Home Care Pulse
We’ve put in the work to be the best at what we do, and we’ve perfected a process that gets through to as many people as possible.
We recently published a page comparing the benefits of using Home Care Pulse to survey your clients and caregivers compared with doing the surveys in-house or contracting with another third party. (You can check out the page here.)
The page leads with a bold claim: Home Care Pulse surveys get a 99% completion rate. We tried to give other survey methods the benefit of the doubt and list the upper ranges for the kind of completes or response rates they could expect, but at best, internal surveys or other third-party surveys rarely do better than about 40-50%.
Completion/response rates are hugely important for one reason: if you’re trying to get good feedback that leads to good decisions, the larger slice of people you’re able to get responses from, the more useful and accurate your data will be.
Do we really get a 99% completion rate on our surveys?
The short answer is yes, but let’s break it down.
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Do You Respond to Every Email You Get?
If you’re doing surveys in-house and sending them out via email, or if you’re using another third-party, you’re typically at the mercy of whoever decides to respond to your email or text. Do you respond to every email in your inbox? Almost nobody does.
While email surveys certainly have their uses, we like live phone surveys for several reasons. In addition to being able to have a conversation that produces better feedback, we’ve found that being able to call again later if they don’t answer leads to a better response rate—even resending an email or a text with a survey isn’t as effective as calling them again.
Ten Years is a Lot of Time to Work Out the Kinks
It’s also important to recognize that having done this for ten years, we’ve learned quite a bit about when to call and how to get through to people. Over the years, we’ve perfected a system that optimizes the number of people we’re able to talk to.
So that’s the longer answer: we get a much better response rate because we keep trying to get a hold of them until we connect, rather than sending out an email or two and hoping we get a response. We’ve also perfected a proven process over time that utilizes best practices in getting through to the largest number of people.
Important note: Don’t worry; we have policies and procedures on how often we call so that we don’t annoy anybody. We call just enough to get through to most people.
Curious what kinds of things we’ve heard in ten years of surveying clients and caregivers? Read about it here.
The Bottom Line
One important thing to remember is that the 99% represents the percentage of the target number of people we need to survey, rather than a percentage of specific respondents. What that means is that, since we aim to survey a percentage of clients and caregivers monthly and there are always a few people who are extremely hard to reach or (for various reasons) maybe on a Do Not Call list, a few people might get called more frequently than others. (However, our policy is still not to survey someone more than every 6 months.)
The bottom line: with most survey methods, if you send emails to 100 people, around 30 of them will respond if you’re lucky. With Home Care Pulse, if your goal is to contact 100 people, we’ll get 99 responses.
Wondering if you should start surveying your clients and caregivers? Here’s why you need to.
