It’s a high risk, high reward approach . . . do you dare?

By Steve Moran

A few weeks ago I had the privilege of doing a presentation titled “How to be the best senior living sales person in the world without breaking a sweat” for the sales team at Primrose Retirement. After the presentation, Jessie Weldon, the Director of Sales and Marketing, and I sat down to talk about this high-risk-high-reward thing they are doing with resident reviews being placed on each communities home page.  

Primrose Retirement

Primrose is based in Aberdeen, South Dakota. They have 33 communities in 15 states and provide independent living, assisted living, and memory care.

Consumer Reviews On Full Display

I continue to be surprised by how senior living communities react to consumer reviews. Too often the attitude is to ignore them. All too often I go to Caring.com (a Senior Housing Forum partner), Yelp, Glassdoor or Google and find a terrible consumer review score, often because just one angry consumer or employee left a scathing review. Ignoring them is a terrible idea. Embracing them is a great way to grow occupancy.

We talked about why they are doing this and Jessie made the point that consumers have become increasingly used to purchasing products and services online and a big reason for using the internet is that consumers like the transparency and honesty of consumer reviews. Knowing that consumer reviews are a big deal, why not make them available without visitors having to go dig for them?

What Gets Posted

Primrose uses a consumer satisfaction organization that makes it easy to place the data on the individual community websites. They post three things:

  1. The star rating for the community; that currently runs from around 3.8 to 4.8.  

  2. Responses to the question: “What do we do best?”

  3. Any other comments or suggestions.

The only responses that get filtered out are those that contain the names of residents or team members.

When The Reviews Are Not So Good

I asked the really hard question. What happens when you get a not so good review? First, they don’t get very many poor reviews, but when they do they get posted and provide Primrose an opportunity to grow and get better. They also know that having some reviews that are less than perfect says we are honest about who we are and what we do.

You can watch the entire interview below:

Would you do this in your organization?