An AgeTech Collaborative™ participant, The Smarter Service provides personalized tech concierge services to older adults and senior living communities, aiming to bridge the digital divide and empower them to navigate the digital world confidently. The company provides personalized, high-touch support through in-person and virtual channels, offering device troubleshooting and fixes, personalized technology life planning, and continuous learning programs. By tailoring its guidance and training, The Smarter Service aims to meet the unique needs of every individual and community.
We spoke with COO Vida Roozen about The Smarter Service’s mission, the remarkable success of a recent pilot program, and helping older adults engage new technology with curiosity and dignity.
This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
What can you tell us about The Smarter Service?
Our mission is straightforward: to help older adults navigate with confidence, and on their own terms, a world that is digitizing around them.
We have two sides to our business. The first is a membership for older adults who are still living at home, where they can access our services directly. The second is a presence in continuing care retirement communities (CCRCs). We set up a desk in the community, usually in high-traffic areas, so residents can get fly-by help when they need it with devices like smart phones and tablets. But residents can also schedule an appointment for help inside their residences, where we solve a lot of problems with smart TVs and streaming apps. We also hold enrichment classes, where we teach people how to use the devices they already own, as well as how to discover new tech that might interest them. We also educate people on topics such as fraud in the digital world.
How wide is your reach?
Our virtual B2C membership is nationwide — it’s an annual subscription that older adults can sign up for, then give us a call when they have a question about a device. They can call about tech-adjacent concerns, too. For example, they’ll ask questions about sketchy emails or messages they’ve received, like, “Do I really owe $999 to this company that claims I bought a laptop computer?” And in the markets where we have a physical presence, we find that our members really want that “handshake” in their homes, so they can schedule home visits for an additional fee.
On our B2B side, we have a presence in six markets in different states, and we grew 200% last year. It’s clear that this need is really growing in communities where older adults live.
Can you say more about how you work inside retirement communities?
Typically, we’ll be on campus anywhere from one to three days a week, depending on the demand in the community. We’ll set up a desk with one of our concierges, and people can stop by the desk for help, or schedule a session in their residence. The same concierge runs the desk every time, because it’s critical for people in these communities to build a relationship with that individual, someone who understands each person’s unique needs when it comes to navigating technology.
That’s part of our service, too: Giving dignity back to the people who are feeling left behind in this digital age. Because the challenge is not just about the technology that they choose, it’s the technology being done to them. Think of self-checkout lanes in grocery stores, or the Social Security Administration announcing they are going digital. Those things can feel especially intimidating if you don’t have someone to help you navigate them.
So your services are both wide-ranging and personalized.
How people use technology is as unique as the individual; what I need help with may be very different than what you need help with. Plus, the needs change over time. What we see in our data is that, when we begin our service in a community, people come to us with problems that we call “break-fix” — a device is broken or not working the way they expect it to, and they want us to repair it.
But as people gain confidence, they quickly start moving from “break-fix” to learning about technology, and then to discovering new technology. They build a certain swagger around using tech, then they get curious about how else it can help them live life the way that they want to. It’s a really cool thing to see.
In fact, giving people “permission” and the confidence to try things is core to the work that we’re doing. Older adults grew up in an analog world, where if you did something wrong, something broke. So for them, clicking a button when they don’t know what it does can feel potentially catastrophic. But that’s not the world we live in anymore, and we give people back the dignity and confidence to explore technology on their own terms.
Not long ago, you completed a pilot program with a nonprofit network of senior living communities. Can you tell us about that?
We did a pilot with an organization called BHI Senior Living, which has 12 different life plan communities across three states in the Midwest. Their head of IT was looking for a way to support their residents and their use of technology, both the tech they own and the tech that is being implemented in the community. BHI really needed to look at it from a business standpoint, especially managing the cost. So they ran a three-community pilot program with us to see how using The Smarter Service would impact the operations of their business.
In particular, the BHI staff had fallen behind and had a backlog of more than 600 tech-support-related tickets from residents. Each ticket was a small problem, but in aggregate they had become a burdensome workload on the staff. Even front desk and maintenance personnel were feeling the pinch, because residents would sometimes just grab them and ask for help, taking them away from their primary duties.
During the first two months of the pilot, we resolved those 600-plus tickets, returning 20% of staff time so they could get back to their primary jobs. Residents loved us, too: We had a sustained five-out-of-five-star resident satisfaction rating. Usage of targeted resident-facing platforms increased from 40% to 75%, and BHI experienced a 3.4x ROI. Within three months of the pilot, BHI decided to roll out the program across all of its 12 communities.
Even today, we have a sustained user rating of 4.8 stars, so it’s clearly a valuable amenity for residents. And it makes good business sense for BHI, because they could control the cost, give staff their time back and not have to hire new roles.
Those are some impressive numbers!
There’s also a social care aspect to the desks we set up in those communities that’s valuable. Typically, the alternative for getting help with one of your devices is to take it back to the store where you purchased it, where they have a sales mindset and may try to get you to spend more money for some solution. We don’t have a sales mindset, and there are no shenanigans; we’re there simply to help people navigate tech on their own terms.
Another interesting thing is that when people come for help, a lot of times they can’t even articulate the problem. They’ll just describe a feeling or an experience they’re having. So having the same concierge week after week — someone who is curious and patient and can do a little detective work to figure out the core of the issue — is extremely valuable. We work to build those relationships and that trust. Bringing that dignity back to the human experience in using technology is what we are all about.
What advice would you have for other leaders and organizations that work in the AgeTech space?
As business leaders, the kind of support that we provide was not something that we had to think about ten years ago. But now, anyone who serves older adults does need to think about this as an issue that needs a solution, whether they’re working independently, in a home care service, in a retirement community or anywhere that people who are 50-plus are navigating tech. So I encourage all business leaders to think about how they can solve this problem at scale, whether it’s with a service like ours or something else, because it’s something that we can no longer ignore.
You can learn more about The Smarter Service at their website, and AgeTech Collaborative participants can connect with them directly through the ATC platform.
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