Silverado Senior Living’s 24-Hour Hotline & Live Chat was recognized as an ALFA Best of the Best Program to Spotlight because of the valuable support the program gives to family caregivers, who provide for a loved one with Alzheimer’s or dementia.
Alzheimer’s and dementia know no geographic boundaries. Using the power of the Internet, Silverado Senior Living now is able to help families facing this debilitating disease from the world over.
Silverado’s 24-hour hotline and live chat service are resources that users may call or log onto at any time of day or night. Silverado makes a point of connecting users to a live-chat-line specialist on staff who can answer their questions about memory care or help them to find resources at Silverado or elsewhere in real time.
Silverado believes that taking such an open approach to service is what many family caregivers desperately need and will remember favorably. “It’s the ability to be available and respond quickly to any need at any time, even if it’s not specific to the company’s service line,” says Randy Platt, senior vice president of operations. “We go above and beyond. We don’t just leave them without information.”
Users vary from adult children just starting to become concerned about a parent whose memory is slipping to families in deep crisis seeking immediate help. Most users find out about the Silverado chat line while searching for help in California, Utah, Arizona, and Texas, where Silverado operates. “Generally they’re in those markets because that’s how we’re tagged on the Internet,” says Platt.
Notably, more than half of all users in the first few months of the program had accessed the hotline or live chat outside of traditional business hours. Some needed (and received) help finding Alzheimer’s care in markets that Silverado does not serve. A few users have even been willing to pay for one of Silverado’s geriatric care managers to board a plane.
In its first few months, Silverado’s senior living, at-home, and hospice services benefited from hundreds of new referrals, 9 percent of which became customers. The new program started to show a profit within months. “It has created new business opportunities that would not have come to us without the chat line,” says Platt.
Plans are in the works to fulfill the hotline and live chat’s potential as a multilingual virtual geriatric care management support system staffed by licensed clinical social workers and MSWs. “It can be a life-changing experience for a caregiver and loved one,” says Platt.
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