How much really does a home care agency review influence your prospective clients and impact your agency's bottom line?

Like we did with our senior living case study measuring reviews influence, in this study for an in-home care company we looked at the reviews and inquiry data for a referral partner who had more than 100 in-home care listings on our site and a mix of both positive and negative ratings. We looked at how many reviews they had per listing and how many inquiries they were getting on those listings on average. What we found was that their listings with 15 or more reviews averaged one and a half times more leads than listings that only had 1 or 2 reviews.

We covered this calculation in our August 2016 webinar about senior care reviews, and the chart that can help you further understand the reviews impact is below.

We then calculated the average lifetime value of a home care client as $11,000. We used a conversion rate (from inquiry to customer) of 10% and with an average of 49 more leads from having 15+ reviews, we assumed they averaged 5 new clients on those listings with more reviews. Multiply those new clients by the average lifetime value and you get $55,000 in incremental revenue. Divide it by the number of reviews it took to achieve that increase, or 13, and then subtract the cost it took the home care agency to generate those reviews. The net value or incremental revenue is $4,231 per home care review.

This calculation and its results will obviously vary according to your home care agency's average lifetime customer value, typical conversion rate, the influence reviews are having for your listing(s), and any costs you're incurring to generate reviews. However, this equation does give you a framework to use to measure the value reviews are adding for your home care business, and hopefully help you to prioritize your agency's online reputation; if you're not already compelled by the fact that our directory is now sorted by home care agency review volume (pushing down listings without reviews given the importance of reviews in a consumer's search for a home care agency).

Not sure how to get more home care agency reviews? We offer some tips to help you, and starting in 2017, offer a new program through Home Care Pulse that will also help agencies get reviews on our site to help increase inquiries and client sign-ups for participating agencies. We're also available to answer your questions as well, you can contact reviews@caring.com.