Next week at NFDA, Batesville Casket Company will unveil their new unified funeral home resource merging their web-platform, Meaningful Selections, and their new consumer-facing app called Bridges. The days of sparsely updated free-standing kiosks are fading fast, giving way to an efficient, easy-to-use, and remote updated funeral management technology suite.
Their new app called Bridges is accessible online, on tablets, or smartphones. When a family checks in with your funeral home you simply send an invitation to them via text or email to download the app on their personal device. Once the primary family contact is set up they begin inviting family and friends to join their event and contribute writing, photos, and tips for a collaborative funeral planning experience. The app is noticeably consumer-facing putting more control and customization in the hands of your families and ultimately smoothing out some of the logistical complexities of funeral planning for the directors.
The Batesville Casket Company app leads the primary family contact through the process in an elegant linear path asking them to complete steps from top-to-bottom using visual cues to indicate completion of tasks. First, the customer fills out the bio information followed by theme customization and obituary writing. The app provides templates for the funeral theme offering suggestions to the family at each step. Even the obituary section comes with starter-templates which brilliantly auto-populate predictable fields by pulling information from the bio. Next, the primary family contact is prompted to invite friends and family members to join the app and participate in the memorialization and panning. The primary family contact has the ability to restrict what added users can see and do separating them into 2 categories of access: Immediate Family and Extended Family + Friends. Finally, there is a helpful resource library and all users have the ability to easily send flowers directly from the app using FTD or the funeral homes preferred local shop.
One of the most remarkable aspects of the Bridges App is the high level of customization for the individual funeral homes who have the ability to create a fully branded experience, add customized resources, suggest custom themes, use their own invitation language, and so much more. The customized features are available on an all-customer and individual-customer basis depending on the desired family experience. For example, a funeral director serving a deceased veteran family can include the correct forms, themes, and reverent copy for that specific family and scenario.
Plan. Share. Remember.
Batesville Casket Company has eloquently distilled the funeral experience into 3 parts: Plan, Share, and Remember. When opening the app, you immediately notice a focus on providing families with information and tools to effortlessly lead them through the planning process. The app was intelligently designed to reinforce the value of the funeral home’s services and pre-planning through a self-discovery user experience. The goal of this technology is to keep the funeral director at the center as the key resource in the experience and to facilitate the planning of a meaningful funeral.
The time-saving capabilities of this app are impressive on the funeral director side and on the consumer side. The primary family contact can invite their entire family to collaborate on gathering information, writing the obituary, contributing photos, and building the memorial web page. Once the family begins to contribute information to the app, the funeral director begins to collect the resources needed to complete the administrative tasks. The customer profile and decedents bio auto-populate forms on the funeral home’s backend tool. This means you receive all of the information for the death certificate, obituary, personalized background, and Tukios memorial video without ever asking the family for the information. The funeral directors can see customer additions to the app in real-time.
Batesville has beta-tested the Bridges app in real funeral homes with real customers and designed it around the habits of funeral directors and families. The most popular features for families were the auto-populated template obituary and ability to upload images. One family in the beta test uploaded 200 photos! The funeral directors liked the ability to brand the app specifically to their funeral home and overwhelmingly used the text invitation, often-times introducing the app on the first contact with the family when picking up the decedent.
Stop by the Batesville Casket Company booth (#1529) at NFDA next week to try the Bridges app for yourself!
