By Jay Jacobson
There is a moment in nearly every arrangement conference when the conversation changes.
A family may arrive talking about cremation, price, or what Mom said she wanted. They may begin with, “We don’t want anything elaborate,” or “We just want something simple.”
Then somebody tells a story.
Maybe it’s about Dad standing at the grill during every family reunion. Maybe it’s the hymn Mom sang every Sunday morning. Suddenly, the conversation stops being about disposition and becomes about a person.
After more than four decades in funeral service, I’ve watched that transition countless times. It’s why I’ve always believed the arrangement conference is about much more than completing paperwork or selecting merchandise.
But there’s something we sometimes overlook.
The family’s experience with us probably began long before they sat across the arrangement table. It began when someone answered the telephone.
Johnson Consulting Group’s 2026 Trends & Insights from Performance Tracker X examines 654,327 sales and family-survey records collected over five years. The report contains plenty to consider about cremation, pricing, customer experience, staffing and changing consumer preferences.
Taken together, however, the findings point toward something bigger: The future of funeral service will increasingly depend upon our ability to establish trust and communicate value, beginning with the very first interaction with a family.
The First Call Is Part of the Funeral
Think about what may be happening on the other end of that first telephone call.
Someone may have died minutes earlier. A daughter may be calling from another state with no idea what happens next. A spouse may be sitting beside a hospital bed. Someone may simply ask, “How much is cremation?”
Too often, we hear that last question and immediately classify the caller.
Price shopper.
But what if price is simply the only question the caller knows how to ask?
They may not understand the choices available. They don’t know our terminology. They may not even know what information they should be seeking.
They just know someone they love has died, or is about to die, and they need help.
That makes the first call much more than an information-gathering exercise.
It is the beginning of the relationship.
The Performance Tracker X research gives us good reason to take that interaction seriously. Families who identified initial contact as a reason for choosing the funeral home produced a Net Promoter Score of 95.1.
Before the arrangement conference. Before the service. Before the obituary, flowers, cemetery or merchandise, someone has already begun shaping how that family feels about the funeral home.
The first call isn’t what happens before customer experience.
The first call is customer experience.
Are We Creating the Price Shopper?
The research also challenges an assumption our profession makes too easily.
Price matters, but perhaps not nearly as much as we think. Among traditional burial families, only 3.6% identified price as a reason for selecting the funeral home. Even among direct-cremation families, where price sensitivity would reasonably be expected to be higher, the figure was 10.8%.
Previous experience, location, reputation and recommendations remain important factors.
That raises an interesting question.
If someone calls three funeral homes and asks, “How much is direct cremation?” and all three simply provide a number, what have we given that consumer to compare?
Price.
We may have taught the caller to make the decision based on the very thing we later complain they are using to make it.
Families deserve transparent pricing. The answer is not to avoid the question. It is to answer it and continue the conversation.
“Absolutely. I can explain that for you. Before I do, may I ask a couple of questions, so I understand what your family needs?”
Now we aren’t avoiding price.
We’re adding context. We’re listening. We’re building a relationship.
And we may discover that the family asking for “just cremation” wants something more, not because we sold them something, but because we helped them understand possibilities they didn’t know existed.
Cremation and the Question of Value
The report shows that 71.2% of cremation cases represented in the data were direct cremations. Only about 29% included either traditional services or a memorial service.
It would be easy to view that strictly through a revenue lens.
I think that would be a mistake.
Perceived-value scores among cremation families remain strong. Direct cremation scored 933.4, traditional cremation 934.0, and cremation with a memorial service 934.1.
Families choosing direct cremation aren’t necessarily saying funeral service has no value.
Perhaps they are telling us:
“We understand the value of what we selected.”
Our challenge is whether we have done an equally good job explaining the value of everything else that is possible.
There is an important distinction between selling families more and helping families understand more.
The first is transactional.
The second is professional.
A family may still choose direct cremation after a thoughtful conversation. We should respect that choice. But they shouldn’t discover weeks later that they wished the grandchildren had been given an opportunity to say goodbye, friends had been invited to gather, military honors had been presented, faith had been expressed, or stories had been shared simply because nobody explained those possibilities.
That isn’t a sales failure.
It’s a communication failure.
Communication Must Be Trained
That brings us back to the telephone.
We train embalming. We train regulatory compliance. We train software, arrangement procedures, merchandise and documentation.
But how intentionally do we train someone to answer the first call?
Not simply which questions to ask, but how to ask them.
Can they express condolences without sounding scripted? Slow down when someone is overwhelmed? Gather contact information naturally? Explain pricing clearly? Ask open-ended questions? Recognize emotion? Listen for what isn’t being said?
Most importantly, can they leave the caller feeling:
“I called the right place. These people can help me.”
The report’s interviews with high-performing funeral homes reinforce this point. Successful firms repeatedly emphasize soft-skills training, customer experience, feedback, accountability and personal rapport.
They aren’t simply hoping they hire naturally gifted communicators.
They’re developing them.
The First Call Is a Leadership Issue
How the telephone is answered isn’t simply the responsibility of the receptionist, apprentice, funeral director or answering service.
It is a leadership responsibility.
Employees learn what matters by watching what leaders teach, inspect and reinforce.
If leadership constantly discusses case count and revenue but rarely discusses how families are treated on the telephone, employees receive a message.
If we spend thousands of dollars making the telephone ring but invest almost nothing preparing the person who answers it, we shouldn’t be surprised when opportunity disappears somewhere between “Hello” and “How much does cremation cost?”
We cannot advertise our way around a poor first conversation.
Communication is a professional skill. It can be taught, practiced, measured and coached.
And it should be.
What the Data Is Really Telling Us
Funeral service is changing. Cremation will continue reshaping its economics. Technology and Augmented Intelligence will give us increasingly sophisticated ways to analyze calls, understand consumer behavior and coach employees.
But technology doesn’t remove the human responsibility at the center of funeral service.
Someone still has to answer the telephone.
Someone still has to listen.
Someone still has to recognize uncertainty in another person’s voice.
Someone still has to ask the next thoughtful question.
The future of funeral service won’t be protected by convincing families to purchase the funeral we think they should have. It will be protected by becoming exceptionally good at listening, helping families understand their choices and creating experiences they believe were meaningful and worth the investment.
For all our conversations about what the future of funeral service will look like, perhaps one of its most important moments will remain remarkably familiar.
The telephone rings.
A family needs help.
And someone answers.
What happens next matters.
Sources
Johnson Consulting Group. 2026 Trends & Insights from Performance Tracker X. 2026. Analysis based on 654,327 sales and family-survey records collected over five years. Relevant findings include customer-experience metrics, perceived value, cremation and burial case mix, reasons families select funeral homes, initial-contact performance, arranger performance, customer-experience training, award-winner interviews and executive-summary findings.
Johnson Consulting Group. 2026 Trends & Insights from Performance Tracker X, award-winner interviews. The featured firms discuss intentional soft-skills development, standardized arrangement practices, early exposure to customer-experience metrics, personal rapport, employee accountability and ongoing training as components of high-performing family service.
About Jay Jacobson
Jay Jacobson is a licensed funeral director, consultant, author, speaker, and founder of Jacobson Professional Staffing in Ankeny, Iowa. Through JPS, he serves funeral homes and small businesses with professional staffing, interim leadership, removal technician training, CEU courses, and consulting services. His leadership work focuses on compassion, integrity, respect, accessibility, practical training, and helping funeral service professionals serve families with confidence and care.
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