Event planner, counselor, florist, entrepreneur… what role doesn’t a funeral director play? As this past year has taught us, funeral professionals are an invaluable and essential part of our public health infrastructure and society. While their tireless, physically, and emotionally punishing work often goes unnoticed, funeral directors and morticians are there to ease our burden at the most difficult times of our lives. The COVID-19 pandemic has only served to highlight the vital services they provide and the silent shadows in which their profession is so often shrouded.
Funeral directors juggle a tremendous array of responsibilities. Working in an industry where families expect—and deserve—flawless service and convenience, funeral directors must manage the complicated logistics of planning a meaningful and fulfilling memorial while helping their clients navigate one of the most painful times in their lives. From the smallest, family-run mortuaries to the biggest, corporate memorial parks, every funeral director knows the countless hours poured into planning and executing the perfect funeral. When working with bereaved families, the stakes are high, and the smallest details matter. Whether it’s a small informal affair (as it has to be nowadays) or a large memorial for a public figure, every funeral has dozens of moving parts that have to be expertly managed by a sharp and attentive funeral director. Today’s technology can help funeral homes streamline operations, save time, and make their services more efficient, leaving your staff with more time to handle customer relations and give each family the personalized attention they deserve.
As a funeral director, you are the face of your business and the primary link between a family and the many aspects of funeral planning. You are not only ushering the body of your client through this transitional phase but also guiding their family and loved ones through an emotional time of their lives as well as a series of necessary and often confusing transactions and arrangements. From preparing and distributing the obituary to embalming to sourcing products, the funeral director oversees all parts of each funeral—not to mention the day-to-day operations and staffing of their funeral home. Even in an age of online shopping and app-based services, personal interaction remains at the heart of the funeral industry, and a strong and intuitive digital presence goes hand-in-hand with the personal service families expect. Your service is what sets you apart and helps families feel comfortable putting an important event entirely in your hands. To maintain the success and growth of your business, it is essential to cultivate the personal service and face-to-face (or, in the pandemic age, screen-to-screen) relationships at the foundation of your service. When you have a small staff and resources are stretched thin, efficiency is everything. Like any modern business, technology can help you eliminate time-wasting tasks, automate some of your processes, and save yourself and your staff time.
Every funeral home runs a little differently, but everyone could use some help streamlining their services, prioritizing their tasks, and keeping track of vendors and clients. Using technology effectively in your funeral home can save you time on the back-of-house logistics so that you can focus your time and energy on interacting with clients and providing the best service to families. Using modern Customer Service Management (CRM) and Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) can enhance your business through time-saving automation, comprehensive resource management, and other organizational tools. A great CRM brings together the data your sales team needs to manage sales activities, pipeline, and customer communications.
Are you still keeping client paperwork in bulky folders and file cabinets and relying on manual methods to find records you need? Do you use dozens of different appointment systems and software to manage bookings, get permits, handle payments and funds, and other tasks? All of these crucial but tedious day-to-day jobs can be made more efficient using technology that eases the burden on you and your hard-working staff. Your team deserves to reap the benefits of effective, streamlined tech that gives you more time to interact with clients and focus on the truly important things.
As someone who juggles so many tasks, having a clear end-to-end view of your entire sales process is essential to keeping your business running smoothly—and staying sane. Using simple automation tools, you can facilitate chapel, cemetery, and crematory bookings online, manage your marketing assets, and build out your digital presence to better serve your clients and expand your market. You’ll be able to identify inefficiencies, schedule shipments, and payments so you never miss an invoice, and keep a clear and searchable record of your transactions and interactions. The right funeral home management software simplifies and improves communication and collaboration between teams while you connect with customers and complete funeral arrangements and keeps important data, documents, records, and relationships at your fingertips.
By bringing modern management and marketing tools into your funeral home, cemetery, or crematorium, you can expand your client base, improve services for your clients, and better showcase your offerings. At OpusXenta, we celebrate the tireless professionals who support and guide countless families through one of life’s most difficult and inevitable milestones, and we strive to develop the highest caliber of tools and applications that enhance your service. You already wear dozens of hats—let technology help you take some of them off!