Interview with Pam Calad

What does Akua Mind and Body do?

We serve adults – men, women, and all genders above the age of 18 who are struggling with mental health and addiction disorders. We have locations across California, primarily in Sacramento, San Diego, LA, and Orange County. We offer four levels of care – whether it’s detox, residential, outpatient, or sober living, we provide clients with a lot of options to give them access to the care they need. 

How did you get connected to Akua Mind and Body?

I’ve been with the company for about a year and a half. I was previously working for a prosthetics manufacturer doing similar work – marketing and marketing automation. I loved it, and what I realized I was most passionate about is helping people access the care they need, especially when they may not realize it’s accessible to them. With prosthetic devices, for example, people usually don’t know what options are out there for them – or even how to access those devices. I think the same is true with behavioral health. Now in my job, I’m directly involved in helping to increase awareness for the services that could help somebody transform their life. 

What are the most difficult challenges for your business?

Immediacy. In the behavioral health industry, if you’re not responding to clients within seconds, their likelihood of going back to their routine or going to a competitor is incredibly high. Chances are they’re already in contact with two or three other options, and if we have any delays, any hesitation, any sense of uncertainty, they’re likely to look somewhere else. Understanding that landscape made it very clear the urgency and importance of acting quickly and getting our clients answers. We also realized that, even with ample training, we couldn’t get to a place where humans answered questions consistently, immediately, and at scale. 

How does Botco.ai help you address these challenges?

We were already using a web chat function, so it was really easy to layer in an AI-powered chatbot. One of our biggest concerns was how our website visitors would perceive talking to a bot versus a human – but what we found is that more often than not, people appreciate the anonymity of talking to a bot. They appreciate the immediacy of getting the answers they need over feeling like they’re talking to a robot. One thing we explored was making the chatbot conversational and consistent. We can always give website visitors a next step and the option to call our admissions team.  

What would you say to people facing similar challenges?

I’ve been really impressed with how AI has been able to transform the engagements we’re having from our website. I don’t believe people are apprehensive about speaking to a bot instead of a human. We always give people the option to connect with a human if they want to – but the fact is, I think people just want immediate answers to their questions, and I can’t think of another way for us to solve for that without using AI. People who visit our website are really struggling and they need immediate answers to their questions. They need to feel confident about the options we’re presenting to them and we have to let them know we’re here for them no matter what, at any time. I think we’ve been able to achieve that really successfully with Botco.ai. 

What results have you been able to achieve since implementing a chatbot?

The web chat is a free lead funnel that integrates with our existing automation and CRM. Our admissions team can stay fully focus on closing those leads, rather than splitting their focus, time, and energy between the web chat, phone calls, and admissions. Our KPIs are admissions from our lead channels, and they are very easy to track, because they’re coming directly into our CRM. What was really fascinating was, once we implemented Botco, we didn’t just have more admissions from our web chat, we now actually have more admissions from our website and we have more admissions from Google as well. Google is usually driving traffic to our website, so it was really nice to see a lift across the board on all of those web-based channels. 

Do you have any future plans or ideas for GenAI?

Rebecca Clyde and I recently chatted about potentially utilizing this internally, since we always need to train and retrain employees. So if we could use the bot from an internal perspective, I think that could be really powerful. It would give us more return and utilization on the same tool. 

When you're not on the job, how do you like to spend your free time?

I am a mom of two little kids, so that alone keeps me very busy. We live in Orange County, and we get to go on a lot of amazing adventures. My youngest is just swimming now, so it’s been a lot of fun to watch. I’m also training for my first sprint triathlon in November at Newport Dunes.