Last month, I asked thousands of Funeral Professionals what they worried about the most. I received a very low response rate, which is typical for funeral professionals as they usually don’t participate in the destiny of their own industry. I did get a general idea of what they worry about. They seem to worry about the day to day challenges of planning a funeral and disposition. To can see their responses (Click Here).  What did surprise me is that no one worries about the actual funeral ceremony itself. They worried about the scheduling and logistics, such as the officiant and the organist showing up. As far as the funeral being a personable and healing experience to those attending…no one seems to worry about this at all! It seems strange to me that people called funeral directors rarely get involved in the funeral ceremony itself. Long ago funeral directors gave that responsibility to the clergy. The general public, driven by an aging boomer generation, no longer see the value of the traditional clergy <insert name here>, and their two thousand year old funeral rituals. Go figure?

The devaluation of the funeral experience is what funeral professionals should be worried about the most. As a funeral director, our greatest contribution should be creating a healing environment where people can come together for a memorable experience. The experience should promote those in attendance to support one another in their grief. The life of the deceased is the star and the overall theme is how that person’s life affected their world and the world of others. Since we have dropped the ball on this aspect of funerals, we have created a snowball effect of new things to worry about such as: Cremation Societies popping up in each and every town; Funeral and event planners working directly with hotels and catering halls because they can do it better themselves; and the price shoppers oh my!

 

Funeral Directors have created a new enemy by not paying attention to the needs of the families they serve, and their desire to have a positive funeral experience. The new enemy of the funeral is the word “JUST”! As in just cremate me and scatter my ashes in the garden. Just bury me in a plain pine box and have a party in my memory down at the club house. Hospice did such a great job and we already said our goodbyes so we won’t need a funeral service. We joined a cremation society so no funeral home is going to get my money! Does this sound familiar? The good news is that the general public is more spiritual then ever and really do want to have a memorable event. They just don’t want a funeral like the last three that they attended. So I’m not sitting here flapping my lips about the self inflicted gloom and doom of the funeral industry. Instead I will provide a solution. The solution is to take the control of the funeral away from the Clergy! Don’t worry about offending the clergy since they aren’t helping your business. You can still use clergy as required, but we need to take control of the funeral ceremony and become funeral planners instead of merely being the director of logistics. How funerals are experienced and how they make people feel is everything. Your future depends on it so become a part of it! For me the number one solution to the public’s disenchantment of funerals is the use of Certified Funeral Celebrants. They are trained in creating meaningful and personal celebrations of life that will leave those in attendance (your future clients) saying WOW! That’s the kind of funeral I want! There is no better form of advertising than doing “Good Funerals”.

So what I am saying is hire forward thinking-creative minded Funeral Directors that focus on the funeral experience for the client and their family and friends. Disenchanted, unmotivated, and lazy order taking funeral directors with no creativity Need Not Apply! Having strong communication skills and being “A Good Listener” will help to establish a more sharing and involved consumer that will really get the creative juices flowing.

The funeral home that partners with Celebrants will be growing their brand and will be positively shared by the word of mouth within the community. By the way, word of mouth is now social media and if you aren’t online being involved in the online conversations, then attending all of those Chamber & Rotary meetings is a complete waste of your time and money. If you don’t have the time or the staff at your funeral home to maintain an online social media presence, then you can hire professionals to maintain and grow your funeral homes social network. I would recommend entrusting the team over at Disrupt Media to manage your funeral homes online social reputation and presence.

So how can we do better funerals? That is what Funeral Directors should be worried about! With that in mind, I would love to hear more ideas on how can we create a more memorable and personable funeral experience. Open the flood gates that are holding back your ideas and share!

Most funeral directors know that one of the most important traits that someone in the funeral industry can possess is being a good listener. The problem is that most of us are so busy talking that we forget to really engage in listening. However, superior listening skills are essential to being a good, effective and compassionate funeral director. At a time when grief hampers the communication skills of most clients, being able to determine what a person is truly saying and truly wants is crucial. There is a lot of information being shared when funeral arrangements are being made. We need to not only be good listeners but also be able to create a trusting environment that stimulates the important conversations that need to take place. Fortunately, good listening skills can be learned.

The basics of good listening skills

Being an effective listener is a skill, just like reading or writing good letters. Some of the tenets of being a good listener include…

1. Assume everyone has something interesting to say. Everyone who is truly speaking from their heart has interesting and thought-provoking things to share, maintains Nancy Kline in her book, “Time to Think.” Throw aside any assumptions or pre-conceived opinions based on a person’s dress, age or address.

2. Create conditions that are right for listening…and sharing. The best conditions for sharing information (and for listening) are situations where there is little tension. Such spaces are quiet, gentle and unhurried. For funeral directors and their staff, this means creating a peaceful oasis where you can meet clients as well as leaving your phone and other electronic devices behind in your office. You might also want to have soothing music playing and a calm décor, even a scented candle burning can help. Allow more time than you think you might need. You don’t want to be fidgeting or looking at your watch while you are trying to listen. These actions all hinder good listening and good sharing. The family you are serving should feel like they only family you are serving when handling funeral arrangments.

3. Pay attention. This may sound obvious, but too many times we are busy thinking about what we have to do next or what we are going to say in return that we miss a large part of what a person is saying to us. On average, only 20 percent of what we hear makes it into our short term memory! No wonder effective communication is so tricky.

Another interesting thing happens when we pay attention, according to Kline–the person speaking enunciates more clearly and organizes his or her thoughts more succinctly. In short, the better we listen, the better they speak and the better we communicate. The logic is simple; when our thoughts wander and we pay poor attention, the speaker starts to feel like they aren’t valued and what they are saying isn’t important. They become self-conscious, hampering their communication skills. In the funeral industry, where many of the people we speak with are already stressed by grief, paying attention is especially important.

Paying attention also means no interrupting and not finishing the other person’s sentences. As a funeral director, it also means waiting until the person has finished what they intended to say before offering advice. Be prepared to ask pointed questions and converse about everyday things that will open doors that might not otherwise open. Many people are usually private about their family and loved one’s. Building trust and getting people to understand that to make a funeral as special and unique as the life lived, we need and have this one chance to make a funeral personal. Too often, we are tempted to pigeon-hole a client into a funeral plan we’ve used many times before…whether or not that’s what the client wants. Today more then ever the easy way is not the way when it comes to meaningful funerals. Using the services of a certified funeral Celebrant will also help create a more personalized and meaningful funeral or memorial, because Celebrants are more trained to draw out and capture the kind of information that can be used in a more personal ceremony. Clergy does not usually use such an extensive interview process and some do not meet with the family at all. It just kills me when the clergy will read the obituary as part of the ceremony (Huge Fail).

4. Don’t think for the speaker. Helping people doesn’t always mean thinking for them. You might assume that since you are the funeral expert and they are coming to you for help that it’s up to you to decide what’s best for them. A better plan of action is to hear them out. Often customers will tell you what the best solution to their perceived problems are if you wait for them to finish talking and not jump right in with your perfect “solution.” In general, advises Kline, people are more apt to be happy with the outcome if they arrive at the solution themselves than when you tell them what they should do.

Are women better listeners?

Pop culture has maintained for years that women are better listeners than men. How many jokes have you heard where the wife exclaims, “You just don’t listen to me” to her husband? There is actually some valid science behind this claim. It seems that men and women process language and communication differently. Men listen with half of their brain, while women engage their entire brain while listening. The jury is out whether that finding makes women better at listening. However, if you have a female on your staff, you might want to include adding interviews with prospective clients to her job description. According to at least one study, women ARE more empathetic than men.

Listening to the generations

The listening skills that have worked well for you over the years in your business may not be the ones that will serve you well in the future. Increasingly, we are dealing with members of the large baby boomer generation as their elderly parents begin to pass away. Soon, it will be their children (and grandchildren) with whom will be talking about end-of-life arrangements. These younger clients are more direct and less patient, in general, and will require us to have additional listening skills to be the best funeral service providers we can be.

• Listening to Baby Boomers. The Baby Boomer generation (those born between 1946 and 1964) are currently in the midst of making end-of-life arrangements for their parents as well as pre-planning their own funerals. This is an independent generation who are used to doing things their own way. They want funerals to be more personalized, to be more life celebrations and less somber affairs. This generation is more apt to break the traditional funeral “norms” and opt for things like contemporary music, a celebrant instead of a priest and a beach setting instead of a church. This group is also embracing more enthusiastically the concept of pre-planning their own funerals. With more than 76 million Baby Boomers in the United States (one quarter of the US population), this could become a very lucrative market for those in the funeral industry. Given this generation’s need for customization, good listening skills will be more important than ever.
• Listening to Millennials. Millennials are those born in the 1980s through the early 21st century. In many cases, these are the children of Baby Boomers. Unlike their parents, these consumers are much more technology-oriented. For funeral directors, that may mean being able to communicate with them via Skype or Facetime rather than in person. This group is also more likely to prefer texts to phone calls. However, changing the technology doesn’t mean that you can stop listening. You just have to adjust your approach to make them feel the most comfortable. One additional caveat about this group: ignore them at your peril. While taking the wrong approach or not listening to a Baby Boomer may lose you a client, ignoring a Millennial will also lose you their friends and their social contacts. This generation is much more social and much more willing to share their positive (and negative) experiences than their parents.

The bottom line

As we approach the end of the year and the beginning of 2016, now is a great time to evaluate your listening skills and see where there might be room for improvement. As our clientele shifts to include younger generations, the future of our businesses may just depend on it.

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Because of her academic training in anthropology, I thought I’d ask Kim to open this post with just a short examination of funerals as rites of passage. (She’s got a Master’s Degree in the field and has spent over 40 years in the cross-cultural study of funeral ceremonies.) “The fellows whose work I studied in grad school: 19^th century anthropologists

Arnold van Gennep, Robert Hertz and their 20^th century counterparts Maurice Bloch and Victor Turner; shaped the way I saw these events. It was Gennep who first proposed them to be “rites of passage” marked by three distinct phases. The field work of the others, Hertz, Turner (an intellectual “hero” of mine) and Bloch refined his theory, focusing on the idea of liminality and the changes in social and psychological identities of survivors. Their primary point is a simple one: a “good” funeral ceremony is a rite of passage which is made up of a series of activities and varying states-of-being; and is, by its very definition, transformative.”

But it appears the funeral ceremonies here in the United States are not at all transformative. In fact, the participants of the 2012 Funeral Foundation Study did absolutely nothing to hide their dissatisfaction with what they know to be a traditional funeral.

“Traditional funerals are about death,” said a fellow named Rick. “It’s just about broken relationships and there is nothing posit

ive about it”, he continued. Another described a funeral service as “a lonely, lifeless tomb”; while a woman named Jody emphatically declared funerals are “mindless”. “They leave you sad at the end just like you were in the middle”, said John; in other words, there is no transformation.

And there’s no sense of community either. “When I go (to) a funeral,” Rick explained, “I feel like I am alone. You’re just there as an individual to say goodbye to this person. It’s depressing and it’s lonely.”

“Traditional services are almost a lecture of sorts,” observed Becky; who went on to say “Some…who preside over death ceremonies don’t allow for any release of sorrow. In fact, the ceremony itself makes participants more sorrowful. “I almost think of traditional funerals as puppetry,” she concluded “with someone in control manipulating the people in attendance to act the way they feel is appropriate.”

The consensus of participants was perhaps best articulated by Marilyn B., who simply said: “Nobody wants to go to a funeral. They’d rather be at Starbucks.” Uh, oh; that’s trouble. And it gets worse, because the study declared the trouble begins with the way we see ourselves and how we define the work we do.

The Underlying “Disconnect”

It seems when a funeral director sits down with a family; it’s almost like two people, each of whom speaks a different language, meeting in the room. (Chances are there’s going to be a lot of talking, but very little constructive conversation.) That’s what we call disconnect.

The researchers of the study qualified the nature of this separation. “Funeral industry executives see themselves as caring creators: healing wounds, helping to write the story of a life, building foundations and bridges to the future; weaving and mendin

g the fabric of a community. But consumers don’t see them the same way; in fact, they see funeral directors as robotic rulers. “At worst, they are bullies,” said Marilyn H.; while another woman recognized the reasons why: “They are there to make everything run efficiently. They’ve done this so many

times they are tough, emotionally. They have to switch on to their remote, automatic, robotic.” Study participant John said, “They remind me of some sort of machinery. Not loud, but repetitive. They have a job to do, there are things that need to be done and the guy is doing it.”

Here’s what I think: this disconnect is a wall that has been carefully built by funeral directors. For generations they have lurked in the shadows hiding in a cloak of secrecy. It’s been easier for them to keep the mystery in funeral service and keep the consumers guessing. Yes they like to think of themselves as caring helpers but the complex nature of funeral service has caused them to often seek predictable paths that help them maintain the comfort level they desire to simply get the job done with the least amount of stress possible (and the highest degree of profit).

Funeral directors are “pros” at diffusing any conflicts that come up in the arrangement process. They are not about offering up options that would begin arguments and create more questions of their abilities. Funeral arranging needs to be a creative process that needs to open door to solutions that will embrace individual needs.

Funeral directors prefer the pick A, B, C or D option nice and tidy ducks in a row with no surprises. While this is expedient, it’s the opposite of what needs to take place to create a funeral service that is as unique as the deceased and the special needs of the survivors.

When funeral directors seek out the easy path, the results become more generic and the resulting funeral is not special. So much so that those in attendance and especially the ones paying the bill will be left with a feeling of “why bother”, and then they say the most dreaded words in funeral service: “Just cremate me and scatter the ashes. Use the saved money to have a party in my memory.” And then they have that party, and we funeral directors look from the outside and say “Gee, I could have helped them plan a much better party that would be so much more meaningful and memorable. I have the know-how and all the best connections to have done this right.” But guess what? It’s too late.

Robin Heppell candidly addressed the issue of “disconnect” in a recent interview with Kim, putting the blame squarely on a primary source of funeral home profits: the casket. “I do think the executives want to see themselves as caring creators; but as a whole, I don’t think they successfully transmit that vision through to their licensed staff because the casket still plays a big role in funeral home profits. If there was little or no profits from caskets, they would be closer to achieving their ideal of being caring creators. As long as caskets have a potential of providing a large amount of profit to a funeral home, their will the conscious or subconscious desire of greater casket sales–and the public isn’t interested in caskets.”

He went on to say, “Until the funeral home is in alignment with consumers, there’s going to be this disconnect. I think the thing is–when you’re able to almost let it go–and truly just give the family what they want and offer things they may not have realized you could, there will be more synergy between the funeral homes and the families they serve.

Okay, so consumers do not see funeral directors as the kind of creative resource they are seeking. But it gets worse. One respondent, Marilyn H., spoke about what it was like to plan her sister-in-law’s service: “It felt like we were buying a car.” She went on to describe the situation: “…we were with a man part of the time, then we were with a woman, and then he would come back. Then they put us in this room and on every single wall there was stuff you could buy. It was awful, like (when) you go to a carnival and they have all the prizes.” Synergy? How about just shooting for an experience that is less than “awful”?

How Can You Deliver the Kind of Funeral Service Today’s Consumers Want?

When asked to speak about their ideal end-of-life service, one participant said “A memorial service is about celebrating someone’s milestones and accomplishments. For the survivors, it’s good to rehash it all. If they’re in a grieving state, misery does love company. The companionship, the camaraderie. It’s kind of a support group. If someone is really grieving, it helps them cope with it better by sharing these common experiences.”

Another shared “I want plenty of dancing and laughing and having a great time.” What Arlene said next (about a friend’s funeral she had recently attended) was most descriptive of the transformation consumers are looking for.  “When we left, everybody was laughing and talking about the person because we saw all the happy moments…everyone was in a festive mood. We didn’t grieve her life, we celebrated her life. I didn’t leave heartbroken. When I walked away from there, I thought they were…still with me. I (was) basking in her achievements and her friendship.”

You can see the problem: today’s consumer doesn’t just want to just “get through” the funeral. They want to create a memorable and healing experience that will form a platform which is strong enough to carry their memories into the future and help them to feel that they are actually part of the legacy of the life lived.

As a funeral director, I believe our biggest value is ability to create a healing environment where people can come together for a memorable experience. This experience should promote those in attendance to support each other in their grief. The life of the deceased is the star and the theme is how that life affected their world and the world of others.

What Does All This Mean for Funeral Home Owner/Operators?

What we may see as the “special need” of today’s consumers–the desire for a truly personal, improvisational and celebratory event which is transformative for all concerned–does create busy work for funeral directors; work they may not have the time or the skill sets to perform. But there is one thing you can do to reduce the workload:

• Hire more specialized part-time employees and rely upon them for the more creative tasks. You should not have to hire more licensed funeral directors to meet the unique needs of today’s families. In truth, doing so could be counterproductive in the long run. Not only could it drive up the cost of the average funeral, chances are it won’t provide families with what they want.

If a specially trained Master of Ceremonies who knows just how to draw on all aspects of a life lived and craft all that information into a well-balanced and touching ceremony would help, then you should be hiring the best Certified Life Celebrant you can find. If you cannot find a good celebrant in your area, you should find a person that you think would be good and pay for their training. (Check out “Not Your Grandparent’s Funeral“, published “way back” in 2012, for a look at the enormous value a certified celebrant can bring to the service.)

• Change the way your licensed staff make funeral arrangements. This is critical; funeral directors must focus more on the event and how it will make people feel. They need to be more aggressive in conveying the options when it comes to the location, look and feel of the ceremony. And the feel of the service can be a very positive reflection on their funeral home.
• Use the latest bells and whistles available. Today there’s a wealth of them: video tributes, custom photo blankets, programs, funeral favors, keepsakes and memorial websites. If any of these will help support the goal of creating a healing experience; then why not use them to the best of your ability?

The key lies in providing value to the consumer. Value that they can feel moved by. If our services don’t move people to say “Wow! That’s what I want when I die!” we will all become disposers of the dead as people flock to cremation societies and event planners. Never forget the clock is ticking. Chances are your attitude, demeanor and operational skill sets are already costing you customers. If you don’t decide to change your approach, the families in your service area will simply leverage the Internet to get what they want if they don’t feel your funeral home is up to their special needs.

Let’s Talk

We know you won’t disagree with the fact that consumers are turning away from “traditional funerals” in favor of more celebratory, life-oriented services. But we have made some strong statements here today which you might disagree with; statements like:

1. It’s unfortunate that funeral directors have long defined a funeral as “a traditional service for the deceased at a chapel or church with the casket present”.  “It’s the biggest screw-up ever,” said Rob Heppell, who went on to say it’s high time we omitted the focus on a casket. If consumers don’t want an expensive casket, and we define the very word as casket-oriented; then they won’t want it.”

2. As long as caskets have a potential of providing a large amount of profit to a funeral home, there will be the conscious or subconscious desire for greater casket sales. In promoting casket-oriented services funeral home owner/operators are guilty of putting their own needs first and in doing so are their own worst enemies.

3. Funeral directors intentionally built a wall between themselves and the consumer.  But, it has now been torn down by the information highway known as “the Internet”. Funeral directors can no longer play “cat and mouse” with the consumer.

4. It’s time for us to get real. We really need to work on our genuineness if we are to build any trust. If we can’t build a genuine trust people will do things themselves. Without trust we cannot effectively convey the real value of funeral service.

Don’t sit and stew over whatever’s on your mind; instead, speak up! Tell us what you’re thinking, and we’ll return the favor.