Raising Tech

Welcome to Raising Tech Podcast Resident Exclusives. My name is Amanda. and once a month we have a featured episode completely dedicated to resident technology including education, common issues, tips and tricks and more.

These podcast episodes are to educate, inform, and update residents on today’s technology world.

Today’s episode is going to educate you on how to recognize and avoid malicious emails. You can listen to today’s episode on all podcast platforms, but we strongly encourage you to watch the video demonstration on YouTube. Today’s demonstration is just one example of the many technology classes we offer through our Tech@Home program.

Without further ado, we have James Peck, our Tech@Home manager. I hope you enjoy.

Hello everybody. My name is James Peck and welcome to our Tech@Home scams and phishing emails presentation. I’d like to introduce you to some common scams that I see on the day to day and teach you how you can recognize them and avoid them in the future. [00:01:00] So the first thing that you need to understand is the number one rule.

If something looks suspicious on your computer, it most likely is. You need to know how scammers operate. Being informed is the best defense for this because scammers are everywhere. You might be familiar with this from unsolicited phone calls, emails, and text messages. Scammers will hide behind fake names, fake stories, fake companies, and often they operate out of foreign jurisdictions that protect them from facing justice.

So some general advice is be cautious. Don’t talk to people that you don’t know. This is especially true on social media. Don’t share information with strangers. And today, anything that you post or share online can be used against you by scammers, especially if what you post is public to everybody. In the past, you may have been taught to look for red flags.

Check for spelling errors, mismatching fonts, check for robocalls or people who don’t sound real, [00:02:00] or just look for lies or false statements. These are a baseline understanding of scams, but today we’re going to go over some more advanced computer scams and how to tell what things look suspicious going back to the number one rule. Some common scams that I run into sometimes we’ll see IRS scams. So you may receive emails from government agencies especially the IRS. If you get emails from them or if you see something bearing an IRS logo, don’t follow the instructions in the email necessarily. What you’ll want to do is, you’ll want to go navigate to the website of the agency that’s sending you the email, and you can log in there.

Typically if it’s something urgent, the IRS or any government agency will send you mail so always keep that in mind. And just avoid clicking on shady links or following instructions that don’t seem quite right in the email. Another common scam are emails claiming to be from Microsoft. So Microsoft or Windows or Office 365 or anything [00:03:00] else will not send you unsolicited emails about your computer.

Never call Microsoft if you’re ever given a phone number or anything like that ask yourself a couple of questions. So when you look at this email on the right here, does the email threaten you? Does it coerce you into doing something immediately? These are all red flags that you should look for when you’re evaluating if an email or a message on your computer is legitimate or not.

As you can see on the right here in this example email, it’s telling us very plainly that if you don’t verify your mailbox, we will force to block your account. Aside from the grammatical errors this is using a sense of urgency. So if you ever feel this in an email or a message don’t feel pressured immediately to take action because most likely it is a scam and they’re trying to get something from you.

Another very common scam that I see are invoice scams. So these will usually come in as text messages or as emails and they’ll bear a logo of a company and the company will be claiming to charge you hundreds of dollars for some service [00:04:00] that you’ve never signed up for or recognize. None of these are legitimate.

Never call any phone numbers that you see in these emails or reply to the email itself. Most commonly, I see fake emails from PayPal, Amazon, Geek Squad or like McAfee or other antivirus companies. None of these actually originate from these companies and they are just used as a way to get your attention and get you to click on a link or to call a phone number.

If you are actually concerned about anything that’s happening with your bank account or your cards, always go to your bank’s website and check for unauthorized transactions there. Sometimes these emails will claim that you have 24 hours to do certain things. Again, this goes back to looking for the red flags of creating a sense of urgency or coercion.

If you feel any of these feelings while you’re going through these messages, it’s most likely a scam.

Next are virus scams. They’ll use messaging like your PC is infected, there’s a virus in your mailbox, [00:05:00] security alert, etc. Usually they’ll have antivirus names and logos plastered on them, like McAfee, Norton, Avast or some others. When you receive these emails, like the one on the right, never click on the links inside them, because you don’t know where that’s going to take you.

So In this example on the right here, there’s an email with some interesting grammatical choices that tells you that ” our spider detected five deadly Trojans in your mailbox today.” This is not technically correct, and it’s something that they’re, again, in the next line saying if it’s left unchecked, they’ll completely shut down your email.

This is far beyond something that is possible of happening. You can ignore this. They’re just trying to get you to click on that link down below, which takes you to, in orange, that HTTP scan. avast. com. So this would be an example of a malicious link or a bad link. So what happens if you click on [00:06:00] that? The most common thing that happens is it will open up a website which will display a message and attempt to lock up your computer. One example of this message on screen here, it’s the typical Microsoft Windows scam where they say that they’ve detected a virus and that you need to call a support technician.

This is typically what happens when you click on these links and emails, and then it will really get you stuck. This kind of falls under a category of pop up scams. These will mostly appear if you accidentally click on a link in an email, or click on an advertisement on a website. These have no legitimacy and they’ll use buzzwords to create a sense of urgency to call a phone number.

After you call that phone number, which you should never do, they claim to have technicians on the phone who will help you fix your issue. What these technicians actually are professional scammers who sit in call centers and their help is trying to get your banking information and to get money out of you in order to fix a [00:07:00] non existent problem that they created.

Going back to this pop up, if you’re having difficulties closing this pop up usually the X buttons won’t work or the X buttons and the corners will disappear. You can always go to a trusted peer to remove this pop up from your computer. It’s completely benign. They don’t actually have any malware or virus put on your computer

after that pops up. It’s just simply a little website trick that makes it very difficult to close the window. If the pop up is obnoxious, if it’s making beeping sounds, or if it’s reading off a robot script you can just hold down the power button on your computer, and you can turn it off, and just take a break until you can get assistance with it.

And another note just for your own information, this is what an example of a real virus detected message looks like. On the right here are two different pop ups. These are from Windows, so on the top is a Windows 10 message, and on the bottom is a Windows 11 message. These are very small windows that will show up on the bottom right [00:08:00] corner of your screen.

These are not emails, and they’re not intrusive at all. Windows has a built in antivirus called Windows Defender or Windows Security. And what it does is if it detects a real threat, as they call it, which would be virus or a malware sample or anything like that on your computer it will take action and it will stop the threat.

It does this in the background, it does it without your permission, and it does it for free, which is great. And it will usually use language like ThreatFound, ThreatBlocked. And if you ignore this message, that’s completely fine because Windows Defender has taken care of the threat for you. And pop up scams these are a lot more common than these real virus detected messages.

You will probably run into a hundred or a thousand pop up scams before you actually end up with a real virus on your computer.

So this takes us into the second half of this presentation, which is identifying phishing emails also called scam [00:09:00] emails. How do you identify these? What we’re going to go over is how to check the domain of the email. We’re going to go over what that means and how to do it. Every organization has a domain name.

And usually a domain name is the same thing as a website URL. For example, Microsoft, the company, owns Microsoft.com. If you visit Microsoft.com in a web browser, this will take you to their website. Amazon, likewise, owns Amazon.com. Harvard, for example, has harvard.edu. So your domain is typically a name dot something.

Usually it’s dot com. That’s the most common, but it can change depending on the company organization or institution. And likewise, emails have domains too. And you can use these domains in the email to judge the authenticity of the email that you receive.

First, you’re going to open up an email and in here you can check the sender’s address. The sender’s address can usually be found at the top of the email. It will show maybe the name of the person [00:10:00] who sent the email and usually you’ll see a string of something at something. com and if this doesn’t show up you can click on the name of the person who sent you the email and it should reveal their email address.

So ask yourself, when you see this sender’s email address. Does the domain match who the sender claims to be? So let’s look at an example of what I’m talking about. So here would be an email address from john.smith@parasolalliance.com. So that first part to the left of the @ symbol is the name of the sender.

So John.Smith. And to the right of the at symbol is the domain, ParasolAlliance.com. So in this, john.smith@parasolalliance.com, this is your entire sender’s address and it’s just someone else’s email address who sent you the email. So you can look at this and go parasolalliance.com is the associated domain to the Parasol Alliance company.

So this came from Parasol Alliance and [00:11:00] probably from someone named John Smith. And you can use this information for every email that you receive. And you can check the sender’s address and try and make sense of it. So another example the fraud department at Chase Bank. So their email address is fraud at chase.com. So again, on the left of the @ symbol is fraud. So referring to the fraud department and then the domain is chase.com. So when you see an email from this. You can just ask yourself, is chase.com the official domain of Chase Bank? In this case it is. So you can be assured that this email came from Chase Bank.

So let’s look at some examples of things that are not from Chase Bank. So for example in the top here, you can see fraud chase, some numbers .com, at gmail.com. First of all, gmail.com is not the official Chase Bank domain, so you can write off that email immediately as being suspicious [00:12:00] or a phishing email.

Another example, fraud@realchasebank.com. In this case, the name on the email is correct, which is fraud. But the domain is not correct. It’s not realchasebank. com. It is chase .com. And a third example, FraudDep@ and then a bunch of letters. net. Again, that domain name is not chase. com. So you know that all of these email addresses did not come from Chase Bank and you can ignore them.

So let’s look at some examples of emails here. This is a very easy example of a scam email. It’s obnoxious and in your face. They use emojis and the subject line on the top there and lots of capital letters and exclamation points to get your attention. Just on the premise, you’re never going to receive free money in your email.

Likewise, this is a good example to take a look at who sent the email to you. So under the subject line in the second blue rectangle is the fake email address, [00:13:00] which is who sent you the email. So they give you a long nonsensical email address that sent you the email. And if you see something like that, just delete it immediately.

It’s all spam and they’re just trying to get you to click on a suspicious link. So let’s look at some examples that are less obvious. Here’s an email pretending to be Chase Bank. We’re going to pick on them frequently throughout this presentation. And just based on the body of the email itself, it looks legitimate. They bear the Chase logo, the English and the grammar used in it is correct, and they list some transactions there in the middle of the screen.

So they show several hundred dollars that was approved and declined. And then in the subject line, they show activity of your debit card on a specific date. Now this email may look legitimate, but there’s one easy thing that you can get to, which is checking the domain. So as you can see on the top here, this comes from the sender named Chase Fraud Alert.

But [00:14:00] the domain is admin@vagaro.com. Like we said, does the person who this email is claiming to be match the sender address? In this case, not at all. We don’t know who vagaro.com is, it doesn’t matter. If they’re claiming to be Chase, we know that it’s a scam and we can immediately ignore this email and delete it.

So another scam that is very common is USPS or shipment delays coming through emails and text messages. So here’s an example of an email pretending to be the U.S. Postal Service and they’re explaining how your package wasn’t delivered on a specific date. Now in this email, you can see it’s just a pipeline to get you to click on a link, which will take you to a bad website.

 You do not want to do this. We’ll get into why later, but up here, just going back to checking the domain of the sender. You can see it comes from somebody on the top there called U.S. Postal Shipping. And then we see a very suspicious. Sender [00:15:00] address there, just lots of random letters and numbers @ a bunch of random letters.

Nothing that came from anything that says @usps.gov or the official USPS site. Again, you can completely ignore this.

So why don’t we click on links and unknown emails? Links or buttons and emails can take you anywhere. So for example, we have www.google.com. You can see that it’s underlined there, and that means that it’s a link. And if you click on that, it will take you to a website. Now, just because the link text says google.

com doesn’t mean that it’s actually going to take you there. In fact, it can take you to any website that it wants. So there’s another example below it where it just says, Please Click Here and it’s underlined. If you click on that, it will take you to a website. Most commonly, these links will take you to what are called fake login pages, but I’m getting ahead of myself.

Let’s take a look at what this looks like in an [00:16:00] email. So here is an example of an email that went out that they give you a reason to click on something. And if you click on it, it will take you to a website. So you can actually figure out where these links are going to take you by hovering your mouse over them.

Do not click on the link, but if you hover your cursor over that kindly click here or any button in the bottom right of your computer screen. There will be a small bit of text that shows up, which will tell you the website that you’re going to travel to if you click on that link. So in this example, if you hover your cursor over kindly click here, it says that it’s going to take you to udelsecure.jimdo.com. So this is just an example domain for this email, but that’s how you would do it. So if you do click on one of these links, one common thing that will happen is it will try and show you what’s called a fake login page.

So fake login pages are a way for scammers to steal your. [00:17:00] Passwords and your usernames to accounts without you even realizing it. So in this example, you will be landing on a page that’s called Office 365 login. It will look like a legitimate login page if you aren’t paying too close of attention, but there are some signs that this is not legitimate and you should not enter your information into this website.

So first is checking the domain of the website. So at the top of your web browser there it says that this is bdshelton. com. So this is not office. com. This is not microsoft. com. So because this doesn’t match what the login page is posing to be, you immediately know that this is a fake website and it’s very dangerous for you to put your information in here because scammers will control the site.

They will take your email and your password that you type into that box and they will turn around as soon as you send that information to them, sign in as you, and they will steal your account. This happens all the time to individuals and [00:18:00] organizations. So it’s very important that you understand that this is a common scamming method.

And this is how you would look for it.

So another example of a scam email is this one. So this comes from an email called corporate@rightspaceme.com. Regardless of the sender address in this email, it actually has some personal information in it. Now, just because an email includes some of your personal information doesn’t give it legitimacy.

So in this email, it’s been redacted, but it would show the person’s full name and an old address that they’ve used. And it has a big flashy button that they’re trying to get you to click on, and it would take you to a suspicious link or a bad link. In this any kind of email like this that uses your personal information, it to try and get you to do something, disregard them, delete them, mark them as spam and avoid them at all costs. Some key takeaways here. Slow it down. So your scams are often designed to create a sense [00:19:00] of urgency. So take the time to ask questions and think things through spot check. So do your research to double check the details that you’re getting does what they’re telling you make sense in the email. Again, going back to some of those scams, some things seem nonsensical and some things that they tell you might not be standard protocol, so you always want to be aware of that.

 If there’s people asking you to do things, just stop. Don’t send things immediately. So no reputable person or agency will demand payment or your personal information on the spot. This again goes back to the Sense of urgency and red flags. This information was taken from a Google spokesperson to Fox news.

And that is the end of our presentation today. So thank you everybody for attending and we hope to see you on the next one. Thanks.

You can find us online at RaisingTechPodcast. com where you can see all of our episodes and contact us to provide feedback or submit an episode idea. We are on social media everywhere at Raising Tech Podcast. [00:20:00] If you enjoy Raising Tech, please leave us a review and share with a friend. Music is an original production by Tim Resig, one of our very own Parasol Alliance employees.

As always, thank you for listening.

Amber: Welcome to raising tech podcast. I’m your host, Amber Bardon. Today our guest is Ken Reinstein, who is the Vice President of Business Development for CaringOnDemand. CaringOnDemand empowers individuals or their loved ones to request caregivers with ease and convenience with no limits on what you need and regardless of where you are, all at the push of the button.

Welcome to the show, Ken. 

Ken Reinstein: Thank you, Amber. I appreciate the opportunity to be here. 

Amber: Let’s dive right into CaringOnDemand. Tell me, what is it? How did you get started? How long have you been around?

Give us the story and give us the background on the company. 

Ken Reinstein: Sure. So I’m a relative newbie with the company. I’ve been about two, three months. It was great to meet you at Leading Age Arizona a few months back. Really appreciated the presentation you gave there. CaringOnDemand is a mobile application.

It’s available to clients and to families. There’s applications both for recipients of care and their families, as well as for [00:01:00] caregivers. And it’s a, it’s really a simple thing. You download the app, you set up a HIPAA compliant platform. And then what that allows our team and recipients of care to do is if they need care, they can literally push a button and say, I need to see someone on Tuesday at 10 a.

m. That information is shared with our caregivers around in the area where that person needs service. And then we fulfill that need. And it’s like, it’s really simple. The beauty of the interface is it allows. Let’s say mom or dad to use it as well as an adult child or we have a backend dashboard that’s built for organizations such as senior living communities or other healthcare organizations where they can monitor who’s coming in and out of their building.

They know what’s going on depending on their level of interest in what details they want. They can see care plans and things like that. And that goes for both the individuals as well as communities. And the beauty of it is, there’s a live human being that helps people on board.

We have a client liaison, so you’re not [00:02:00] just stuck dealing with kind of fumbling with the technology, if perhaps that is a challenge. There’s an opportunity to speak with our live client liaison. Who’s a person right here who lives in the East Coast, and they’ll help build a plan to meet your needs and your budget, depending on how much time you need.

The real kicker and beauty and differentiator for what we do is there’s no minimums with setting up care. When someone typically thinks of a home care service or a home health service, there’s multiple hour minimums, two, four, six hours a day, et cetera. Although it’s a little bit impractical to have a five minute visit, someone could literally sign up and use our services for five minutes once a day, all the way up to a 24 seven care plan if needed.

Amber: That’s really interesting. We’ve spoken to other vendors in the space who are doing something similar, but it’s only for providers. It’s only for communities. So I really love how this platform is so flexible and can be used in so many different situations. Can you talk a little bit about what would usage of CaringOnDemand look like at a senior living [00:03:00] provider versus like you said, mom and dad out in the community by consumers directly.

Ken Reinstein: Yeah, there’s some really interesting opportunities there to partner with communities. So first of all, as I mentioned, we do have a dashboard that we would set up and there’s no charge to set this up for a community. There’s a dashboard that allows the executive director or resident services director to see that caregiver Ken Reinstein.

I’m not a caregiver but to see the Ken Reinstein is coming into the community to meet with Sally Jones at 10am. The way our technology works is. Our caregivers check in when they arrive at Sally Jones home, and then they check out. So there’s the ability to track that. There’s the ability to track if perhaps the requested meeting wasn’t fulfilled for some reason, and then we can follow up or if it’s canceled.

If the client recipient of care needs to cancel, that’s all notified in the app. The dashboard allows a lot of metrics in there, and I don’t have all the nitty gritty details to share, but there’s a lot of metrics that are really. Again, can be as detailed or as [00:04:00] simplified as requested by the community.

It’s flexible. We can set up modules to meet the needs of each individual community. The really neat value add to this is we can work with the community and we can help them market. We can be used as a sales and marketing tool that we have this service and

process at their communities. We’ve worked out where we’ve been a bridge program for communities. Perhaps there’s an interested party, a depositor who’s not quite ready to move in yet, or perhaps in a great situation, if there’s a waiting list, we could be a bridge program where we could work with X, Y, Z community and still be a Point of care or point of service for them in conjunction with the community while they’re perhaps still considering that move in or on that waiting list.

Amber: Yeah, that sounds really easy to use. Is it a nationwide platform at this time? 

Ken Reinstein: It is available. We can work anywhere that a certified home care agency or home health agency exists. Our primary operations [00:05:00] right now, we have about 400 recipients of care on our platform right now. We’ve got about 15 or so communities across the east coast and in Arizona where I’m at.

But there is literally no boundaries to where we can go again. We just need to work with, and we do work with some national healthcare vendors, home care vendors right now. So we could set up and get started very quickly Anywhere that anyone would be interested to work with us. 

Amber: Can you talk a little bit about the caregiver side?

How do you find your caregivers? How do you qualify them? How does all of that work? 

Ken Reinstein: Absolutely. So we work with license agencies that are regulated by whatever state they may be in. And of course, it’s all over the board on regulations in Arizona. There’s really not much regulation, but Perhaps in New York or New Jersey, Florida, etc.

There’s a lot more regulation, but we work with licensed agencies and those agencies of course conduct background checks on their caregivers and we ensure that they adhere to any of the state requirements that are needed. So what we do is we ourselves do not [00:06:00] hire caregivers, we partner with those national agencies or those local agencies that have those caregivers in place and

of course, with the requirements that they are background checked and certified so they’re not just hiring someone right off the street who had nothing better to do but to need a job. So we really ensure that there’s that quality there in that safety and security and peace of mind that we can provide through that partnership.

Amber: Can you tell me a little bit about the story behind the founding of CaringOnDemand? How did you come to be? What’s the background of the founding members? What was the problem you were looking to solve? 

Ken Reinstein: Absolutely. So our our founder, Stephen East has been in the home care and aging space for about 20 years.

And he kept hearing stories from seniors that were really, they wanted care. But the cost was really becoming prohibitive. Obviously, there’s cost pressures going on more and more in our world these days. But one of the reasons behind the escalating costs was the inefficiencies and also that silo mentality that agencies could only provide [00:07:00] care in set increments that are.

Again, multiple hour minimums . That disruption opportunity that differentiate that we offer is that we create a network of providers. So our clients have access to a broad network without having to call a bunch of agencies.

And we have that concierge level service and that flexibility to use our service at a, Again, five minutes, 10 minutes, 15 minutes, one time weekly, or all the way up to whatever length of time they may need. The beauty really is in the cost savings is the ability to tailor and to cater to the needs of the client, not to force the client to meet the needs of the agency.

Amber: What is the app itself look like? Is it generally used by the HR team at the community? Can you talk a little bit about how that process works? 

Ken Reinstein: It’s typically, like I said, used by someone in the resident care team, resident services team. They can see who’s coming in and out of the community when they’re going to whom they’re going to see. There’s a lot of details that are provided.

There’s [00:08:00] care plans that are individually developed for each user that depending on again the level of interest and desire. And of course, nothing is done in a vacuum. We wouldn’t share this information without the client being fully aware, but the community end user has the opportunity to see the care plans to see when that visit happened and if perhaps, the caregiver noticed that Sally had a fall since I was last here or I noticed that the house looks a little more disheveled, things are out of place.

I’ve noticed something’s going on. There was a deficiency or something. And so that information is shared with the Agencies, with the communities. We have communities that want very hands off. And then we have communities that really want us to be very fully involved and maintaining a full understanding of what we’re doing with each and every resident.

Amber: Can you talk a little bit more about the pros of why a senior living community would wanna use CaringOnDemand? 

Ken Reinstein: Absolutely. The average move in at a community is about 80 years old. Of course there’s, depending if you’re talking [00:09:00] about independent living or assisted, et cetera, typically someone’s gonna have perhaps a couple deficiencies or limitations with ADLs.

But for the most part, these individuals can be independent and can remain in an independent living status. Just by receiving supportive services that we offer that’s really what our vision is is that it’s care when you want it and for as long as you need that meets the needs of the individual.

So again it’s looking to help really extend the quality of life and the ability to have people who needs that little bit of extra care. For instance, we just received an inquiry yesterday about someone who wanted help for their father to take care of their cat and their cat litter there was some other things that they needed, but that was one of the first requests is do you guys help with pets and things like that.

So that was something that actually was giving peace of mind to a potential client’s daughter who was getting ready to go on a vacation and wasn’t going to be in town to really be there for her father. It’s a peace of mind, both for the [00:10:00] residents recipients of care and also family members and the communities itself that would be a partner to help

their residents stay healthy and vibrant longer. 

Amber: Ken, can you tell me a little bit about the ROI?

Can you talk about the cost for the platform and how that works? And do you take insurance? 

Ken Reinstein: We do not directly take insurance, but we provide paperwork to allow recipients of care to, to bill insurance such as Medicare, Medicaid, et cetera. It’s a very low cost.

We do not charge communities at this time. The cost for an individual recipient of care to have access to our app and our services is 5 a month.

And if we’re talking about a community level integration, there’s lots of flexibility there. There’s opportunities of course to maybe have a discount or perhaps several months of. Access and things. And we’ve also worked with communities that have just built that 5 charge into the monthly service fees for a community.

Amber: Is there anything about [00:11:00] CaringOnDemand that we haven’t talked about yet that you want to make sure our listeners know?

Ken Reinstein: We’re a new technology. It’s really the future. Everyone’s about technology, about convenience and about flexibility. I think using To help a community grow its resident satisfaction. A community with our services really with our platform integrated in what they do.

It just gives an additional value to moving into that community again, because it’s that peace of mind that we provide and we offer through the opportunity to work with certified home care agencies to take care of a resident or to take care of mom and dad to give them that extra extended peace of mind.

Through the platform that we offer. 

Amber: Great. Thank you so much for coming on the show today, Ken. And where can our listeners find out more about CaringOnDemand? 

Ken Reinstein: Absolutely. We do have a basic website, caringondemand.com, if they want just to generally check it out. If they’d be interested if a community is interested or [00:12:00] it doesn’t have to be a community, it can be an individual, a family member, et cetera.

They can go to caringondemand.com/raisingtech and there’ll be a form there that they can fill out to have someone contact them. Everything is private. They’re not going to get spammed by signing in that form.

Amber: Great. Thank you 

so much for joining us today. 

You can find us online at RaisingTechPodcast. com where you can see all of our episodes and contact us to provide feedback or submit an episode idea. We are on social media everywhere at Raising Tech Podcast. If you enjoy Raising Tech, please leave us a review and share with a friend. Music is an original production by Tim Resig, one of our very own Parasol Alliance employees.

As always, thank you for listening.

Amber: Welcome back to Raising Tech Podcast. I’m your host, Amber Bardon. On today’s episode, we have Senior Sign. Senior Sign is designed to make move ins straightforward for staff, residents, and their families. Senior Sign is far more than e-sign software. Think compliance tracking, remote and mobile signing, electronic faxing, and all of your documents house in one location in the cloud.

 Their goal is to bring you peace of mind by keeping the moving process simple and error free and onto and representing Senior Sign today. I’m so excited. We have Neil Krauss, founder and chief product officer.

Amber: Welcome to the show, Neil.

Neil: Thanks, Amber. Yeah, it’s awesome to be on.

Amber: As I shared before we started recording, I’ve heard a lot about Senior Sign. We have people using it. I’ve heard so many positive things. So I cannot wait to dig in today and learn more about Senior Sign and have you share it with our audience.

So let’s start with that question. What is Senior Sign and tell us the story behind its creation.

Neil: Yeah that [00:01:00] is a good question. So the story behind the creation, maybe I’ll start there. And I think that’ll probably answer the first question, which is what is Senior Sign. So in 2017 I walked into a senior living community had an idea for a project that I was working on.

Thought maybe there was a channel to market and sell through senior living communities. Through the process of a conversation with the director of sales and marketing here locally in Utah. She asked me to put their move in packet online. She’s can you just put all of this paperwork online for us so people can fill it out?

My initial response was I’m sure somebody’s already doing that. Why don’t I do a little research and I’ll tell you who to sign up with was my response to her. That kicked off about a 10 month process, which turned into back and forth with the community, creating a prototype understanding their process better.

And through the course of that, I realized, it’s not just as simple as something that like a docusign can handle, a handful of signatures. One document, it ended up being, 20 pages, residents and [00:02:00] family are signing 19 to 20 times. They’re collecting attachments, they’re trying to collect physician forms.

So there were all of these problems with their process in trying to digitize, what was up until that point just on paper. I saw a lot of folders that were two sided. One side was for the family to fill out. The other side was for the physician to fill out. So they needed to go meet with their doctor.

 Through the course of that process, we created a tool that handles the move in process started out specifically for senior living. That’s really what Senior Sign is. That’s where we got our start. Was right there in the community an idea from a director of sales and marketing.

So I can’t take credit for the idea. But we’ve grown quite a bit since then. Worked with a handful of communities since then. And then now we’re working with 700, more than 700 communities. So across the senior living industry.

Amber: Yeah, I think you, you can take credit because I’ve been in senior living for 17 years and anyone who’s ever interacted with the senior living community knows about this problem of admission paperwork.

It’s a problem in so many aspects [00:03:00] from faxes, from printing, from paperwork, from tracking, I’ve gone to sites where they have literally showed me folders and stacks of paper and they’re like, this is what we’re doing manually. And you did come in and you created a solution to solve that. So I think you should take a little credit.

Neil: Okay. I’ll take a little credit then.

Amber: So walk me through a little bit. How does this kind of work start to finish? So when someone has seen your sign fully implemented how does, how do they get the paperwork out? How’s it signed? How does it talk to other systems like the medical records system? Can you talk me through that a little bit more?

Neil: Yeah, that’s a great question. Up front, what I continually heard was. Other tools in the industry that maybe have come around to try and handle this process are a little bit cumbersome in that all of the setup is put on to the community and somebody in the company. Talk to a lot of people in the industry that were maybe paying for a software that handles admissions or move in that they really weren’t able to utilize yet [00:04:00] because somebody in the company had to become an expert on, Building all the templates, things like that.

We really start and started with a customer success process, which We collect all of the documents that they’re currently using, hopefully in digital form. Sometimes we get really bad scans of documents, etc. But usually it’s PDFs, and then we build smart templates on top of that. They’re using the same documents over and over again.

These sales and marketing managers know their packets inside and out. Sample templates could be like documents, the physician forms attachment requests all of that kind of works its way into a packet template.

So that’s really where we start is with all of the setup, but as far as, the frontline workers that are working with families and the residents they would either import from another system to your point a health record or a CRM we do work with a handful of different softwares across the industry, we’re open to integration.

So either importing some of that information or just starting out by adding a new resident into [00:05:00] their Senior Sign portal. And then from there, we have three options to help complete that paperwork. The first being from home so they can send it out. This wasn’t nearly as common until COVID hit and then we saw a lot of people sending packets for completion from home rather than in person in the community.

Amber: Can I ask you, when you say they’re doing it from home, is it like a portal that they’re accessing?

Neil: Yep. Yeah, exactly. They create a login, a lot of HIPAA compliant information, PHI payment information, things like that get collected in that. So we do password protected at this point for the residents.

 They can send that packet for completion from home. Oftentimes there’s a prepare phase, so The manager is going to prefill a room number, rates, care types, feeds, things like that. And then when the resident does sit down, oftentimes it’s actually an adult child, a family member, a power of attorney.

Sitting down to fill out that paperwork as they work their way through the packet, those templates that we’ve built begin to pre fill from document [00:06:00] to document. So I fill out the first one, we’ve collected a little bit more information that we can then push into the subsequent documents to hopefully help speed up that process. They work through, documentation, attachments we can fax physician forms, print physician forms,

email physician forms. It depends on the physician oftentimes. But that’s the at home process. There’s the in person process, which we see a lot of. We did see a lot of it pre COVID. We still see a lot of it skilled nursing actually does a lot of this as well like bedside, being able to do that and have a process there was pretty important as we were building the tool, so that’s the second means, and then they can still do it on paper if the resident so chooses, so you can pre fill and prepare that packet as a manager, and then just print it and send it with them for completion from home to, again, hopefully help speed up that process, and then attach everything back and have it all live in one place.

That, that’s what the process is like right now. You mentioned integration, et cetera. So something we’ve said all [00:07:00] along is we have to be platform agnostic is how I put it. Don’t really care what your CRM is or what your health record is. It’s we’re fine to play nice with any systems that you’re using.

And hopefully build a better workflow so that it’s a little bit more seamless, Dual entry of all of that data is a really hard process as a manager to have to Go back to my crm type everything in or write everything into a packet And then secondarily on the flip side to get everything from the packet and try and type it into the ehr whatever it is they’re using So yeah, we do integrate and we try to carry as much data through that process as possible so that the process seems seamless and then obviously finalized documents that are signed with compliance tracking, et cetera, built in audit trails, all of that gets can get exported to this, the health record, not the CRM.

Amber: So once it’s implemented. Then staff can access that information either in Senior Sign directly or in the health record. It sounds

Neil: yeah. Yeah. Yeah. [00:08:00] That’s the ultimate goal. We don’t like, we, we don’t have any I don’t know what the word would be, but it’s it’s not a tool that you’re constantly going back to previous packets, except maybe in the.

The off chance the state walks through the door and needs to pull a few packets to review or things like that. So

Amber: who who with the community is the typical user of this software and I want to go back to a question as you’re answering that on implementation are you said you’re getting PDFs or, versions of the documents.

Are you building everything in the system or is the staff doing that? Can you just talk about that a little bit more? What’s the involvement from the community?

Neil: Yeah. Yeah. That’s great. Our typical daily user from the community is that director of sales marketing an admission coordinator, maybe on the skilled side at a CCRC or a live playing community.

It just depends on where they’re coming in, if they’re coming into the health center side, or independent living, etc. It can vary just depending on which company we’re working with, but I [00:09:00] would say the majority of the time it’s a director of sales and marketing. That’s doing that kind of walking through the whole move in process up until move in day.

And then to your other question. So we have a whole implementation team that’s the second half of our customer success team. So customer success helps with, answering questions and all of that. But our implementation team collects all of their documentation, attachment requests, position forms, anything to help build that packet.

And then we have a whole, I call it a fleet we have actually a whole bunch of, stay at home moms that want to work part time, et cetera, that, that build document templates for us. And once those are built, the way our technology works is, some other processes can be more robust with other companies, but the way we’ve tried to do is, do it is to simplify by, we get an updated PDF, hey, there’s a, here’s a new version of that same template that you’ve already built.

Okay. We can just swap out the background image and all of the fields and the data collection portion of that still lays [00:10:00] right on top of that PDF it’s a really quick swap makes it an easier, quick update, so we get updates all the time and we handle that just as part of their ongoing subscription fees.

Amber: Okay. That, yeah, that helps give me a really good idea on what implementation looks like. So one thing I’m wondering as you’re speaking is we all know AI is buzzword, it’s gonna come on every single conversation you have with people about technology these days, AI automation, bots, process efficiency.

 I’m just thinking, taking like the hospital records, things like that, being able to just automate some of this data. If you can tell us anything new and exciting that’s coming around that.

Neil: Yeah, anything that’s around that is very high level at this point.

We’ve got a pretty simple process. Anything that we’ve toyed around with, or are starting to explore has to do probably with interpreting legalese. Going through a document, maybe explaining it if A resident a more senior individual is reading through that.

And it’s like [00:11:00] those packets can be cumbersome. So it’s like what am I really signing and agreeing to here or highlighting any key portions of a legal agreement? That’s really where we’re starting to look to help some of that or. Even in that process of having a little bit of a companion in some instances, some people don’t have that power of attorney adult child to help them go through that process, so they lean on someone in the community to do that.

But how could we do that with AI or a signing wizard? If you remember back in the days of Microsoft Office with the magic paper clip kind of thing. So something to walk them through the process and help you should bring that

Amber: back, bring that right here for clip. I love that was your answer, because I was thinking more in terms of like data automation, but you’re talking about actually being able to add value to the process by explanations to residents, which is really cool.

Neil: Yeah, I’ve seen some amazing things happening with AI, especially on the [00:12:00] CRM side, patient intake on the skilled side, really figuring some of that out. But, the primary issues or problems that we continue to face just in that little move in process that kind of lives between CRM and EHR, we’re in between those those problems are, can we find, a specific legal agreement?

Did they agree to, arbitration? How do we pull some of that? So there is for sure a data component where we could, have them, have a tool of sorts that they can go through and call that information. But I don’t know that AI would be needed for some of that, some of it can just be tracking.

Amber: Another question that occurred to me, as you were speaking is another sort of common very manual process I see that I haven’t seen a good solution to is like, what happens post admission?

Admission, so right now. Everybody’s sending emails. So there’s like an email goes to maintenance. It goes to housekeeping. It goes to dining. It goes to is there anything built into Senior Sign that automates the post admission and starts the workflow of what has to happen next?

Neil: What we’re looking to do is go deeper [00:13:00] into the move in process which expands necessarily into some of those offline tasks. Let’s call it. So what we have today and Senior Sign our tool basically has digitized that paper folder I mentioned earlier, which is what they used to send family home with.

Where we’re looking to go is, what are all of those offline tasks, unit turnover, for example, getting keys, made a nameplate for the door, a welcome packet. What is moving day like planning some of those things t minus 10 days to move in. How are we handling X, Y and Z kind of thing. So that’s really where we’re looking to go with the tool.

More automation, more task tracking again around that process. So that’s where we’re headed. A lot of those features aren’t sitting in Senior Sign today and available to our customers. We’re not resting on our laurels saying, “oh we’ve got e-signature, so let’s move on.”

We’ve got a lot in the works.

Amber: Yeah, and I’ll just say from having visited many communities that is definitely a challenge that doesn’t have a good solution. So it’s still very manual that move an email, move out email, stuff like that. [00:14:00] And if you can solve that, I think that would be fantastic.

Neil: Yeah, even move in day I think there’s so much that happens move in day to make that. As stress free as possible, a great experience for, these residents that are giving up one home for a new home and. That’s emotional, etc. So anything that can help make that go more smoothly is a huge advantage for a community.

Amber: Yeah. That’s what we do on Raising Tech. We come up with new ideas. Yeah, there

Neil: you go.

Amber: Sounds like you guys were working on it already though. So I know you mentioned at the beginning when you were talking about your founding story is that you had looked at other systems like DocuSign, you tried to find an existing system.

So now that Senior Sign is built and rolled out to so many communities, can you talk a little bit about the difference between Senior Sign and something like a DocuSign?

Neil: Yeah. I had a bit of a tech background prior to coming into the senior living space. This is the first industry where I’ve seen people really seek out and look for technology solutions for their communities that are very senior living [00:15:00] based, directed at senior living, designed for senior living, built for senior living.

A great example is the CRM space. This was, I came in, I had never heard of Sherpa, I had never heard of Welcome Home, never heard of, At the time, you had Enquire and some others so had never heard of these CRMs. You hear of HubSpot, Salesforce, SugarCRM.

Like I could name a thousand CRMs out there. So really what we’ve tried to do is, we hear time and time again that DocuSign just doesn’t work for senior living. It’s not a knock against DocuSign. It’s just the process is more robust than an e signature. E-sign is the easy part.

 The e-sign act is only 14 pages. There’s not a whole lot of parameters in there that you have to adhere to. So really going deep in that movement process is what makes us maybe a little bit different from a DocuSign. A couple of other points, our pricing is really geared towards senior living, so we price per community, whereas Some of the bigger players.

I don’t want to keep knocking on DocuSign. I don’t want that to be, there’s Adobe Sign, there’s HelloSign there’s a [00:16:00] handful of other e signature softwares out there but they’re really priced per packet, per signature, per user, per whatever it is and so it doesn’t really cater and it gets quite expensive when you start adding in, I need a regional to have access and six people from corporate and my director of sales and marketing across

19 buildings, and we’re sending out 80 pages of documents four times a month, you know It’s it just adds up really quickly. So that would maybe be the first point. Secondarily, Five community, a 10 community, senior living company is a big deal to us. You know, we want to make sure that they’re using the software.

We’re tracking. Are people logging in? Are they using it? If not, we reach out with our customer success team. Whereas you’re going to be a really small fish to an Adobe sign, a DocuSign. And then lastly, we’re really looking to integrate with all of the systems that they’re probably already using today that are also senior living specific, the Point Click Cares, there’s MatrixCare. There’s all the different health [00:17:00] records. You’ve got Align now Etc. WelcomeHome. All of those integrations are important to us just because it does smooth out that workflow for the end users that are using those other systems.

Amber: Yeah, that led me to think of another question.

I know you’re managing the admissions process. Can you also do other contract management?

Neil: We do a little bit. The one we get asked about all the time is human resource documents.

Amber: Okay.

Neil: So we haven’t played in that space.

We, we’ve tried a couple of times with a few different communities. There’s a couple that are using it for that. It’s not really designed for that process. If we did something and we would do it in a big way to really handle that, but we do see all sorts of documents and contracts, et cetera, internal company ones as well as external.

Amber: Yeah, I’m starting to see this request pop up a lot more recently. I just had someone text me a friend at a community and ask me, who do your clients use for contract management? And I was like. I don’t really have anybody doing that yet, but it is popping up. I’ve heard of [00:18:00] contract works, but, I don’t know if there’s anything seen living specifically like we’re talking about.

Neil: Yeah and maybe I’m sure I could ask a lot more questions around what they’re trying to use it for something we’re also working on, long term roadmap in terms of the product is a little bit smarter contract builder for the community. Taking into account, a lot of the fringe questions, etc, But being able to, for example, type in resident, Amber’s moving into 201, room 201 and pulling in all of the information around that to build that card contract a little more smartly.

So rather than having them have to prepare and fill that out, we know 201 is a two bedroom unit that rents for 4, 500 a month base. It’s in Building A at our CCRC, and it’s on the second floor, and just pulling in rates, fees, care types, et cetera, so automatically knowing that’s an assisted living, and that’s under, Neil’s management, and so assigning Neil as the community [00:19:00] contact, some things like that maybe a little bit more of the contract building again, longer term, we’re not there just yet, but something we’re working towards.

Amber: Now I’ve learned a lot today. I I’m really glad I got to hear more about Senior Sign. Like I said, I’ve heard really positive things . Is there anything we haven’t talked about? You want to make sure our listeners know?

Neil: We’re very senior living focused. We’re just now starting to venture and get pulled in naturally into skilled nursing a little bit more But very senior living friendly. We love the industry We feel very fortunate that we get to work with such great individuals.

Amber: I didn’t comment on this earlier, but everything you were mentioning about the senior living specific and the vendors and the specific needs.

100 percent true. And we definitely look for partners who are focused on that and understand that. I’ve talked to people who are trying to come into the industry and we’ll just integrate with anybody. It’s it doesn’t really work that way in senior living. Like you, you think it does, but you have to really know the right people and right, understand the players and how they all want to talk to each other.

Neil: Right. Yeah, exactly. I always joke. [00:20:00] So when I partnered with our CEO, when I brought him in as my business partner joked, we went to our first conference and I said, just buckle up, this is A really big high school reunion. Everybody knows everybody. The industry is very small in terms of, who knows who and everybody’s worked for everybody else and they’ve jumped companies.

But that’s actually what I really love about it is going to conferences, seeing customers, seeing other vendors that, that we integrate with and other partners. I’m looking forward maybe to running into you all at a conference and this has been great. Thank you very much for having it. I love

seeing more of this happening around senior living, which I think is probably an underserved industry when it comes to podcasts and information and technology, etc. So thanks for what you’re doing.

Amber: Yeah, I’m glad to be here. So where can our listeners find out more about Senior Sign?

Neil: Senior Sign. com is probably the best place if you want to actually see the software.

You can sign up for a demo and one of our sales guys are happy to jump on at any time. I don’t think anybody needs to seek me [00:21:00] out individually, which is great.

Amber: Unless they want to hear more about your founding story.

Neil: There you go.

Amber: Thank you so much for coming on today, Neil.

Neil: Yeah. Appreciate it. Thanks Amber for having me.

You can find us online at RaisingTechPodcast.com where you can see all of our episodes and contact us to provide feedback or submit an episode idea. We are on social media everywhere at Raising Tech Podcast. If you enjoy Raising Tech, please leave us a review and share with a friend. Music is an original production by Tim Resig, one of our very own Parasol Alliance employees.

As always, thank you for listening.

Amber Bardon: Welcome to Raising Tech Podcast. I’m your host, Amber Bardon. Today, we have a special episode. We are so excited to announce the launch of a new mini series, Raising Tech Resident Exclusives. Once a month, we will feature an episode dedicated to resident technology, including education, common issues, tips and tricks, and more.

These episodes will be to educate, inform, and update residents on today’s technology world. On featured episodes for resident exclusives, we will feature specific content for residents, such as cybersecurity, what streaming services to use, AI for residents and more. For those of you who are not familiar with our Tech@Home program, we are the only senior living technology company that educates residents on how to safely and properly navigate technology. At Parasol Alliance, we offer onsite support for residents with our customized Tech@Home resident technology support services and this personalized program helps residents engage and connect with the world around them through the use of technology. [00:01:00] Our resident technology program has so much to offer we have a dedicated technician for the community.

They work on things such as move in setup, technology device setup they offer drop in sessions for residents to walk in, one on one support, as well as technology classes. And I know from me being on site at multiple communities and speaking to residents, this is a service that I hear them asking for.

Not only is it a day to day support, basically a help desk for residents and a way to solve their technology problems, but I increasingly hear more and more residents ask for education. They want to know what’s out there that they’re not aware of. They’re excited to get more engaged with technology.

And a lot of times they’re just not exactly sure where to start and how to stay safe. And so we do a lot of this education and classes through our program for our clients that have that. And we really wanted to offer this to a broader audience. So that’s why we’re going to be doing these mini series, which is a little bit of content, a little taste of what we offer through our Tech@Home program through our resident exclusive episodes. [00:02:00] So for our first resident exclusive mini series, we’re really just going to talk about the program, what it is. We’re going to get a little bit into what it looks like and joining me today to talk about this topic. I have James Peck, who is our resident technology manager.

Welcome to the show, James. 

James: Thank you, Amber. 

Amber Bardon: So James, you’ve been with us for a few years and you were resident technology assistant for most of that time. So you’ve recently been promoted up to the manager position, which we’re all so excited about. So first I want to hear a little bit more about you. How long have you been in the role?

What led you to want to do this position to work with residents and maybe tell us what your favorite part is.

James: So I’ve been with the Tech@Home program for about two years now. I saw an opportunity to help an audience of people that’s most in need of accessing technology, training, information, and resources. It’s been a pleasure working with the residents and seeing them grow over time. One of my favorite things that I get to see is the satisfaction that residents get after their issues are resolved or their questions are answered. 

Amber Bardon: That’s great. [00:03:00] James, can you share with me a little bit?

What does it look like day to day? So if you’re at a community, what types of questions are residents coming to you with? What kind of information are they looking for? What’s the most common support issues? Tell me more about your day to day in that role. 

James: Some common questions that I get requests from residents pertain to email.

Usually it’s things like inbox cleaning. They’ll get lots of spam, so maybe we’ll set up some spam filters for them, unsubscribe them from mail lists and even create folders for their family communication. And then additionally, just making sure that their email is accessible and secure. So maybe we’ll set up a bookmark so they can get to their email.

Autofill login information, and then enable and help them understand what two factor authentication is, how they can use it and how it keeps their account safe. Email keeps residents connected with their community and family. That’s a really important one. Another thing is printers. So usually it’d be troubleshooting a lot of printers, unable to print things is most common.

So I’ll help them fix printer errors. Usually it’s reconnecting devices. [00:04:00] Printers are a big deal to residents, they print off recipes, letters, event flyers, and more. And printers drive a lot of community engagement from what I can see, and also improves their quality of life.

 Additionally, just replacing printer ink. Telling them what kinds of ink to buy, where to buy it in person versus online. And then if they’re able to show them how to replace the cartridges themselves, otherwise I can help them with that. And lastly, a really common one is scam education and prevention.

So most commonly is responding to scareware. Usually, so it’s obstructive pop ups, give you beeping or alarm sounds. So what I do is reassure the residents, there’s no harm done with these pop ups and if they’re comfortable with it, I’ll give them instructions on how to close those pop ups in the future.

Additionally, while I’m there, maybe I’ll run a short scan, install an ad blocker for them to keep these things from happening in the future. And then just thank them. Once again for reaching out to Tech@Home and this gives residents a peace of mind while they’re using their devices and it brings a lot less fear of being hacked or getting [00:05:00] malware on their devices.

Amber Bardon: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Residents are in their home in these communities and these are all day to day technology items that we’re all dealing with in our own homes. And I think it’s so great that we could have a resource who can help them be at the ready, walk them through a lot of these common issues and really enable their use of technology day to day.

I want to talk a little bit more about the cyber security aspect, because I know that’s something I hear a lot about from our clients is like the number 1 concern with just the high incidence of scams and cyber security incidents and things like that, targeting this population. Can you share a little bit more about the specific concerns that you’ve heard from residents?

And I know you mentioned a couple of specific things we can do, but can you just touch on maybe some just high level tips and tricks? 

James: Absolutely. So one thing to mention is we do offer a class on scam prevention and awareness where we cover these sorts of tips, but some specific things that I get into are being cautious of phone [00:06:00] numbers that get flashed on the screen, telling you that you need to call them for various reasons.

Closing those pop ups or avoiding those phone numbers is by far the easiest way to avoid getting scammed. Another thing too, is just being aware of who is sending you emails. I also help residents identify where the emails are coming from and then how to verify who they’re receiving emails from is actually who they think it is. 

Amber Bardon: we are going to be doing another in depth episode about cybersecurity in the future. So watch for that. James, from your perspective, from having done this role for a while, how does Tech@Home improve the day to day for residents.

James: The thing that we all have to keep in mind is that Residents do all the same things that we all do in our own lives, whether that be shopping, banking, scheduling appointments, watching TV.

So Tech@Home can help residents stay productive with these things and it definitely increases their satisfaction with technology in general. Additionally, a more specific example is helping our low vision residents with training and interfacing with their devices that can be through screen [00:07:00] magnifiers or shortcuts.

And this also allows them to continue using their devices in the same capability that they used to. 

Amber Bardon: James, I know that the technology culture amongst residents really varies site to site at all of our different locations so at some locations, there’s a resident steering committee for technology or resident education committee. I know some have coffee hours.

Some have drop in sessions. Can you tell me a little bit about your experience? How do residents typically engage with you? Do they like to start tickets? They like to call? Do they like to walk up? Do you do drop ins? Tell me about how that works 

James: Usually residents will do a combination of all those things.

So most commonly residents will reach out to the front desk, and they will assist them with the ticket creation process. Otherwise, I host twice monthly Tech@Home classes, and I encourage all residents to bring in their devices that they’re having problems with or if they have questions about.

Additionally, I offer some drop in hours in my office, and if I catch any residents in the hallway who ask me some questions, I can help them [00:08:00] there on the spot.

Amber Bardon: Let’s talk a little bit more about the classes and the education. What are some of the topics that we do presentations and classes on? 

James: Our class topics vary. Many of them are inspired by news or current events. Like right now, AI is a hot topic. So we have a class on that. In other classes, we cover popular software that residents may be using, like Microsoft Word just generally navigating their email or web browsers and using Google.

And additionally, we do live demonstrations. Usually it’s computer navigation, how to get through certain menus, and all that is shared live for residents to view in class, and they can also follow along on their own devices.

Amber Bardon: James, tell me a little bit about how do you educate residents when there can be a really wide variety and not only technology knowledge, but also age ranges.

James: When I’m helping a resident with training devices, I typically assess how the resident is describing their situation and their problem to me. And I like to meet them at their skill level. And there’s a big variety. Some residents [00:09:00] like things as simple as possible and are very hands off in the process.

And others like to know exactly what I’m doing and how I’m doing it. So they can replicate it in the future. I like to keep my classes at a very general audience level, and keep things very simple, and then sprinkle in some more technical aspects, and I can gauge how the class is going just based on facial expressions and the questions that residents ask and the feedback that they give after classes.

Amber Bardon: I know that can definitely be a challenge just in speaking to some of our other resident technology technicians that there can be such a wide range of technology adoption just based on age or willingness or enthusiasm and a lot of different factors.

So I know we have a lot of great ways to tailor that content to different levels of where the residents are at. So James, I am really wanting to hear from you a story about a resident that you have worked with or helped out with. Is there something memorable that you can share with us?

James: Absolutely.

 Very recently, I was helping a resident who was compiling information on her family [00:10:00] history about her homestead in Montana. So she had gone through the process of reaching out to local archives, pulling a lot of information and records that the state had.

And what I was doing was helping her compile this into a digital format and then sending it to a publisher. And it’s been a very long process, but my role has been acting as a translator for the resident and the publisher. Thank you. Because the publisher understands and will speak way more technically than the resident is comfortable with.

Just helping with very basic things like installing Microsoft Word, typing everything up, getting scanned images and documents Into a digital format so we can send it off. 

Amber Bardon: I love that story. And I think that shows the value of Tech@Home as more than just that support of how does my printer work?

Because you’re doing so much more to enable residents to use technology, to preserve these memories, preserve these stories. And I think that’s just so amazing. James, thank you so much for [00:11:00] joining me today. It was really great to have you on the show, and I really look forward to hearing more content from you in the future. 

James: Yes. And thanks 

for having me, Amber. It’s been a pleasure. 

Amber Bardon: And stay tuned for more resident exclusive content coming.

Thank you for listening.

You can find us online at RaisingTechPodcast. com where you can see all of our episodes and contact us to provide feedback or submit an episode idea. We are on social media everywhere at Raising Tech Podcast. If you enjoy Raising Tech, please leave us a review and share with a friend. Music is an original production by Tim Resig, one of our very own Parasol Alliance employees.

As always, thank you for listening.

Amber: [00:00:00] Welcome to Raising Tech Podcast. I’m your host, Amber Bardon. And today we have HeartLegacy on for the second time. Christie Freeze is the Partnership Growth Manager. Welcome to the show, Christie.

Christie: Thanks so much for having me excited to be here.

Amber: So Christie, I know we’ve done a podcast in the past with HeartLegacy. And on that episode, we dived a lot into what is HeartLegacy? How did you come to be those types of things?

So we’re not going to spend a lot of time on that today, but just so our listeners know, if they didn’t listen to the previous episode, can you just give us a really brief intro on both HeartLegacy, SalesMail, and yourself?

Christie: Yeah, for sure. So HeartLegacy was actually founded back in 2018 as a legacy preservation, video editing solution.

And so in 2019 is when I was personally introduced to SalesMail, which is more of a sales centric tool. So think HeartLegacy, more like edited video marketing videos and SalesMail, more personalized one to one video. And I was actually introduced when I [00:01:00] was a sales director. So my whole career has been in senior living sales and marketing.

And then fast forward, I joined the team here at the top of the year in January. And I’m now the partnership growth manager, which really what that means is really supporting our external partners, which is what we call our customers and our clients. And then also working really closely with our sales team, marketing team, and client success team really to focus on our pilot program.

So we offer, a trial or a pilot, and I’m really stewarding those pilots into success. And then doing a lot of trade shows, conferences, that kind of thing.

Amber: So Christie, one of the things I wanted to talk to you about today is how HeartLegacy and sales and all has evolved since COVID. So obviously we all know as part of COVID, we saw more and more digital interactions. We saw more and more things happening virtually. So in this new world that we’re in both during COVID and post COVID, how can senior living communities maintain that human connection in their communications?

Christie: Yeah. Love this question. So I also really think that [00:02:00] during COVID times, We really started to lean on like zoom and teams, which is obviously how we’re connecting, but I think that we started to really lean on those forms of communication. And so for SalesMail to be able to allow really one to one, more of the asynchronous communication versus having to all be on the same zoom call or same team’s call.

I think that really shifted. It really shifted it for me during that time where I could send a message in a really meaningful way and it would land in the inbox or text message or whatever. And that family or prospect or referral partner could watch it when they wanted and they could respond when they wanted.

And it was still a really meaningful communication method because I was, I talk like this and my tone and my inflection, but it wasn’t something that I needed them to agree to a time to be on the call with me. So I think that really opened up the world of possibilities and allows people, like I said, send it via text or send it via LinkedIn message and still have that personal touch if you’re not able to [00:03:00] be in person or be on the call at the same time.

Amber: So can you give me some real life examples of how this would work in a community?

Christie: For sure. So I’ll share with you first my personal best practices where I found it the most impactful.

So the first stage, if you are, Getting like in a place for mom or caring. com lead, any type of third party lead coming in. This is an opportunity, which I think we’re going to talk a little bit about automation a little later on, but this is an opportunity to make an evergreen video, which is just a video you can make and use over and over again.

That just basically says Hey, I wouldn’t say, Hey, Amber, in that video, I would say, Hi, I’m Christie with so and so community. We’d love an opportunity to show you around, answer any questions you might have and send that when the new lead comes in. And then once the lead responds to you and you’re like, hi, I’m Amber.

I’m a real person. I would then really start personalizing that followup. So it doesn’t need to be at every stage of the process by any capacity. But I think inbound lead, I also think post tour, once somebody has come into tour. If you’re not doing it [00:04:00] on the inbound lead, I think pre tour is a really impactful place to be able to like, say, Hey, I’m wearing this butterfly, top, and I’m going to be outside of the front entrance. This is where you part just letting them know. I think that in senior living in general, there’s still a stigma sometimes attached to walking into a senior living community and not knowing what to expect. And so if you can tell them what to expect or show them what to expect, that’s really going to start removing the mystery of what this whole process even looks like.

And then, like I said, post tour recapping the things that you heard, the things that were important and then using it throughout the rest of your process.

Amber: Yeah, that makes sense. I think one of our clients is actually doing this as well on the employee side.

So when someone is coming on site for a job interview, they’re sending them a video welcome to our community. This is where you park. This is where you can find the front desk. Cause as we all know, some of these communities can be a little confusing and complicated to figure out where you’re supposed to go.

Christie: They for sure can. Actually, that’s one of the stats that I have [00:05:00] to share is that one of our partners has seen an 85 percent increase in responses from employee candidates using it on the recruiting side, which again, right? Like I, I’ve only used it in the sales capacity, but really being able to see How the team interacts, how people are going to treat you through getting those types of videos.

 It’s almost like dating, right? Like where both parties need to be involved. It’s not just all of these people want to come work for us, or these people want to come live with us. Let’s have some back and forth dynamic and make that a really enjoyable experience.

Amber: Yeah, absolutely.

It’s most of our day to day interactions that we’re just on our phone and we’re just looking things up. It’s all through those videos now, like text based messaging, email communication just seems a little antiquated at this point. So you mentioned earlier automation and. AI is a huge buzzword.

We just published a white paper about it. And so let’s talk a little bit about how automation can be used in the sales environment in senior living. How can it be personalized? Not just feel [00:06:00] like a mass email. Let’s talk a little bit about that.

Christie: Yeah. So I think it’s still a really delicate balance. I think that, I know I personally am always going to be on the human connection, like a true human being is always going to be the gold standard, but I think that evergreen videos are going to be able to bridge the gap with them.

I want to personally be the one that makes that initial evergreen video, or perhaps it’s after a webinar or after some type of an event, an email that goes out in mass. With one email that or one video that was made for many people versus one to one. I still think that there are going to be hiccups when you try to do one to one videos at mass.

I think that’s just something that you need a really easy tool. Like I think that SalesMail makes it really easy to sit and crank out 15, 20 videos in a really meaningful way. Because it’s so easy to do. It takes me like 45 seconds, right? I just sit there and crank them [00:07:00] out. But I think that you can also leverage those evergreen videos in an automation type campaign.

I know I’ve used in the past like outreach or sales loft or things like that when I was in more of a SDR type role. And those are fantastic if the video is really general. Because if not, we’re going to have, Amanda’s video going to Amber and Christie’s video going to Sally, and it’s going to just potentially be a mess.

So I do think that’s on the horizon, but I really would love to see it stay a little bit personalized in that automation type sequence.

Amber: You can never fully automate or it just becomes too, just because a lot of noise, right? Everyone’s, you’re getting hit all in automated communication.

We talked a little bit about how are we getting the videos out and personalizing those and automating those and things like that. But people who are listening to this may be thinking about like, how do I even make a video in the first place?

Christie: Yeah, for sure. So that’s my favorite thing about SalesMail is that it’s you need nothing but your phone. And if people [00:08:00] can get on a zoom call, which we’ve all had to do through COVID times and beyond, you can use this app. It’s just an app on your phone. And the reason that I get this question a lot.

So this might help unpack it a little bit. I get the question a lot. Like, why wouldn’t I just make a video on my phone? And the answer is you could. You can now upload that video to SalesMail. But the reason that we record and want to send out of SalesMail is that it’s going to come through branded and it’s going to come through as an animated gif over a hyperlink image in the email body.

So the full video file is not coming in the email. So if you were to send a video raw from your phone, it’s probably going to get flagged in spam. It’s probably going to look suspicious because it’s a heavy file. And so by using our tool and this platform, it’s coming right into the inbox or text message or LinkedIn already branded.

And for senior living communities that brand awareness and that trust that they’re able to build by seeing, a spectrum retirement logo or, something like that. That’s oh, yeah, [00:09:00] that’s who I’m talking to. Now that face matches that. And then that logo hyperlinks back to their website.

And then there’s the contact information down below. So we have over 6, 000, 7, 000 users now. And those people are trained when they’re onboarded to say, click the link above to maybe check out our website, click the link below for a call to action, or here’s my contact information. And so it’s just that very smooth process that makes it super quick and easy, but also really impactful when it’s delivered in that way.

 Another kind of pro tip that I encourage people to think about, if you’re not watching yourself or re watching your video, I think you can move forward.

If you re watch and you re watch and re watch, you’re going to pick things apart. That’s just like, how we operate. But I think if you create these and think of these as a video voicemail, the cadence that you would leave a voicemail in, that helps you to just kind of like, rinse and repeat, start cranking them out.

And I do always tell people when I’m training them, that the [00:10:00] recipient on the other end cares so much less about what you look like, what you’re wearing, they’re so still captivated that a person took 30, 45 seconds to make them this personalized message, if you were to ask them what your hair looks like or what you were wearing, they couldn’t tell you.

Like that part’s not actually important to them. I’m not saying go stand outside of a dumpster, but even if you did, it’d probably still be okay.

Amber: Yeah. I think I’ve heard that the person who looks at your own social media and your own recordings as yourself,

Christie: 100%, especially through that lens, right?

If anyone’s coming to your platform, they’re coming to gain value and to learn what you have to share, not to pick apart what you’re wearing.

Amber: So I think we’re talking primarily about the staff side of that, but can you share any stories about the resident side and how residents get involved in some of these videos and content creation?

Christie: Yeah, so I know for me when I was using it, which I have seen a [00:11:00] lot of examples of these 2 with other users, but introducing typically there’s like a resident ambassador or somebody that’s been at the community for a long time.

And having the ability to again, I would do this in more of an evergreen format. I would have them introduce themselves and just like how long they’ve been here and what they love about the community and be able to have that as one of my like value add touch points. But it’s also really impactful when that family walks in to tour and sees Betty and they’re like, Oh my gosh, it feels like they’ve already met her or at least know some things about her.

You can do that with so many other areas of the community. I’ve really encouraged teams to do this with their executive directors. If the executive director is not able to meet a family or a prospect upon touring, this is a really awesome time to have a quick video from them that you can fire off.

And then just being able to capture activities as they’re happening. If it’s something that, if they’re really passionate about. Pickleball, record pickleball being played in the [00:12:00] community and say, Hey, we can’t wait to have you here on Tuesday to play pickleball with us at 4 p. m. or whatever that looks like.

So I think there’s a lot of ways, like I said, because it’s so easy to just point, shoot, send it, save it. You have this queue or this library full of really meaningful content that you can share when it makes sense. I think that’s the other misconception is that people think they need to record the video and send the video.

And that’s just not my personal best practice. I would rather sit down and make all of the videos for tours I’ve had this week, referral partners. I’ve connected with this week and then send it out when I may be more in front of my computer and able to just type out these quick little emails that I’m embedding a video into.

Amber: Yeah, it’s almost like using your phone personally to share videos and photos when you think of something in the moment, you can just go in your library and just send it out as it makes sense. Yeah. Are there some statistics that you can share about success stories from teams [00:13:00] using SalesMail successfully?

Christie: Yeah, there’s a couple, but I picked one of my favorites because I think it speaks to sales teams, but I think it speaks to operators too, just in general, right? Like we’re all trying to get new leads to convert to tours and we’re all trying to get those tours to convert to move ins.

And Julie Potowitz is a name that many will recognize and it’s probably familiar with. And this is during her time at Vitality Living, not while she’s been at Grow Your Occupancy. But when she was at Vitality Living, she did a really good job of capturing the statistics pre SalesMail and post SalesMail, and I think that was really impactful.

So one of the stats that she’s provided to us is that she saw a 22% increase of inquiry to tour. So converting those inquiries into tours, an increase of 22%, and then an increase of 37% of two, or to move in by adding SalesMail. Like I said, not at every stage of the process, but at some of the most meaningful times.[00:14:00]

And I think that is just huge. When we’re trying to get people to convert from an internet lead via phone call, text, email carrier pigeon, that part’s dramatic. I know, but it feels like we’re trying all of these really I don’t know, outdated ways and expecting them to just walk in and tour, we send them a personalized video.

Our chances truly are going to increase. That’s just, that makes complete sense to me. And so then it’s just refining that process. But those are two stats that I really love to share. I think those are really impactful.

Amber: Yeah. And I think it’s just, it looks a lot more fresh and current, I think to see those videos in a communication versus just the traditional text based messaging that we’ve had in the past.

Christie: For sure.

Amber: I think, we’re moving through post COVID technology changes, but what do you see is going to happen in the future? What’s next? So we’ve made this transition to more digital communication, more videos, but what’s going to be after that?

Christie: Yeah, I feel like as far as the AI [00:15:00] front goes, I think that’s going to continue to evolve and grow and I’ve personally dabbled with it like a fair amount and I’m no expert by any capacity, but I think that has the potential to really just shift this journey as a whole. I think that still having personalized video.

And video in general is not going anywhere. I think that’s going to continue to increase and be on the forefront. And so I think that, it reminds me of like back when email first came out or phones first came out. And when we got phones. We were like, we’ll never text on those, or we’ll never have a social media platform on those.

That’s all we do on them now. And so I think it’s. It’s not when is that going to happen? It’s it’s happening. How do we leverage it? How do we lean into it? And so I think that it’s going to take the humans behind the AI to really lean into this type of, resources, essentially what it is and this tool and use that to enhance this entire journey for people.

And I think that the [00:16:00] buyer, like the consumer on the other end, Is way more well versed in technology than they ever were before. And so I think that, back in the day I started in 2012. So I’m allowed to say that back in the day, I think that it was just like, Oh, they don’t know anything.

Meaning the family, they know nothing. So it’s up to us to educate them. And now they do. And now they have the ability to educate themselves. And so now we really get to come in as sales folks and be a true trusted advisor and more of a guide. Is this the right fit for you? Doesn’t sound like it. You should consider here, or here.

Because we’ve done really good research. So I think it’s just going to continue to evolve and grow really at a rapid rate. And so we just need to be on board for that.

Amber: Yeah, that’s a really good point. In the past, people didn’t know anything. So you had to educate them, like you said, and now it’s almost like the inverse where people have too much information.

And you have to try to be more selective, which with what information actually want them to know and pay attention [00:17:00] to.

Christie: We need to shift of hey, did you maybe just go to Google and type in senior living? Nah, that might not be what it exactly looks like right now.

And that might not be what the community that the person’s representing offers or looks like right now. But I think it’s great. I think that gives us, like I said, an opportunity to be more of a guide versus trying to educate and then guide.

Amber: Christie, is there anything that we haven’t talked about that you want to make sure listeners know from this podcast?

Christie: So I think really just humanizing whatever it is you’re doing. And I think that, for salespeople specifically, this is just for sales folks and marketing folks. I think that getting over the hump of being nervous on camera, Or being fearful of what you sound like or look like, I think that needs to come sooner than later.

I’m personally super down and offering my time and resources to help people overcome that because. It’s so impactful when you can do that through the sales process. And the quicker that folks [00:18:00] can hop on board with that, the better it’s going to be for the family, for the prospect, whoever. And it always blows my mind that people are really fearful because a family is going to walk in and see who you are.

Like they’re going to see your face. They’re going to see what you look like and what you sound like. And so it almost feels like a competitive edge to send them a video first. And let them start to get to know you. So when they walk in, it’s not like a brand new first meeting. Just starts to remove that barrier a little bit.

So I would just say, be brave, just be brave, dive in, give it a try. So I think that the success and the results that will come will be really worth it.

Amber: Yeah, I’ve heard an analogy before when you’re meeting people remotely that it’s almost like you’re moving through the process and dimensions. So maybe you’ve seen like a picture of them and that’s one dimension and a really good video call and that’s like this next dimension and then you meet in person and so they become more and more familiar to you as you introduce these different dimensions [00:19:00] of technology.

Christie: I

love that. I can

visually see that happening. So that’s a really awesome analogy.

Amber: Christie, where can our listeners learn more about HeartLegacy, SalesMail, and where can they find you?

Christie: Yeah, for sure. So LinkedIn is our jam right now. You can look up SalesMail or HeartLegacy over on LinkedIn.

You can find me on LinkedIn. And then our website offers a ton of really great blog posts, help articles, things like that. So if you’re just getting started into SalesMail and you want to check that out great resource. Demo Day has recently been launched. And that’s just a great opportunity to learn more. 15 minute demo, 15 minute Q& A. We’ll be hosting those every month, so be on the lookout for the next one. You can get signed up, register for the Zoom, and we’ll see you then.

Amber: Fabulous. Thank you so much for coming on the show.

Christie: You’re welcome. Thank you for having me. I really appreciate it.

Amber: You can find us online at RaisingTechPodcast. com where you can see all of our episodes and contact us to provide feedback or submit an episode [00:20:00] idea. We are on social media everywhere at Raising Tech Podcast. If you enjoy Raising Tech, please leave us a review and share with a friend. Music is an original production by Tim Resig, one of our very own Parasol Alliance employees.

As always, thank you for listening.

Amber: Welcome to Raising Tech Podcast. Today, we have Aaron Mayer, who’s the Director of Sales for Bear Robotics. Welcome to the show.

Aaron: Hey, Amber. Glad to be here. Thanks for having me.

Amber: Yeah, I’m really glad you’re here. So we have done a Bear Robotics podcast. It’s been a minute. So I connected with you, Aaron, at a recent conference, and we talked about how we have to get you back in the podcast.

Robotics is blowing up. There’s so many new things coming out with staffing crisis and workforce. I know that the workforce is a big topic at multiple conferences I’ve been to. So I’m really excited to talk to you today and dig a little bit deeper into Bear robotics. and specifically talk about introducing robots.

Aaron: Yeah, awesome. like I said, thanks for having me on. I think the biggest thing that we’re seeing in the senior living industry right now is that a lot of operators haven’t snapped out of the COVID slumber. They’re still doing heavy room service, buffet style service. They have adapted their dining rooms and most of them are [00:01:00] just empty.

And dining is such a critical point in all of these communities, especially independent and assisted living. There’s not many times that the residents get to socialize with one another. They look forward to these meals every single day. And the biggest part here also is we’re having these staffing and labor shortages.

It’s hard to retain good people. It’s hard to drive the operation and keep it going. At the same time, costs are going up and the expectation is rising for these customers, these seniors that are moving into these very luxurious establishments. They’ve traveled the world, they’ve dined in very nice restaurants, and they come in after they’re footed with a big bill and they expect To be wined and dined and they should so we need to find a way to deliver on these expectations.

And I’m excited to get into it today.

Amber: So Aaron, tell me a little bit more about you first. So to set the [00:02:00] stage for the conversation we’re going to have today.

Tell me about your background. Where did you come from? How did you end up at Bear Robotics? What’s your journey?

Aaron: I’m a classically trained chef. I was born and raised in the kitchen. I did it all. I started as a dishwasher. You hear that story all the time, but it’s very much true for my situation.

Went to culinary school. I got the formal degree. I actually majored in nutrition worked in hospitals and I found myself nuzzled in senior living dining operations. I’ve worked with some big contract food service companies managed a bunch of high level like dining operations accounts.

And three years ago, we actually ended up deploying these robots in one of my communities that I managed. And it was right in the middle of COVID and it saved my operation. That’s the truth. I was able to restructure my staffing patterns and my labor force. To accommodate these automation tools and the residents were all about it.

We were able to level up our dining [00:03:00] experience. So a lot of times today when I’m talking to new customers and dining directors or executive directors or COOs, CEOs, presidents of these large organizations, I like to challenge them to think outside of the box to level up their dining atmospheres as well. A lot of people think that these seniors might not like these robots or the perception might be off.

But it couldn’t be more wrong. They love seeing people in a dining room and they love engaging with their favorite servers three times a day. They love seeing them. They love chatting with them. And when we can keep those servers on the floor to be more attentive and provide table maintenance , floor presence equals perception of service that’s elevated.

That’s what we’re doing here.

Amber: I want to go back to what you said. You said that Bear Robotics saved your operations. That’s a bold statement. Tell me more about that. Give me some specific examples of how that worked at your community.

Aaron: Yeah, so I’ll get very [00:04:00] specific. We had about six servers for a 50 table dining room.

And this was actually back in the middle of 2020. When we were in the thick of it, we were actually were just coming out of the the first wave where we thought we could reopen dining rooms with social distancing. And the president of my company was nagging me to try. I was the Guinea pig for all new tech operations.

And he was saying, Hey, try these robots. And I’m like, absolutely not. I have limited staff, I’m being pulled in a million directions. Finally, I agreed to do it. And we implemented two of these robots at my establishment. What I did was we lost three servers, three servers came down with COVID.

And we were operating at 50 percent staffing pattern. We actually luckily just implemented a point of sale system where we had handheld tablets on the floor. So what we did was we restructured how we went about our dining service. [00:05:00] I kept two people on the floor just to take the salad, soups, beverages orders.

They were just on the floor ringing in these tickets and that’s all they did. And I told them, do not go back into the kitchen, just stay on the floor. We were able to service two times the amount of tables per person when we leveraged those two technologies together. So we were ringing in tickets from the dining room and we were having a robot run the food and beverages and soups and salads out.

So with those two working in harmony, we were able to operate as we were full staffed with three servers and two robots.

Amber: I love that story. And I love that this came up because there’s two points I wanted to speak to based on what you said. So first of all, you said earlier, you were really resistant to the idea of robotics and I go on site to a lot of sites.

I was just at a community last month. And I was talking to the dining staff and same conversation. What’d you guys think about robotics? And I was really shocked. There was so much [00:06:00] resistance still. There’s people that are in positions that are younger, you think would be more open to this.

The woman I was speaking with was like, absolutely not. I will never have robots here. I don’t want to take away from the personal touch. So I want you to speak to that, but also on the same token is what you said earlier, that a lot of people also have a perception that the residents are against it.

But I also have heard. Complete opposite. So the communities that have implemented robotics that residents really like it, they get excited, they like to brag about it. So can you speak a little bit to those two points?

Aaron: Yeah, absolutely. And I’m glad you brought it up. First from an operator’s perspective, you hear robotics and automation and you’re like, I don’t have time.

I don’t have time to do this. This is a huge lift, big implementation.

Amber: Can you explain that more though? What, what takes the additional time? Like, why are people thinking it’s more time?

Aaron: I think because we’ve been trained to inherently like senior living moves slower to adopt new things.

We see that all over the place. When we were at that CCL event, you were talking about wifi [00:07:00] infrastructure and how daunting it is just to put that into play. And we’ve been trained to think that way whenever we’re implementing a new call system, POS system EMR, like anything like that, it’s just a big project.

And now I can’t speak from any other organizations, but we make it really simple. Our product is installed and ready in two hours, and then we’re just sitting there observing and training. So it’s not a multi week phased rollout where there’s plugs and tapes and all this construction. It’s quite simple.

Everything’s in house in our product. So it’s really easy to implement our robots just to even test out for a short amount of time. to address the bigger part of your question, I love when I’m faced with a customer or someone, even a resident saying I like our servers.

I don’t want to get rid of them or we want to increase human interaction, not reduce it. Because it gives me like perfect platform to shoot right back and say, are you [00:08:00] crazy? What? It’s quite the opposite. When I talk about server presence on the floor, I really mean it.

And I tell a story all the time and everyone can relate to it. Like how many times are you out dining with family, friends? And you’re looking around on the floor for your server. Maybe you want another glass of wine. Maybe you’re ready for the check and you can’t find the server. You’re looking over your shoulder.

You’re trying to make body language, eye contact, whatever it is. And you can’t find them. And in your mind, what happens at that time? You start to perceive the service going down because I’ll tell you what that server is doing. I’ve been in the kitchen. I’ve been a server before. They’re juggling a million plates.

They’re checking on their other tables. They’re in the kitchen, waiting for their food to be ready. They’re making sure that this person’s checked out. They’re doing all these things, but our robots keep them on the floor. We don’t deal with many people that want to eliminate humans on a dining room.

They just want to provide a tool to help them. And that’s what we do best.

Amber: Yeah, I think when a lot of people who aren’t [00:09:00] that familiar with what a solution like Bear Robotics can actually do, and when they hear robots, they’re thinking that’s taking away from the customer side, and you’re really talking about more back end operations.

So can you walk us through, what does a community look like that has Bear Robotics fully implemented what are the roles that the servers are doing, that the robots are doing. Can you just talk through that? What’s the experience like for a resident?

Aaron: Yeah, and I’ll do a full circle journey.

A recent client of ours we did this virtual white paper with and we tried capturing the full cycle of What we do and how we do it. And it all starts with kind of just a phone call and a consultation. How do you see these robots helping your community?

What are some of your pain points in your dining operation now ?These guys particularly the dreadful four to eight shifts, if anyone’s listening that manages dining or nursing operations, and it’s a hard shift part time you have the college or high school kids working [00:10:00] it and it’s really tough to keep staff.

They were struggling with that. And the biggest show of the night is dinner. The residents really look forward to having dinner. And like we talked about earlier they have a really high expectation of their service of dinner. They want their food coming out quick. They want it hot.

And they want to be able to chat with their friends and have a good meal experience. What we did was we actually came out we did a little walk through we qualified the site, made sure that there’s no barriers for success, like stairs or big bumpy flooring, which we never really see in senior living in general.

And we actually attended the resident council and food committee, where most people have monthly or bi weekly, And we presented the idea of robots to them first, before we implemented anything, before we went live we let them ask questions, we let them touch and feel the robot, see how it moved around the dining area and the space, and we quelled all concerns up front there actually wasn’t in [00:11:00] this particular instance, there wasn’t one person that was curious about us eliminating staff, which we weren’t.

We were just supplementing and adding in a, an extra set of hands.

Amber: Can I ask you a question before you go on to the next part? But I was wondering the back of my head while you were talking, it sounds like it wasn’t the case in this community, but have you ever been brought in where maybe the CEO is we got to get robots and I’m super excited.

And everyone else hates the idea and how do you overcome that?

Aaron: All the time we deal with C suite or owner operators, people who are not operators, people that are very removed from the actual operation.

And they say, I love the idea of it. This will work perfectly. They sign up for an agreement, they get a handful of robots. And then the worst thing that happens is we come out to deploy these robots. And the dining team doesn’t know the residents don’t know and then all of a sudden they see this big [00:12:00] white thing that’s moving around their dining room.

And they’re like, what the heck is that? Whose job is it replacing? So to your point, it’s really important to touch all layers of the operation and we’re very careful not to deploy robots until everyone’s prepared to receive them.

Amber: I love your idea about letting people just interact with them. And it’s just a unstructured way so they can ask their questions and see what it’s like. And I think a lot of times, just with robots is people have this like idea in their head of what it’s like, and that’s where the fear comes from.

But when you actually see them, It’s totally different. Okay. So keep walking me through it. So you’ve come on site you’ve started your implementation. What is the rest of the implementation go live look like? What do you need to do prepare? What kind of training is there?

What has to change on the operational side? And then maybe you can talk about what does this look like once it’s actually in place?

Aaron: Yeah. So from this example, we held the resident council. We allowed them to ask questions. We solicited feedback. And then we prepared them [00:13:00] for their first night of service.

We said, look, you’re going to have a new friend in the dining room today. It’s going to be helping out those hardworking servers that bust their butts every night to get you your food quick and hot. And there was a lot of excitement around it. We try to engage other departments as well. I love working with activities departments and and just anyone who’s deals with resident engagement.

A lot of times we do an activity where over a month span as we prep for the robot to come, we have the residents participate in a naming event or a gender reveal. However you want to do. We’ve seen it all. Quick disclaimer. 99 percent of our senior living communities. named their robot Rosie because they basically resonate with the Jetsons because that was their time.

And

When I say it takes two hours to install that’s really all it takes.

Our engineer comes out, we do a map which is basically all internal. We mow this robot around, capture the walls they have 3D cameras on the robot and LIDAR, which basically [00:14:00] bounces a signal and it’s just depth perception. They’re not like video or picture cameras.

They’re just depth cameras. And then we get this map and then our engineers design it to work towards a workflow that we use. So as we go, we’re working with the dining team, the front of house managers, the dining directors whoever’s hands on in that operation. And again, to your earlier question.

This is why we need everyone involved from the start to know that we’re coming in. Many times when we deploy these robots, this sounds like a big process, but I’m just spelling it out. Many times we actually know what we’re doing before we get in. So we can just be in the background doing this whole process.

And then we just we prep for a huddle or a standup right before service and we train everyone live there. So fast forward to actual service, our first run we do an in depth training with all the staff. We make sure everyone knows what buttons go, where the purpose of the robot. The purpose of staying on the floor and [00:15:00] engaging with the residents and not crowding in the kitchen.

Anyone who’s listening that is in dining operations. They know it’s a big issue where people congregate in. And we don’t like that. They’re always saying, Hey chef, where’s table two, or I’m waiting on four. We want them getting the heck out and staying on the floor to entertain the guests and make sure they have everything they need.

So we do a lot of that. We try to make sure things are going smooth and then we take the training wheels off. We walk away we monitor the data and reports. We share them with the operations team and the people on site. We can see how many deliveries we make per shift per day. What does our operating time look like?

How much weight do we carry? How much distance did we travel? A ton of KPIs that we can measure that can just be translated into return on investment.

Amber: I didn’t know about the KPI and reporting side. That’s interesting. It’s something I hadn’t thought about to have that information. Does that also help you determine ROI [00:16:00] and like labor hours, save, things like that?

Yeah.

Aaron: And it’s quite complex because we don’t get too involved. We’ve done a couple of case studies where people have been an open book to their labor pattern and their staffing and wages and all that good stuff. But a lot of times we don’t ask the questions cause it’s personal to the operation, but you can surmise ROI capacity.

Our robots cost 19 bucks a day. So depending on what Metro city you’re closest to, if you’re in, if you’re on the West coast or even like DC area, New York city area, you’re already paying 15 an hour. And one thing I talk about a lot is calculate the robot and operating time. If you have John, the food runner that works from four to eight, you’re paying him from four to eight.

You’re paying four hours of labor. It doesn’t matter. It doesn’t mean he’s running food four hours straight. He’s taking bathroom breaks. I’m sure he’s sitting on his phone for a few minutes checking Twitter and going through Instagram and it just happens. So we calculate [00:17:00] that in robot operating time.

Even if we do five deliveries in one hour, that’s an operating hour that you would have been paying a human. And again, this might sound like I’m suggesting we’re replacing staff. But our proposal is use John the food runner to become a server or have him run other things that the robot can’t, or just be in a dining room and be more pliable with your workflow.

That’s what we want to encourage people to do.

Amber: Okay. Yeah. That makes sense. Can we talk about some robot myths and maybe bust some of those myths and I’ll tell you some of the ones I’ve heard, and then you can maybe add some you’ve heard, and we can talk through them to dispel them a little bit.

And some of them we did discuss already. Of course, the fear that people’s jobs will be replaced the loss of customer service. But I’ve also heard some operational concerns just around floor layout, building layout, where the kitchen is, where the dining room is how applicable is this in places like the assisted living and skilled nursing dining room?

So those are some of the ones I know, maybe we can talk about [00:18:00] those and then also add any that you’re aware of.

Aaron: Sure. So some of the big ones are our dining rooms too tight. We don’t have the space. And that’s that myth is busted. Big old busted stamp. We only need around two feet to move around to get through pathways.

There’s no dining rooms that are too tight in senior living. Even if even if you have one, I I say prove it because we have wheelchairs, rollators, walkers, we’ve got all these assistive devices, but if a human can get through it, so can our robot. The one thing for us, we deal with a lot of restaurants, of course and when we have people standing up, like a college bar or a big bustling, like sports bar, something like that’s a challenge for us because you have, you don’t have people sitting.

But in senior living, you have people sitting during meal period. Of course, people are getting up coming and going, but for the most part, people are sitting and when that is the case, we can get to and from anywhere we really need to go. The other thing is floors and [00:19:00] pathways. Our newest robot survey plus, which is directly behind me.

And you guys can find it on our website. It’s our most marketed robot. Basically our second generation, we can go over really bumpy floors, big thresholds that are almost a half inch wide. We can go up and down ramps. The only thing we can’t do is stairs. Of course, I like to joke. We can go downstairs, but we can’t go up, back up.

And the good thing is we don’t see a lot of these uneven flooring or ramp kind of situations in senior living because they’d be a tripping hazard anyway. So the climate and environment is really conducive for heading these robots. The last thing that we hear a lot of people do is talk about is door access.

My door is really close to the dining room. I can’t leave it open or fire code says that we can’t do this with the door. That one’s busted as well because we have a product that opens and closes doors now that communicates with the robot. And likely people have these in their communities already.

There’s numerous brands. [00:20:00] We have a product that we use that works directly with the robot, but also works when a server tries to kick or push a door. So it’s manual and automatic. And that’s actually something we just implemented with a couple of robots that are the latest deployment that did the white paper study.

 It’s been a game changer for us. We definitely. That’s a big thing for senior living. What happens in a kitchen should stay in the kitchen, except for the plate.

Aaron: We don’t want the noise the clanking, all that stuff in, in, out in the dining room. Some people have the space and they have open kitchens. A lot of new designs are open style, which is great. Definitely more conducive because this door opener we have is an added product and it’s a separate integration.

But when you get it all to work together it’s really harmonious.

Amber: One more myth I want to bring up, and I’ve heard this more with the cleaning robots and maybe like the lawn mowing robots and things like that, but is there any worry of a collision? Are people scared of that?

Aaron: They’re always scared of it. And it’s funny cause when you’re at these [00:21:00] deployments, residents like sticking their feet out or putting their hand in front of the robot. And I always laugh and I go over and talk to them and I’m like, I told you it’s not going to hit you. The only thing that could happen is a resident could bump it like if they’re not seeing it or something.

But that’s never a very violent interaction. The robot is bottom heavy, so it’s not going to tip over. It’ll just wobble. We have really good detection. Our engineers are really good at creating pathways where we don’t hit anything. If something were to jump out really quickly and startle the robot.

It would stop on a dime. We’re really good at doing that. So it’s something that we’re confident in.

Amber: Aaron, one last question I have for you. You have so much experience, working for a community before being in the culinary industry and all the different clients you get to interact with through your position.

Now, do you have any general tips and tricks you can just share to elevate dining operations?

Aaron: Yeah, I would say the biggest thing is [00:22:00] be more adaptable and think outside the box and welcome new types of tech. Welcome the new P. O. S. System that your servers can take orders with tablets out on the floor.

Welcome. Automated tools that could bring food to the table. Eventually we’ll be able to bring food for room service up, up multi levels. Go vertical you in order to consistently deliver on the expectation of elevated dining experiences. You need to implement these tools. Because the labor market’s not going to get any better and you’re good people.

They won’t stay forever. So you need to leverage automotive tools. And when you can have a whole suite of automotive tools that aren’t that expensive to work together, to really get the most out of your staff. It’s a great thing. It really is. And you could deliver that expectation and you could have a really awesome dining program.

One that your residents and customers talk [00:23:00] about and people come just for that.

Amber: Yeah, I think that’s a great. No to end on. And really you can take that and apply that to really any area of senior living that more automation, more process efficiency is something we need in so many areas. And, robots are a pretty cool way to do that.

Aaron: They are

Amber: well, Aaron, where can our listeners find out more about bear robotics?

Aaron: So you can go to bear robotics. com. We are all over the place. We market a lot. on Google, our home website. We also are at some major conventions. We’ll be at leading age this year. We’ll be at the big ones.

So you will see our robot roaming around the floors and you could find us there.

Amber: Thank you so much for joining me today.

Aaron: Thanks for having me, Amber.

Amber: You can find us online at RaisingTechPodcast. com where you can see all of our episodes and contact us to provide feedback or submit an episode idea. We are on social media everywhere at Raising Tech Podcast. If you enjoy Raising Tech, please leave us a review and share with a friend. Music is an original production by [00:24:00] Tim Resig, one of our very own Parasol Alliance employees.

As always, thank you for listening.