The Digital Front Door of Senior Living: How conversational AI has impacted Carlton Senior Living

Dave Coluzzi (CEO, Carlton Senior Living) joined Botco.ai on the Mary Furlong Longevity Deal Podcast to discuss about using chatbots for healthcare services and how conversational AI has impacted Carlton Senior Living and their approach to nurturing prospective residents. Carlton Senior Living has 11 locations in northern California, with over 1300 residents and 1000+ employees. While the entire conversation is incredibly insightful, I’ve summarized my key takeaways below.

Carlton Senior Living began using conversational automation with Botco.ai in 2021 with the aim of increasing website conversions, giving prospects the ability to educate themselves, and providing a way to book tours within the chat experience. Altogether, they wanted to improve top-of-funnel health in both the number of leads generated, and the overall quality of leads. This integration has led to great results, with 80% or more of tours converting to resident move-ins. 

Are chatbots for healthcare services better than human interactions?

Often a concern in the senior living space, many worry that AI is billed as a replacement for their valued employees and teams; they would prefer their prospects to speak with a live person rather than a chatbot. Attesting to this concern, the team at Carlton has found that their chatbot rather augments the performance of their team.

The chatbot focuses on high value tasks such as giving tours to prospects which not only elevates customer convenience but increases company efficiency. Not to mention, many of their prospects also prefer to interact with the chatbot for the beginning part of the sales process, as it is low pressure, immediate, and available at all times. They are able to ask questions about floor plans, meals, safety measures, and pricing, while getting immediate (and helpful) feedback.

 

Carlton has also been strategic with designing an avatar that reflects their customer profile. Carlee looks like the daughter of an aging parent, which is the persona of the decision maker in a majority of the conversations they have. 

How does conversational AI impact your brand?

Carlton values their brand and culture immensely. The culture of each location and of the organization as a whole stands as  a major reason people choose to move into one of Carlton’s residences. They have even experimented with options to scale their sales efforts while keeping the essential culture intact. Following their company principals when experimenting, they learned that using individual locations as the point of contact resulted in fragmented sales efforts with too many entry points to the sales process. What’s more, a centralized call center, another option, didn’t have the same cultural buy-in as people working in individual communities. 

When they began to work with Botco.ai, they found a way to scale their sales efforts while maintaining consistency in their messaging as well as keeping their culture intact when communicating with prospective residents. They started with the traditional buyer journey that their customers take; they worked closely with our team to design the conversational flows and included company messaging used when speaking with prospects. Because our teams worked so closely together, the output reflected Carlton’s brand faithfully and expanded the reach through 24/7 automated conversations.

Learning from conversations with our chatbot

Conversations with prospects can provide much insight into emerging trends, as well as gaps in service, and opportunities to expand. One limitation of sales teams and static websites is that a lot of data slips through the cracks. What exchanges most often lead prospects to book tours? Are there questions that precipitate a prospect to end the interaction without converting? When are most people talking to your team?

Carlton leverages the data collection and aggregation tools built into Botco.ai’s platform to identify actionable business insights. They use the timing of inbound chat volume to adjust the work schedules of their team to ensure people are available to complement the chat experience. They also pay attention to which locations garner the most interest as well as which services are in highest demand at each location.

Okay, but what about these tours?

The ratio of move-ins relative to tours is one of the most important factors in the health of a senior living business. Carlton has seen a substantial increase in the conversion rate of tours to move-ins since working with Botco.ai. Botco.ai sees about a 30-103% increase in conversion for each client. Historically, Dave reported that their conversion rate hovered around 50%. Since implementing Botco.ai, this number has reached 80-85%.

There are a couple of reasons for this. First, the interactions people have with Carlee evolves into greater and more efficient knowledge on matters of services, value, and price. Being upfront about all of these items results in fewer unqualified individuals making their way to Carlton. Second, the customized conversational flows help prospects move further along in the sales pipeline than they would otherwise.

In addition to a greater tour conversion rate, Carlton is also seeing increased tour requests from their users’ chat sessions. More tours + higher conversion rate = great ROI.

Time to value

An important question we often get has to do with the time to value, or how long it takes to begin seeing results from implementing conversational automation with Botco.ai. Although this varies by account, many of our partners see results within two weeks, with monthly improvement thanks to the enhancement of AI over time and the collaboration of our team with your organization. 

Want to learn more about how Botco.ai can increase your ROI and conversion rate, please schedule a call with us. Botco.ai would be thrilled to help you and your business make the most out of your digital front door.