Co-op Funeralcare
Co-op Funeralcare is a funeral director, providing funeral services that help people say their best goodbye to loved ones.
About
Who are Co-op Funeralcare?
Co-op Funeralcare provides help when someone has died, assisting families to create their funeral arrangements and providing support and advice before, during and after the funeral.
The brief
Change staff attitudes to its customers and services
Funeral care is an unregulated business sector, which has meant that lots of independent companies have challenged Co-op Funeralcare on price.
Co-op Funeralcare noticed a commercial shift during the pandemic: the volume of sales of its lower-end services grew much larger.
We discovered that Co-op Funeralcare’s funeral arrangers were failing to offer families appropriate services, assuming they could not afford them. There were also logistical challenges; one was that funeral arrangers were not communicating well with customers about their capacity and double-booking dates.
Co-op Funeralcare did analysis into this and the result was that funeral arrangers did not believe that certain families could afford certain types of funerals and were not offering appropriate services to families who wanted to say goodbye to loved ones in a dignified way.
Add on services (such as keepsakes, memorial jewellery, bespoke transportation) were not being offered where appropriate.
A further challenge was that staff in the care centres were resistant to any form of training that suggested their roles were ‘sales’ based.
Co-op Funeralcare commissioned us to deliver training to 3,000 staff in multiple locations, with inconsistent IT and staffing structures.
Our approach
Improve staff soft-skills & capacity of in-house trainers
Our Penguin team spent two days at different locations, talking to all team members in-person to understand their challenges, whether funeral arrangers or those front-of-house.
We diagnosed several challenges, focussed on services offered, types of arrangements made and inconsistencies in processes:
Funeral arrangers were not communicating to ‘back-of-house’ teams regarding capacity and were promising dates to families that were not possible
Funeral arrangers having a fixed ‘mindset’ as to the affordability of a family based on a number of factors including their postcode, the way they dressed and the way they spoke
Funeral arrangers were not offering appropriate choices to families who were then left disappointed after realising they could have personalised the funeral further
Some funeral arrangers were offering the same services to every family and it transpired that this was how the funeral arranger would arrange a funeral for their loved ones – not necessarily how the customer would want it to be arranged for their love one.
Funeral arrangers had a high level of empathy but some comments made about families were:
They wanted a ‘cheap’ funeral, so I got them on the basic funeral plan, but the funeral arranger did not ask what the budget was for what the families believe to be a ‘cheap’ funeral
Our Solution
Penguin Learning’s Solution
Our solution was to deliver three virtual workshops in succession, building up the funeral arrangers’ soft-skills before the Co-op Funeralcare operations team delivered a workshop on a fresh approach to offering their funeral services. We used a Train-the-Trainer format to maximise capacity, allowing us to deliver multiple group training sessions in one day with support from five Penguin Learning Facilitators.
The training addressed areas of assumptions and unconscious bias, effective communication, conversation cycle and being curious. The programme was then rolled out over eight weeks.
The training focussed on:
Assumptions and unconscious bias
Challenge preconceived ideas Funeral Arrangers may have towards the affordability of different families or their funeral preferences based on the customers’ location and appearance
Effective Communication
To provide Funeral Arrangers with insight that families ‘don’t know what they don't know’ and for many, this will be the first funeral they will organise and may not be aware of the options available for a personalised funeral
Conversation Cycle
Rebuilding conversations with families from the ground up with a strong focus on listening skills and asking questions to explore subjective statements such as a ‘cheap’, ‘quickly’, ‘formal’, ‘traditional’ etc.
Being Curious
Supporting the new proposition launch and offering appropriate choices without being perceived as ‘selling’
Our performance
Co-op Funeralcare is still running this programme and business performance figures are covered by an NDA with Co-op as their preferred supplier.
“Check back soon for more results”
