Senior living referral company A Place for Mom is eliminating a senior living community liaison position in favor of a new strategy with “more direct” lines of communication with operators.
The New York City-based company last week announced it is laying off its customer success management team, which makes up about 6.8% of its nearly 900-person workforce and helps senior living communities keep up with and convert leads flowing into their database through A Place for Mom.
Company CEO Larry Kutscher told Senior Housing News that the change “is a result of our strategy to have our advisors connect more directly with our community customers.”
“Over the next few months, we will be sharing more information about our approach,” Kutscher said.
With the move, the company is now making its senior living advisors “the bridge between our families and communities.”
“This will simplify the process of working with APFM, unlock direct access to family insights and enable our SLAs to sell the differentiated value of each local community,” the company said in a note to its customer network last week.
A Place for Mom is keeping the customer success team in place until April 4 to ensure a smooth transition. Management expects to place a “number” of the affected team members into existing open roles with the company, an A Place for Mom representative told Senior Housing News.
In conjunction with the move, the referral partner also is piloting a new program called “Family Live Transfer,” which “connects actively searching families in real-time directly to a community representative on a dedicated line.”
“We have seen high interest in this program from both families and communities,” the company said in the note to its network of customers.
The team was built up during the last several years of the Covid-19 pandemic, as senior living communities struggled to recoup occupancy lost during the pandemic’s first couple years. The company in 2021 raised $175 million in growth equity funding, with plans to help transform the company at the time.
Last year, Kutscher told Senior Housing News that the process had turned the company into a marketing and technology “machine” meant to help senior living operators provide services for families.
The company has also spent time building out an array of technology, including a website specifically for skilled nursing facilities and a predictive model that helps pair up prospects with communities that better fit their budget, location and care needs.
“We’re able to now, much more accurately, predict where that family is going to be interested, and therefore help the adviser make a better referral,” Kutscher said last year. “And we’re collecting more information, both about the family and the community; and getting them to be more up to date and more accurate.”
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