Funeral Industry Leaders Invest in Training

Largo, FL – Funeral businesses of all sizes have come to appreciate the value of staff training. Death care services are changing so quickly, it is impossible for a funeral director to depend completely upon a mortuary school education to adequately serve families. The rapid development of new personalization options and how these options can best be presented to families requires a concentrated effort by licensed staff to maintain currency.

Also changing are the various means of obtaining education. Because the focus of funeral businesses has shifted from volume alone to a combination of volume and quality sales, MKJ Marketing, the death care industry’s leader in market research, advertising and web site development, has extended its line of packaged training programs.

Funeral businesses nationally receive thousands of inquiry phone calls daily as consumers educate themselves on funeral home offerings. Inquiry calls have grown so great as to represent a funeral businesses best opportunity for increasing at-need and pre-need volume. Despite the scale of the opportunity, many firms have done little or nothing to prepare their staffs to professionally receive these inquiries, whether telephone or walk-ins.

Experience proves that the funeral home with the lowest prices does not get the majority of the cases from these calls; instead it is the firm that is able to communicate the best value. MKJ’s “Price Shopper” training program provides instruction on how to prepare for inquiries, and how to effectively communicate the information consumer’s need to make intelligent decisions. The “Price Shopper” Training Program teaches staff how to deliver the quality message. Once they become comfortable with the quality message, they’ll use it whenever they interact with consumers in presentations, making arrangements, or interacting with the public in social settings.

The “Price Shopper” Training Program is a set of three DVD’s with workbooks. The workbooks reinforce the learning experience as the trainee views the DVD’s. Most firms will recover the “Price Shoppers” $1950 licensing fee through increased volume within the first two weeks of implementation.

A related challenge is training licensed and unlicensed staff on proper telephone etiquette. How many families does your firm lose because their initial telephone contact was handled poorly? Working with hundreds of funeral businesses nationally, it is stunning how poorly many firms receive phone calls by:

• Not identifying the name of the firm when answering
• Not being prepared with pen and paper for recording messages
• Revealing too much information at an inappropriate time

All of which diminishes the professionalism of the firm, which causes the caller to question the value of the firm’s services and capabilities. The “Good Call”ô Training Program addresses these telephone based situations:

• First Calls
• Aftercare Calls
• Visitation & Service Questions
• Providing Directions
• Floral Orders
• Taking messages & Transferring calls
• Handling Complaints
• Price & General Inquiries

The “Good Call”ô Training Program includes two DVD Training Programs and a handy reference guide to keep near phones for quick referral. Its impossible to place a value on proper telephone etiquette when your image is on the line; the license fee for the “Good Call”ô Training Program is $1595.

Packaging is utilized in nearly all industries, from vacation get away packages at resorts to added features on automobiles. Packages offer consumers’ choices, which creates customer satisfaction, while also increasing the average sale. MKJ’s “The Power of Packaging” is a DVD based training program that includes an eight-page workbook that guides you through the packaging process for both burial and cremation. The system is based upon “Good, Better, Best” format. The licensing fee for the “Power of Packaging” program is $895.

The “Power of Packaging” is included in the “Cremation Arrangement System” which has been an outstanding success at increasing the average cremation and burial sales. Through a combination of effective packages and training the “Arrangement System” will increase the average cremation sale between $900 and $1500. Contact MKJ for pricing and features.

DVD based training programs reduce the cost of training while also being a resource that is used over and over again when hiring new staff members and for remedial training. The more staff views the training DVD’s the more proficient they become with the skills.

MKJ Marketing serves a national clientele of funeral businesses, cemeteries and death care industry vendors in areas of Market Research, Advertising, Web Site Development, and Training Programs. For more information on MKJ’s training programs including upcoming seminars contact MKJ Marketing at 888-655-1566 or visit the new www.MKJMarketing.com web site.