions, you’ll likely get more accurate and actionable information.

Here are some of the questions we recommend asking but depending on what stage your agency is at or how you’re looking to grow, these may be a little different; however, they’re a great baseline to start with.

Depending on how you conduct the survey (over the phone or with a distributed set of questions) you’ll want to ask questions that can be answered on a scale of 1-10, from terrible-great, or simply yes/no/sometimes – of course, with room for comments to highlight their reasoning.

We’ve created a free resource discussing the best ways to measure client satisfaction through surveys. You can check it out here.

Best practices for surveying clients and caregivers

There are many approaches you can take when surveying your clients and caregivers, and while they all have their pros and cons, we’ve noticed a few best practices that have been helpful for some agencies.

There are always going to be moving parts when trying to capture feedback, so adjusting your strategy continually and seeing what’s working and what isn’t will help you find the most success.

From what home care agency owners have told us, the biggest benefits of using client and caregiver surveys include being able to address problems more effectively and staying on top of ongoing trends that might need extra attention.

According to Tamara Franks, Owner at At Your Side – The Woodlands, TX, “It’s so easy to not realize what you’re not doing, and it’s so easy to not realize that what you are doing isn’t as helpful as you thought it was.”

More resources

Running a home care agency is hard but monitoring and analyzing client and caregiver feedback doesn’t have to be. To help you out, we’ve compiled a list of some resources that may be helpful as you get started.

Client and caregiver satisfaction is extremely important, and you can’t improve that if you don’t have the right surveying practices in place.

Activated Insights is proud to offer client and caregiver surveys on behalf of agencies across the country. If you’re interested in measuring/improving loyalty, learning where you can improve, or want to boost retention across the board, watch our instant demo to see how our survey program can level-up your agency.

If you run in-house surveys, what have you found to be most effective? Let us know in the comments.