6 Ways to Reach Senior Care Users – and How to Partner With Them to Achieve Success

Receiving feedback from our customers is one of the most valuable tools in assessing how they are using our solutions and how we can help to make their experience more efficient. However, sometimes recruiting customer participants can feel like you are shouting into a void. When no one is responding to your email, it can feel like this disconnect with one another has only intensified over the past year as we experience Zoom Fatigue.

In our experience, the Senior Care customers we work with were busy before, and now they guard their schedules even more carefully, and with good reason. Our customers don’t have a lot of time to give because their time is better spent caring for others. Unfortunately, these hard working individuals often encounter unknown and novel challenges that we can help provide solutions for if they are willing to share their experiences. That’s why we decided to change our approach when reaching out to customers to work around their busy schedules while still helping them to be more efficient in the process. Here are 6 ways we have changed our processes to reach difficult to recruit users to ensure their needs stay at the forefront of everything we do:

1. Smaller requests

One of the first things we did was lessen the amount of time we requested. Instead of a traditional one hour session, we decreased by 50% and only requested 30 minute meetings. Participants found this easier to fit into their schedules and we could more easily setup calls across multiple weeks. It also allowed us to show participants multiple iterations over a few weeks and subsequently, many participants were willing to go over the time once they were engaged.

2. Partner with internal teams

We were able to keep calls shorter by engaging with internal teams, like Customer Support and Implementation. Conducting pre-interviews or usability sessions with Subject Matter Experts, such as former nurses on those teams, allowed us to better anticipate customers reactions. We’ve increased our collaborations with internal teams since the pandemic began,  and as an added bonus, it helped drum up internal excitement for our new products and improve handoffs.

3. Don’t bury the lead

When we are reaching out to prospective participants, we try to keep the request within the first couple sentences. No one is excited to read 6 paragraph emails. We ensure our emails still include supporting information, but we make sure that what we are asking for is clear and concise. By not burying the lead, we recevied more responses.

4. Engage with managers

Yes, the goal is to get to the end-users and including managers and leaders does have benefits. In the case of enterprise software, it can give you perspective on how your project is or could be operationalized. When setting up these meetings we make it clear that part of the deal is that the manager will set us up with the end-users. It’s also a chance to find out about the kind of devices they are using and any existing restrictions. Before the pandemic, we were able to be onsite with organizations and see users before and after staff meetings. We have found that engagnig with managers can be a useful strategy and may even result in the manager handling all the scheduling.

5. Utilize design sprints

For some types of users, it might be easier to devote a whole day, or multiple days in a row, to research requests. A design spike is a great option. Getting to know your users’ typical schedules and needs can help you figure out what is going to work best.

6. Understand compensation desires

Never underestimate the power of incentives. Whether it be food (safety permitting) such as a bowl of candy at booth or pizza in a breakroom, company swag, or offering a voucher for premium subscription or services, all of these can be quick way to start a conversation.

As a world class UX design team, PointClickCare is committed to putting our customers at the heart of everything we do.  Our UX is key to that process and user input is critical to our ability to enhance and improve solutions for an ever changing industry. But it is important to remember that this process isn’t always easy. It’s a bit of fever dream to think of working at an organization where UX research is thoroughly funded and users are easy to get access too. When that’s not the case, we have to get scrappy and realize there are many tools and many ways to get the research we need. Lastly we must always remember not to get stuck in the mindset of needing things to be prefect.