Transcript lightly edited for readability. Figures reflect the speaker’s account.
Lisa Hall
Life before Zingage was chaotic. I can only express that nights and weekends were always busy. I was always working as a small business owner. I think a lot of people relate to that. Nobody else is going to answer the calls so it was always me or my scheduler and we were working all the time before we implemented Zingage. I was a little leery for AI because my AI experience is ChatGPT. I didn't know who was going to react well to an AI answering but we let everybody know we're changing because we need to be able to sleep at night.
We need to be able to have our weekends back. But the best thing that I don't think I realized is the emotional strain that it takes off my people. We did a trial on a Tuesday and after one night of the weekday trial my scheduler called up and she goes please let's turn this on right now because that first night we had three or four callouts. We had people calling in and Riley who is our AI assistant she handled everything. It was quiet. I was able to do dinners again. We were able to go out with friends again.
We really reclaimed our nights and weekends by just flipping the switch. For Zingage getting staff buy-in is important especially AI. They think they're going to get replaced. They think that bringing in Zingage and Riley is somehow going to eliminate jobs and it wasn't a hard sell after we did the demo because she's an assistant. She's there to work the hours when we want to sleep. She's there to do the weekends when we want to have activities in a life and I really think that if you do a demo you're going to see how much time it gets you back and it's just been great for our staff's mental health because they're actually getting time off now instead of having to be on call.
Zingage has been instrumental in supporting us as we've grown. I think back in March we were probably averaging about 1100 hours a month. We've seen substantial growth since March. We were 1100 hours then we up to 1300 hours in early summer, 1500 hours in August, probably 1600 in September and we'll probably average over 1700 in October. With Zingage I can turn the settings on so that it covers a little bit more time so that she can help because she can make multiple phone calls at once.
She can fill a shift overnight. It gives us that ability to work on the growth of our business instead of being tired and exhausted and saying I've gone four or five weeks without having a day off. Riley gives us the day off. Zingage has been helping us overnight in ways that I really didn't think was possible. Recently we had a 2 a.m. call out. Riley took the phone call and by 2 30 she had the shift filled. She was able to text multiple caregivers. She got multiple responses back.
When I woke up in the morning somebody was like why is someone so on the schedule. We went back and looked at our history and Riley had filled it in 30 minutes. Zingage is also able to handle emergencies for us. One weekend we had a hospitalization. They went in and they were going to have a small procedure done. The logistics of finding out how long they're going to be in the hospital for calling all the caregivers associated with all the shifts from Saturday late afternoon through Tuesday when he was going to have his procedure.
It's not something that I had to do. Riley said I'm going to go ahead and call all the caregivers and cancel them up until Tuesday afternoon and it was just a load off my plate and she had it handled within about 15 minutes. Being able to have that peace of mind even in emergency situations is really important. It was fabulous. Riley shows up every day and she's a great employee.
