Our Commitment to Those We Serve

At K4Connect, our mission, in fact, the very reason for our founding, is to serve older adults, including the residents of senior living communities.  That has never been as important as right now as the world faces up to the unprecedented challenge of the COVID-19 virus.  Yet, even at its best technology can only serve as a way to help and augment the heroes on the front lines, the staff of all our customers. To that end, we have already been working closely with our community partners to accelerate community-wide communications, increase resident accessibility to the latest information, build communications to family members and implement monitoring solutions for the communities with Smart Home technologies. 

Starting last Friday, we began publishing a weekly “COVID-911” Bulletin focused specifically on how technology can be used to help serve residents, improve communications and reduce stress on team members.  We will continue to publish the Bulletin weekly to our customers. Moreover, we have added a COVID-911 section to the K4Community Support Center that is available to all our customers that includes actionable how-to guides and information about each of the items in the Bulletin, as well as best practices employed across other communities that are leveraging technology in these trying times. 

Yet, we are not stopping there. Several days ago, we began to pivot our development efforts specific to capabilities that our customers could deploy and leverage during this crisis. For example, for those already using our Amazon Alexa voice capabilities, we have added a direct hotline for residents to ask for the latest update via a pre-recorded voice message from the community. In the end, the focus of these capabilities is to help residents and families stay informed, and safe, while allowing staff to focus on other important issues in the community.  Additional voice, application and other new capabilities will be introduced soon and shared in future bulletins. 

Last, one service we have always offered is our “Virtual Staff” feature. If community residents or staff have a question, they can simply call us – directly and (as always) at no cost. Our K4Connect Advocates are now directly staffing our support line 7 days per week from 7 am to 9 pm ET, with continued live answer support 24-7.

In the end, we are here to serve. I can tell you the entire K4Connect team is working tirelessly along-side the heroes on the front lines to serve those most vulnerable. 

It is our mission.  It is the reason we exist. 

This week’s Friday bulletin introduces new Alexa capabilities, additional support hours and new COVID-19 printable resources

March 13, 2020

We understand bringing your community through the Coronavirus is challenging — that’s why we created this weekly newsletter series, the COVID-911 Bulletin. These Friday updates are intended to provide additional guidance and resources on how your K4Community existing tools, as well as new ones we are releasing on a weekly basis, can be leveraged to serve your teams, residents and their families.

First, as a reminder, a service we have always offered is our “Virtual Staff” feature. If community residents or staff have a question at any time, we are directly available to help. Moreover, we have extended our hours and added additional support members, all trained on existing and new features to support you, and your residents, on the most up-to-date K4Community resources available.

Our K4Connect Advocates are now directly staffing our support line:

• 7 days a week from 7 am to 9 pm ET at 855-876-9673 or via Support@K4Connect.com
• Live answer support will continue 24-7

One of the things we’re hearing from you is the need to quickly and efficiently share COVID-19 information making sure residents know where and how to find it. In addition to printed materials and K4Community resident application, signage and TV insertion capabilities, voice technologies can provide a valuable avenue to Coronavirus information for your residents. We’ve now introduced new K4Community Voice features to best keep your residents, and their family informed while reducing your workload. Some of these are outlined below, including a quick and easy how-to guide on activating the new features in your community

-The K4Connect Team

---

What You Can Do Now: K4Community Voice

For any questions on activating these features, please reach out to K4Connect Support.

Voice-Activated COVID-19 Hotline for Residents

Last week we highlighted the new voice-accessible COVID-19 Hotline feature that can augment front desk staff during this time of especially high volume inquiries from residents, families and the outside community. This serves as a designated phone line that leads to your own pre-recorded COVID-19 updates, providing you a place to prepare and share information that residents can access any time both through their Alexa devices and direct dialing.

Create a Hotline for Those Outside of Your Community

Additionally, this phone line can be shared with friends and family, and other contacts, outside of the community who want to keep up to date with the latest COVID-19 updates, offsetting the number of inbound calls communities are receiving daily.

However, if you’d like to keep those communications separate, we can designate a second hotline, following the same easy steps, specifically for those outside of your community. That will not be available via Alexa, but you can supply this phone number to the outside community for them to use.

Printable Resident Voice Guides & Resources 

To encourage and ease residents into using voice as a method for accessing Coronavirus information, we’ve created a guide card you can distribute to rooms (or common areas) with Amazon Alexa devices. This guide card details the commands residents can use to immediately access COVID-19 information using voice.

A Resource Center: COVID-911 Folder

You’ll notice we’ve updated the K4 Support Center in your K4Community dashboard with a new folder COVID-911: Resources. We know you’re busy, so we’ll keep all of the must-know COVID-19 K4Community information and updates in this folder that you can reference any time. This bulletin, along with each weekly bulletin update, will also be stored here. 

Today, we’ve also uploaded 10 new downloadable and printable PDFs from various health organizations you can share as printed material, or simply upload to the Dashboard and share through the resident App in the News or Resources sections. We’re constantly updating with new information, so check this folder often for new resources to share with your teams and residents.

Have a best practice to share? We’d like to hear about it — share your feedback with us, here.