How to Get Alexa into Your Senior Living Community
How to Get Alexa into Your Senior Living Community
If you’re thinking about bringing Alexa into your community, there’s something you need to know. Setting up Alexa for your communities all by yourself can be complicated, time-consuming, and tedious.
Between the logistics nightmare of procuring the devices and the technical hurdle of implementing community applications, there isn’t much time left to care for residents. Here’s a secret though, it doesn’t have to be that way.
Before we jump into the how, let’s talk about the why.
Getting Started With Alexa for Seniors
Alexa for Seniors is sweeping the nation. From being parodied on SNL, to becoming one of the most important pieces of tech for seniors, Alexa has a cultural relevance that hasn’t been seen in tech for seniors in years. Why? Because for seniors, voice is the most intuitive interface to use.
For seniors, talking to Alexa is like talking to a friend
How are Seniors Responding?
With VoCo, seniors are blown away with how easy it is to use Alexa. Alexa is loaded with tons of features seniors love like today’s weather, alarms and reminders, news and sports updates, unlimited music, games, jokes and stories, and community-wide calling.
“I can’t live without my Alexa” — VoCo Senior
What’s best for your community?
There are a couple options for implementing Alexa at your community. You can build an Alexa app, you can install Alexa in-house, or you can use VoCo as your full service Alexa provider.
VoCo installs, manages, and personalizes your Alexas so that you can focus on supporting the things that matter most:
Your communities and staff.
Here’s a detailed breakdown showing what it would look like to implement Alexa in-house for your community.
Technology can be hard. There are many steps to setting up a senior living community with Alexa.
Here’s a quick list of some of the steps just to get Alexa setup in your community.
- Alexa App Building
- Programming and Personalizing each Alexa
- Procurement of Echos
- Training Seniors and Staff
- Installation & Wifi Configuration
- Account Management
- Creating Marketing Collateral
- Additional Alexa Skill Uploading
Head to Head Comparison
VoCo vs. In-House
When you bring the work in-house, you’re bringing over 70 hours of extra work to your team at each community. Do you have the time to burden staff with this? Do you have a team with the tech skills to manage this safely and properly?
Over 70 hours of extra work at EACH COMMUNITY
This doesn’t include app development time, monthly maintenance, troubleshooting, daily calendar content updates, support, and ongoing training. That’s why it’s a no-brainer to work with VoCo for all your Alexa for Seniors needs.
When You Work With VoCo
Seniors get an Alexa already programmed to their wifi, personalized with their favorite apps, and plugged in ready to use! VoCo is a full service Alexa for Seniors provider. From procurement to personalization, VoCo has you and your community covered. VoCo even updates all of your content calendars and menus for you.
Our communities love our integration with popular engagement provider Sagely. If you’re a new or current Sagely customer it’s even easier to use VoCo. No stone goes unturned to ensure your community has an easy experience.
Time Saved
- 10 minutes per Alexa to program
- Over 5 minutes per email account to create
- Over 10 minutes per install
- 7 hours to Build Marketing Material and How-to Flyers
- 3 Hours to design training
- 1 hour to purchase materials and setup
- 3 hours to design training documentation
- 1.5 hours for training
- 1.5 hours for staff training
- Time to build custom applications 2–4 weeks
Total? Nearly Two Entire Work Weeks!
If you’re still thinking about doing this, let’s take a closer look at just one step.
What does it look like to setup one Alexa?
Unbox the Alexa, create an email account, create an Amazon account, download the Alexa app then reach this screen.
Click the setup button and reach this screen.
Once your phone connects, you need to input your WiFi Credentials
Alexa will wait and connect to WiFi, then you’re pretty much all set?
Now repeat 99 more times for each of your residents with DIFFERENT Amazon and email accounts (so they don’t share personal information).
Sound crazy? (that’s because it is)
BUT WAIT THERE’S MORE!
Want seniors to have access to fun senior friendly apps?
Login and manually download each app individually to each Alexa.
This Times 100
Now if you get into a rhythm you MIGHT be able to do all of this in 10 minutes per resident. 100 residents later and you’re up to 1000 minutes of extra work just for the first step!
Takeaways
Alexa has so much value to give to seniors, why don’t we see it more often? The reality is the operational challenges are simply too big for most communities to take on.
VoCo was built to bring Alexa to senior communities and solve these unique operational and technological challenges.
Get Started With Alexa at Your Senior Living Community
Ready to bring Alexa to your community? Schedule a time to talk with us and experience a live demo.
