How to improve your Care Sourcer offers
Some straightforward improvements to the offers you make through the Care Sourcer service can make a real difference when it comes to growing your business.
Here’s our top tips for making your offer stand out to people searching for care.
Keep an eye on your emails for opportunities!
Care Sourcer will send you emails alerting you when a request for care happens in your area. You can choose how often to receive these emails and we recommend you choose to receive them ‘per request’ rather than a daily digest (you can change your preferences by logging in to your account and going to ‘Account’ > ‘Edit profile’ at the top).
Care seekers don’t always choose the first care provider to offer, but they are often under time pressure so keen to start making contact with providers as soon as possible.
Staying up to date will give you the best chance of growing your business.
Give your response the personal touch
Take a moment to really read over the personal message in the request and understand exactly what the client is looking for.
| Example care request | A good example of a reply | A bad example of a reply |
| Hi, my mum had a fall a month ago. She has no serious injuries but the incident has shaken her confidence. We need someone to visit her every weekday morning to check she is ok and keep her company. I think one hour will be enough. Thanks, Daniel |
Hi Daniel, I’m sorry to hear that your mother had a fall recently and would like to put forward Example Care Services for your consideration. We have 12 excellent and reliable carers working for us, and I think Susan would be very well suited to you. She has over 10 years experience providing excellent care and lives very close by to your mother. She would be able to accommodate visits each weekday morning from 8:30 – 9:30am. Please let me know if you would like us to pop in to arrange an assessment and give yourself and your mother the opportunity to meet myself and Susan. Many thanks, |
Example Care Services offers care and support with all aspects of daily living. We need to carry out an assessment to ensure that the person meets our criteria. |
As you know, people looking for care are often in a distressing, time-pressured situation, so when you respond:
- Echo what they say in their personal message to show you have understood the issues/requirements at hand.
- Write in a friendly and personal way, as if you were talking directly to the person in need. If you don’t understand any of their requirements, just ask for clarification.
- For an extra personal touch, if you have a specific carer in mind for their package then tell the seeker a bit about the carer in your personal message; for example their name, experience or areas of expertise.
A brief and compassionate message from you, written from scratch, and personalised to the particular care seeker and their needs, will give you the best chance of standing out in a positive way.
“If I don’t see they’ve addressed my concerns, it just looks like a promotional email”
Know your business’s selling points
If someone stopped you on the street and asked what made your care business different to the others, could you confidently answer?
Knowing your unique selling points is key to engaging with people looking for care on Care Sourcer. If you don’t know what makes you stand out, it’s difficult to impress potential clients. Here’s some ideas:
- Let them know how many families you helped
- List years of experience that you have in care
- Highlight if you have a great CQC rating
- Reference similar clients you have provided care for in the past
- Mention your specialisms if they are relevant
Encourage a meeting
At this stage, your key goal is to arrange a meeting – getting face to face will skyrocket the chances of successfully agreeing a package of care.
Prompt the care seeker to arrange a meeting with you by suggesting some times and dates that you are available in your personal message on Care Sourcer.
Double check your personal message
Care seekers are looking for a high-quality service that they can trust, with a provider who takes the time to ensure everything is correct. Your personal message in your care offer gives the seeker their first impression of the quality of your service as a whole. We regularly receive feedback that a personal message containing multiple spelling and grammar errors is off-putting.
Double check your message before you submit an offer, or ask someone else to have read over it – if you need any assistance, there are various online checkers available (including the excellent free Grammarly website plugin for Chrome browsers, which will help to eliminate errors wherever you write – a big favourite in the Care Sourcer office!).
Keep your Care Sourcer website account up to date
Make sure people can actually reach you – if your phone number on Care Sourcer is incorrect then you’ll fall at one of the final hurdles. Please take a moment to check your contact details are correct by going to ‘Edit Profile’.
It’s easy to track the telephone and message enquiries you are receiving through Care Sourcer by going to your Offers page. By clicking into each of your offers you’ll see a detailed breakdown of calls and messages you have received from that offer. You can also see a summary of these metrics in your Insights page.
Letting seekers contact you through the Care Sourcer site means you can continually monitor the enquiries and value you are receiving from Care Sourcer.
When a care seeker accepts your offer you’ll get an email from Care Sourcer confirming the good news. Please follow the link in the email and click ‘Review and confirm’ next to the offer to close this off and keep your list of current offers tidy. By confirming the care package you allow the care seeker to review your services, which will help future prospective clients evaluate them for their own care requirements.
A bit of housekeeping every now and then makes it much easier to know which opportunities are still open, so no matter how busy you are, don’t forget to:
- Keep an eye on your emails for opportunities
- Give your response the personal touch
- Know your business’s selling points
- Encourage a meeting with the person looking for care
- Double check your personal message before sending
- Keep your Care Sourcer website account up to date
We’re always here to help – if you have any questions about Care Sourcer, get in touch via providers@caresourcer or on 0800 048 8618.