Best Buy update: ‘Assured Living’ assuredly up and running. And was this Editor’s in-store experience not typical?

September 14, 2018 | by

Reader and Opinionator Laurie Orlov wrote this Editor to advise her that Assured Living was most definitely alive and well in Best Buy-land. The Assured Living page presents a variety of services, starting with a personal monitoring service (video) for an older adult that starts with a fairly standard pendant PERS (two way) and also creates an in-home network of motion sensors for doors, windows, and furniture installed by Geek Squad. These sensors send activity to a control panel which tracks activity and wellness patterns (sic!–as we know it’s algorithms and rules in the software). Within about a month, the system will send real-time automated alerts if something is out of the ordinary. The video then promises the usual ‘deeper insights’ into wellness and potential issues with the older person.

What doesn’t sound like QuietCare circa 2006, down to the need for installation, are the Wi-Fi camera in the doorbell and the automated remote door locks, the tie ins with the Mayo Clinic and UnitedHealthcare. 

We both speculated on the motion sensor set as being Lively Home (from GreatCall) –Laurie added possibly Alarm.com’s BeClose, which has supplied Best Buy in the past.

Assured Living is available only in limited markets (not listed) but you can get 10 percent off with AARP! But product packages go up to nearly $189.97 for a one time fee plus $29.99/month, not inclusive of that nifty doorbell camera and remote door locks.

One wonders if the reluctance of older adults to admit they need monitoring and consent to the installation is less than in 2006, when QuietCare’s and ADT’s sales people had difficulty overcoming the reluctance of a person living home on their own to be monitored by their (usually) child. Sometimes a sale would be made, the installer would come, and the installer would be shooed out after second thoughts. The genius of GreatCall was in making technology palatable to this market by assigning it a positive use, such as communicating with friends and direct personal safety, not someone minding her. Right now, the template is 2006 with a tech twist.

Drop in and visit Laurie Orlov on her Website We Like, Aging in Place Technology Watch. (She’s alarmed about chipping people too and frames it as more of a security and a moral issue than this Editor did, who prefers her chips to be chocolate and her cars to be driven by her alone.)

As to this Editor’s ghostly experience buying a TV in store, perhaps I should have invited a Best Buy rep over! Reader, former Marine flyboy, eldercare expert, and full time grandfather John Boden did and got a simple solution to an annoying problem. Read about it in comments on our prior article here.

Can Best Buy have an effective older adult strategy when they can’t sell a TV?

September 12, 2018 | by | 3 Comments

We noted last month that the acquisition of GreatCall by big box retailer Best Buy was the next step in a strategy targeting an older adult market niche, with goods and services promoting digital health and wellness, ‘solving technology problems and addressing key human needs across a range of areas.’ GreatCall will be managed as a separate division because, as their CEO admitted, ‘it is a different business’, presumably continuing to do what they do best–direct marketing. Longer term, what GreatCall was purchased for is to enable what they have touted to investors as “Best Buy 2020 that includes Assured Living, a program aimed at using the mobile web, sensors and other digital or smart-home healthcare technology to help adult children or caregivers remotely check in on the health and safety of aging residents at home.” The acquisition is expected to close this fall.  Digital Commerce 360/Internet Health Management  

But will this strategy, which requires a bit of personal service and problem solving, work in the field? The result of a simple search and transaction for a common electronic product wasn’t a promising predictor. This Editor went to a Best Buy in search of a new TV set to replace her aged and fritzing Panasonic (the kind with a cathode ray tube). It was a rainy Saturday night in Paramus NJ, the kind of night on which only Those Determined To Buy brave the traffic to shop. After a sweep of the aisles looking for that senior-oriented healthcare technology, finding none, she hit the TV displays, adjacent to the laundry dryers.

With space measurements and a tape measure in hand, she looked at smaller TVs. Having already determined that a 28″ would likely be best, but with no 28″ on display, she measured 32″ sets which maybe, maybe could fit the TV spot in the wall unit. Smart? Roku? What do these mean, and do I need them? 720 px? 1080 px?  This went on for about 30-40 minutes. In that time, not one blue-shirted salesperson stopped to assist a willing buyer who just needed a little help. So she went in search of one, finding exactly…none. Other shoppers looking at larger sets? Also non-assisted. After a few more sweeps of the aisles, stopping to marvel at an QLED’s resolution, feeling a bit ghostly and ghosted, she tapped out and left, vowing to buy a Samsung online–anywhere other than Best Buy.

If this can happen with a straight-forward electronic product with a relatively willing buyer…what will happen to a more complex sale with a lower level of understanding? Without a better level of customer service, all the corporate strategy talk will simply…flop.

Oh yes, that live link to Assured Living? It goes to a page that says “We’re sorry, something went wrong.”