Should You Add a Chatbot to Your Senior Living Website

Should You Add a Chatbot to Your Senior Living Website?

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Adding a chatbot to your senior living website might seem like a good idea. After all, chatbots never sleep, never take vacations, and never call in sick. They are always available and happy to provide quick answers to common questions about things like pricing, tours, and employment.

What could possibly go wrong?

Based on our experience, a bunch of things:

  • Chatbots, by their very nature, contradict an industry that touts empathy and personalization.
  • Chatbots can de-humanize your brand and create a transactional feeling.
  • Chatbots can intercept conversions from less-expensive marketing tools.
  • Chatbots don’t build rapport or do effective discovery.
  • Chatbots can confuse people about pricing.
  • Chatbots don’t generate traffic.

Below, we dive into each problem.

Chatbots, by their very nature, contradict an industry that touts empathy and personalization.

We work in an industry that prides itself on empathy, human connection, and personal relationships. It’s why we encourage our clients to highlight real people—residents, family members, and team members—in their content. It’s why discovery calls and in-person tours matter so much.

So when a prospect’s first interaction is with a chatbot instead of a real person, we risk losing the most powerful part of the experience: the human one.

Sure, there are use cases for bots, especially if you’re short-staffed or need 24/7 coverage. But in our experience, most bots on senior living websites aren’t thoughtfully customized, and they rarely feel aligned with the deeply personal nature of the decision families are trying to make.

Need some proof that chatbots can be problematic? A recent study published in the Journal of Retailing and Consumer Services notes that when warmth matters (for example, in healthcare or hospitality), using humans is better than using AI or machines.

Chatbots can de-humanize your brand and create a transactional feeling.

The problem with too many senior living websites is that they all look and sound the same. Too often, they present the same stock photos, the same amenity lists, the same way of talking about senior living and community life.

Prospects who bounce around these sites end up getting lost in a “sea of sameness,” something made even worse when you add chatbots into the mix. When every community is using the same generic chatbot prompts, you lose what makes your brand your brand.

The problem is customization. Some bots are harder to customize than others. And some marketing teams overlook the parts they can customize, which just adds more chum to the Sameness Sea. That brand you worked so hard to develop behind the scenes ends up fizzling out before it even has a chance to find its sea legs. (OK, we’ll stop with the ocean metaphors now.)

Also keep in mind that bots don’t always play nice with mobile devices, which is a problem when you consider that 70% of senior living website visits happen on mobile devices. And yet, the chatbot often takes up the entire screen, virtually erasing the branding. Ouch!

Chatbots can intercept conversions from less-expensive marketing tools.

Everything we do in senior living marketing and sales is all about driving more tours and move-ins. We pay attention to analytics to uncover the activities that move the needle, with the idea being we should do more of what works and less of what doesn’t.

Here’s the thing: At SLS, our client data doesn’t consistently show an increase in overall sales-qualified leads or increased move-ins when chatbots are present.

Instead, we find that bots simply intercept the conversion from other less-expensive marketing tools, such as calls-to-action (CTAs) and branded landing pages, by popping up first.

Of course, your mileage may vary. If you’re using chatbots, pay close attention to the analytics.

Some key performance indicators (KPIs) to keep an eye on:

Chat-to-move-in conversion rate. How many chats ultimately lead to conversions, i.e., move-ins? How does this conversation rate compare with other channels/CTAs? If the chatbot conversion rate is unusually low, this could indicate the bot is creating friction. This possibility is even more distressing if the bot is intercepting potential prospects that might have otherwise converted on a CTA or branded landing page.

Containment rate: This is a fancy way of saying, “Does the bot satisfy the user’s questions within the conversation, or does it have to get a human involved”? Again, your mileage may vary, but the rule of thumb for a “good” containment rate is somewhere in the ballpark of 70-90%.

  • PRO TIP: Don’t be fooled into thinking 100% containment is good. It’s not. You want certain users to be transferred to a human, such as those with questions about care options, medical concerns, or other inquiries that require more nuanced and personalized attention.

Chatbot-specific analytics to pay attention to

We include a few below to keep an eye on, and here’s a comprehensive guide to chatbot analytics in case you want to dig deeper.

Fallback rate: How often does the chatbot fail to help the user, resulting in a “fallback” message or escalation to a human?

Average chat duration: The longer users chat with a bot, the more engaged they probably are (which is a good thing). But check that bot-to-move-in conversion we mentioned above, since that’s the real test.

User satisfaction: Enabling a rating system or short survey after someone uses a bot can provide insight into what your prospects think of the bot experience on your site.

Bottom line: If the chatbot hasn’t moved the needle (or contributed in some meaningful way), consider taking those dollars earmarked for the bot and investing them in original photography and great video content that authentically represents your brand voice, promise, and core values.

Chatbots don’t build rapport or do effective discovery, especially when it comes to booking tours.

It’s fair to say that we want more website visitors to book tours, right? On the surface, booking a tour through a chatbot might sound easier for everyone, particularly the prospect and the sales team.

And yet, too often the chatbots take a simple tour request and turn it into a lengthy survey, which creates friction for prospects. Most prospects interested in scheduling a tour simply want to choose a date and time and get on with their life, not be forced to answer a litany of questions.

Imagine wanting to make a dinner reservation on OpenTable and being required to disclose who you’re having dinner with, your food preferences, and your relationship with your companions.

  • PRO TIP: Don’t let chatbot tour bookings make your sales team lazy! Too often, the prospect books the tour through the bot, the booking appears on the sales rep’s calendar, and yet the sales rep doesn’t take the time to call the prospect to confirm the tour, do discovery, qualify, or build rapport so they can personalize the tour experience. The result? Higher no-show rates and less-personalized tours.

Chatbots can confuse people about pricing.

Responses to “get pricing” prompts can lead to quick self-disqualification. Yet without context, prospects often have knee-jerk reactions rather than a complete understanding of what the figures mean or the funding that might be available to them.

At SLS, our data indicates that 90% of bot users select the “get pricing” option. However, after the price reveal, 90% click on the “cannot afford” button and self-disqualify without ever engaging with a human being. These self-disqualified leads are often pushed into the CRM, where the sales team quickly moves them to “cold” or “lost.”

We encourage a different approach that involves categorizing these leads as marketing-qualified leads (MQLs). Instead of pushing them into the CRM’s cold or lost bucket, we enroll the MQLs in an educational nurturing campaign that explains funding options.

The clients who follow our advice see tours and move-ins from prospects who initially disqualified themselves after interacting with the chatbot, but through nurturing, they gain the confidence to move forward and engage directly with the sales team.

Chatbots don’t generate traffic.

The reality is that bots are completely dependent on all your marketing channels, like paid ads, local search, and social media, to generate website visits. The bots themselves don’t generate traffic.

What they offer is a convenient website shortcut that reduces the time and clicks needed to navigate to other conversion assets.

Placing a chatbot on the website will not overcome ineffective marketing and low website traffic. The bot serves as a secondary attribution source for leads, tours, and move-ins, meaning a different source—a primary source—drove that prospect to the website.

In a chatbot world, your biggest competitive advantage might be ditching the bots and creating an authentic human experience instead.

When everyone does the same thing, prospects view our services as a commodity, reducing their decision criteria to location and price, which creates a race to the bottom.

Yes, chatbots will improve. For example, they will eventually feel more personal with prompts you can easily customize based on a prospect’s behavior. They will learn how to engage differently with first-time visitors vs. returning ones, or ask thoughtful questions based on, say, a person’s level of care interest.

But right now, the chatbot experience feels impersonal, displaying the same prompts for every brand and on every page. The best use might be to activate them at night or on weekends, or use them for communities that have an open sales position.

Need help figuring out if your chatbot strategy is working or hurting your brand?

Let us take a look under the hood. If your bot is working, we’ll tell you. (No need to fix what isn’t broken.) If it isn’t working, we’ll explain what you can do to improve conversions.