SeniorHomes.com makes it easy to find the right senior living & care facilities

SeniorHomes.com helps seniors find assisted living, independent living, or memory care facilities through its online database and call center. When the company outgrew its hosted call center provider and needed more sophisticated reporting features, it upgraded to a custom-built solution on Twilio’s platform. Within 2 months of launching the new call center, SeniorHomes.com doubled upsell rates and realized a return on its investment.

Keeping up with business growth

Transitioning parents to a senior care facility is never an easy task for adult children. Chris Rodde, co-founder and CEO of SeniorHomes.com, found a way to make the process friendlier by pairing an online search engine with a knowledgeable team of customer service agents dedicated to matching seniors with an appropriate level of care.

As SeniorHomes.com expanded, it outgrew its hosted call center solution. The company sought better reporting capabilities and integration with its custom-built CRM system.

A quick, adaptable solution

After evaluating nearly a dozen vendors, SeniorHomes.com decided to build a call center on the Twilio cloud communications platform. Key to selecting Twilio was the ease of incorporating Twilio’s API into the company’s existing CRM system. “We found that integration was going to be a huge challenge, if not impossible, with every other provider that we investigated other than Twilio,” said Ken Ploeger, developer at SeniorHomes.com.

The entire deployment took just 3 weeks, with 2 additional weeks for testing. The resulting call center features an IVR, an automatic call distributor, call queuing, call recording, CTI-style screenpops with information from SeniorHome.com’s CRM, cross-channel support, a unified agent desktop, and real-time reporting.

Improved productivity and accountability

Since making the switch to Twilio, SeniorHomes.com has seen a big boost in productivity. Detailed reports that were unavailable from their previous provider have helped the company better serve the clinics and care facilities that pay for advertising on its website. “One report that has been particularly critical to our growth allows us to track sales,” said CEO Chris Rodde. “Since we began using it, we’ve doubled our upsell rate.” Simply making reports available to agents so that they can gain insight into their own productivity has improved performance. Meanwhile, capabilities like call recording and monitoring ensure the quality of customer interaction stays high.

Day to day, agents get more done. Having a unified desktop means agents no longer have to switch between call center software, a CRM system, and other tools. Everything agents need from the customer record to the phone itself is available from within their browsers.

Another benefit is an increase in marketing ROI. Twilio-powered call tracking numbers assigned to different marketing campaigns make it a cinch to measure the impact of marketing spend. “We’ve been able to track the effectiveness of different advertising channels and link up revenue with the cost of those channels,” said Ploeger.

SeniorHomes.com plans to continue to add functionality to the call center to meet the needs of its growing business. New features on the horizon include enterprise feedback management—sending surveys to customers to get their input after a call—and expanding multichannel support to include chat and SMS.

How it was built

SeniorHomes.com integrated the Twilio API with its PHP infrastructure and MySQL database. Using Twilio Client, a developer could embed VoIP into its existing custom CRM system so that call center workers could handle inbound and outbound calls from their browsers. Sudden spikes in call volume are managed through Twilio’s Queue feature, which routes calls to an available agent.