Understanding the last interaction date/time for care enquiries

When you view a list of care enquiries or an individual care enquiry you will see a last interaction date/time which represents when the last meaningful interaction with the care enquiry occurred.

In this article we'll look at which interactions are considered meaningful and how the last interaction date/time is used within CareHQ.

What counts as a meaningful interaction?

The last interaction date and time is set when certain events occur or actions are taken in relation to a care enquiry that are considered to be meaningful (as opposed to administrative tasks such as updating a spelling mistake in a care seeker's name).

The following events and actions will trigger an update to the last interaction date/time:

• A care enquiry transitions to a new stage in the sales journey (e.g. Spoken to > Visit booked).
• An action is added or marked as completed for the care enquiry.
• The care enquiry is added to, or removed from, a care home's waiting list.
• A comment is added to the care enquiry.
• A message (email or SMS) is sent to, or received from, one of the key contacts associated with the care enquiry.
• A key contact is added to the care enquiry.
• A document is added to the care enquiry.

What is the last interaction date/time used for?

The last interaction date/time helps in a couple of really important ways; it makes it easy to check that care enquiries are being followed up on in a timely manner, and it helps to ensure that care seeker data isn't retained longer than is necessary.

Alongside the care enquiry listing page, we recommend using the sales pipeline dashboard to check that care enquiries have been followed up on. Within the sales pipeline dashboard, enquiries are broken down into columns by the stage they are at within the sales journey and against each care enquiry you will see how long it has been since the last interaction. Care enquiries with no interaction for a prolonged period can be quickly identified and reviewed to determine how best to progress the enquiry (or potentially to close it).

The problem with keeping care enquiries open indefinitely

In some cases contact with a care seeker will be lost during the sales process and you can find that a care enquiry remains open for an extended period. If you review care enquiries regularly you'll have a good feel for when this has happened and it's time to close the care enquiry.

However, in our experience it's not uncommon for care enquiries to remain open for far longer than intended. In fact, often when we help clients move from other CRMs we find open care enquiries going back over a number of years.

Retaining care seeker data indefinitely can cause problems such as;

• reducing the accuracy of reports
• breaking data retention rules put in place by your organisation in line with the UK Data Protection Act.

CareHQ automatically anonymises care enquiries 12 months after they have been closed, in line with your data retention rules. However, open care enquiries are not anonymised as this would risk removing data from an active lead.

To address this problem CareHQ monitors open care enquiries and automatically closes any enquiry without a meaningful interaction within the past 6 months. This means that data for a care enquiry is retained at most 18 months from the point at which there has been no meaningful interaction.