Why Online Chat Is Essential For Your Website And Why We Believe CareChat Is The Best Solution For Care Homes And Home Care

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The Evolution of Communication: From Phone Calls to Texts to Live Chat

In this article we’re going to introduce you to two things that are revolutionising the way we generate leads and the way we provide great service to our customers on our care business websites.

First though we need to take a brief and nostalgic history lesson, at least for those of us old enough to remember before we had the internet.

Before the introduction of advanced mobile phones, if you wanted to speak with someone who wasn't in the same room as you, your only option was to pick up the phone and call them to have a good old conversation.

Then came mobile phones and text messaging. At first we wondered why would anyone would go to the trouble of texting someone when they could just pick up the phone and talk to them!

It turns out that there are lots of reasons. If there weren’t, text messaging wouldn't be so massively popular and apps like WhatsApp would never have been invented. Now, almost everyone uses text messages and many people actually prefer texting to a live conversation most of the time.

When websites came along, you could only get in touch by filling in a contact from or, if it's urgent or important, by calling the business. However, many people are not confident on the phone. They don't like talking to people they don't know and they're scared that someone will try and sell them something if they phone up with any sort of enquiry. And let's be honest, they're probably right!

Then, along came live chat on websites. This is great for those people. And there are many of them. Now it's just like having a text conversation with their friends.

If Live Chat is so Great, Why Don’t I have It?

So why don't all websites, including care homes, have live chat?

The problem is, unless you're a very large company it's simply not cost effective to employ a person whose sole job is to stare at a monitor and be available all day every day to answer live chats as and when they come in.

In the average care home, all the staff are far too busy to be sat in front of a computer keeping an eye out for online chats. It's simply not practical.

What about automated chatbots? They don't require any manpower. That's true, and they are certainly much cheaper to reply than a human being, so if you’re on a tight budget they can be a good alternative to full live chat.

They do have a couple of disadvantages though. Automated chatbots are limited to predetermined sequences of questions and answers. That makes them best suited to specific tasks and answers. They can’t just answer any question as a human operator can. In addition, that can be seen as being a little impersonal, particularly for a touchy-feely industry like providing care for the elderly.

CareChat Live: How It Works and Benefits for Care Homes

So what’s the solution.

We’re delighted to be able to offer you two solutions that are perfect for the care industry and will suit all budgets.

First is our premier product, CareChat Live. This provides the best of both worlds, a full live chat facility - without tying up your care staff.

Here’s how it works.

Our operators are online from 7am to 10pm Monday to Saturday to pick up chats on your website.

We’ll only involve you if the chat is someone who is interested in a place for their elderly loved one in your care home and if the chat is within your staff’s normal Monday to Friday working hours.

If it is, we page your nominated staff members in the care home (by text and email) to let them know someone wants to chat with them.

Meanwhile, we take their name, email address, and phone number to ensure you have their details.

When your staff member clicks the link in the text or email, they take over the chat and give the website visitor all the information they need.

More importantly, they can also invite them to come and view the care home and arrange the visit right there and then on the chat when the person is at their most receptive. No more trying to chase up leads and not being able to get hold of anyone!

CareChat Live is the best solution available for using chat to generate leads from your website. It's ideal for larger care homes or home care agencies that have a large volume of traffic to their website and more beds to fill. 

A Revolutionary and Affordable Alternative: Introducing CareChat A.I.

What about care homes and home care agencies that don’t have the budget for CareChat Live and who still want to provide a great experience for their website visitors and to answer all their questions?

If that’s you, we have something truly exciting and groundbreaking that’s going to blow your socks off when you see it in action, and that we guarantee is affordable for any care home or home care agency. Here it is.

We’re delighted to announce our brand new product, CareChat A.I.

ChatGPT and Dataset Training: How CareChat A.I. Understands Like a Human

The magic is in three things

1. ChatGPT

2. The dataset training both on your business and our unique data set of information about the care industry.

3. The prompt engineering to determine the ‘personality and behaviour’ of the bot.

ChatGPT If you’ve ever used ChatGPT you’ll know it’s just like talking with a human. However, just like humans it has knowledge gaps and one of them is your business. 

The Data sets We train ChatGPT on all your business information and our own data set about elderly care that we’ve compiled . It can then answer questions about anything in that data, just like a human can and just like a human does. Not only that, but we program the chatbot to discuss only your business and anything else that is relevant to finding care for an elderly loved one. That keeps it from going off on flights of fantasy or ‘halucinating’ as it is sometimes prone to do.

Prompt Engineering Finally, believe it or not, you can customise the way that ChatGPT behaves and thinks so it has a personality. If you program it to behave like Darth Vader it will assume his dark personality and will respond accordingly. Same for Robin Williams manic comedy or Hugh Grant’s suave upper class Englishman Gentleman.

What we do is create our own personality that we believes ideal for the care industry. We make it friendly, and approachable, caring even when it’s chatting with you.

To all intents and purposes, it’s just like having a polite, well-spoken, caring staff member available 24/7 to answer anything your customers or prospective customers want to know about your business. It never eats, sleeps, takes time off, complains, goes on strike, or gets sick.

If it doesn’t know the answer to a question, it will ask for the website visitor's name and email address so that you can respond to the query yourself. And, we can program the correct answer into its learning so that next time it uses it and it doesn’t need to bother you.

It sounds miraculous, and to be honest, compared to how things were just a few months ago, it is! Here’s a link to a video showing just what it can do.

Is it perfect? No. There will be some glitches because it's brand new technology. And there are still some things it can’t yet do as well as a human, such as selling. We’re working on it though!

Testing CareChat A.I.: Experience the Future of Online Chat

If you’d like to test the bot for yourself, enter your details in the form below and we’ll send you the link to our test bot where you can ask it anything you like about our example care home.

If you’d like to know more after that and you’re interested in having CareChat AI on your website,  you can click here to set up a discovery call where we can have an informal, no-obligation chat about your requirements.

We look forward to impressing you!