Nursing Staffing Agency: Keeping Your Clients Once You Secure Contracts

The challenge facing many new or existing nursing staffing agencies is keeping your contracts with hospitals, nursing homes or long term care facilities once you secure a contracts. A lot of time and money is spent securing contracts so the last thing you want is to lose the business you worked so hard to do to acquire.

Losing a contract may be tied directly to your actions or to the actions of employees. Whatever the reason is that you lost the contract at the end of reasoning is just the fact that you lost potential income and future relationships with this facility. Getting these contracts back is one of the most difficult things to do, if you can ever get the contract back once you have lost it.

That is why I really believe in creating a public relations campaign with the contracts you have and to keep the contracts by making the client feel they are the most important thing to you. The reasons why this is critical is that when you have issues that arise, those issues hopefully will not be the reason why you are dropped from future business.

Back in my early years of my career I was working as an x-ray technologist for a large medical staffing agency. I always performed excellent in my assignments and tried to make happy the clients I dealt with. I was the type of employee that many of the hospitals were glad I showed up to help them cover the shift for the day.

It was not until I was promoted to a salesperson that I realized how important it was that employees represent the company well because those employees will make or break your company. But, we cannot always control how employees interact with our clients and therefore we will find out problems once we get a call from the facility that had a negative interaction with our employees.

This negative interaction at times will leave a negative impact for the client, especially if it’s the first time you send someone, or if the client has experienced one negative candidate after negative candidate and we do nothing to fix the issue. The key to keeping contracts is dealing with issues as they arise and reminding the candidate you are here to fix the issues.

I have found that building a relationship with your clients from the very beginning won’t eliminate problems, but will help them dumping you the moment you do have a problem. Hospitals greatest frustration with staffing agencies is the lack of perceived eagerness from employees, they at times view us as we just want to get paid for the warm body. Your job is to make your clients feel that you are creating a relationship with them for a long lasting approach to your company’s mission.

I realized early on that it is less expensive to talk to your clients at the beginning once you secure contracts, than it is to try to regain a contract you lost. It is easier to change the candidate than it is to try to regain a contract once you lost it. Talking and communicating constantly with your clients is critical and crucial to the success for your staffing agency.

You will work very hard to secure contracts, you will spend money to secure contracts, and you will communicate with perspective clients and have meetings telling your story to secure contracts. You will spend a lot of energy, the last thing you want it to lose business for misunderstandings. Very simple rule of thumb I have to keeping contracts, talk to your clients.

Keeping contracts and securing contracts is the lifeblood of your staffing agency.