At iCarol, our system security is a top priority and we follow the best practices and guidelines put forth by major technology advisory groups, certification boards, and others. In recent months, we have enhanced elements of iCarol security such as password reset policies and automatic timeouts as a result of such guidance.
For our October Support Training, we invite customers to join us for a discussion around these latest enhancements, how they work, why we put them into place, and how adapt to these changes within your organization.
Date: Wednesday, October 18
Time: 2pm Eastern
To register for this webinar, log into iCarol — the link to register is posted in the iCarol Help Center Community Announcements as well as the Admin Dashboard.
It’s so important to offer your community ways to communicate with you that fall in line with their preferences. For many, that means using channels like Live Chat rather than making a phone call to an organization. iCarol’s Live Chat tools help you meet people where they are on the communication channels they prefer.
For our September Support Training, we’ll review new options for how you present your live chat to those visiting your website. We’ll talk about the choices available to you when you create your chat widget, including font and color options, and a quick escape feature.
Date: Wednesday, September 20
Time: 2pm Eastern
To register for this webinar, log into iCarol — the link to register is posted in the iCarol Help Center Community Announcements as well as the Admin Dashboard.
Later this month we will hold one of our period Enhancement Review Webinars. In these webinars, we look back at some of the key enhancements or new features added to iCarol in recent months. Our Enhancement Review Webinars are not trainings, rather we go over the major enhancements and new features and talk about use cases, what problems or challenges these enhancements are intended to resolve, and give examples of how they may improve your workflows or add efficiency to your organization.
Date: Wednesday, September 27, 2023
Time: 2:00pm Eastern
To register for this webinar, log into iCarol — the link to register is posted in the iCarol Help Center Community Announcements as well as the Admin Dashboard.
Contained in our release of version 3.87 of iCarol we have loads of enhancements across different areas. Stay tuned for more, and save the date for our next Enhancement Review Webinar tentatively scheduled for Wednesday, September 27 at 2pm Eastern (registration opening soon) to learn about all of them.
For today, though, we wanted to share one big and exciting upgrade to our Messaging services — several items that enhance and improve the experience for your Live Chat visitors who are using mobile devices, as well as tools that allow you to further configure the overall branding and appearance of your Live Chat service on your website.
What’s New?
Chat widget
Traditionally, your iCarol Live Chat invited someone to chat with you using an image embedded into one of your web pages that, when clicked, took the visitor to an iCarol-hosted registration page and the visitor held a chat conversation in an entirely different window outside of your website.
The option to have that workflow remains, however now you can choose to have your chat appear in what we’ve come to recognize as a more typical and modern chat workflow, by offering an icon and option to start a chat from the bottom right of your website as pictured here:
Once opened, the chat widget presents your optional pre-registration questions to the visitor. When those are entered and submitted by the visitor, the chat comes through to your iCarol Messaging queue as it has in the past. Then once the conversation is accepted by your volunteer, staff member or counselor, they’ll handle the conversation within iCarol as they always have, meanwhile the chat visitor will continue to use the widget. Perhaps best of all, this widget is even more mobile friendly to better accommodate your website visitors using devices such as smartphones or tablets to visit your website and begin a chat with your organization.
Chat Widget Configuration
Along with our new widget option is the ability to configure the widget to blend in with your website, matching your color scheme and branding. This includes:
Uploading a logo
Enabling Safe Exit and assigning the exit website
Setting background colors
Selecting font types and colors
We hope you and your website visitors enjoy these new options. We think that your website visitors will enjoy the ease of use and intuitive style of the chat widget, along with how nicely and seamlessly it blends into your site!
The new settings can be found within the Messaging module of your iCarol system and is accessibly by Admins and others with the appropriate security permissions. Please visit the iCarol Help Center to look through our new knowledge base article about these settings and tips on how to use them. If you need additional assistance, you are always welcome to reach out to our Support Team during their normal hours of operation by opening a ticket, sending an email, or starting a chat with them from the Help Center.
All the data shows that it is critical for your organization to offer consumers more ways to reach you than just by phone. Phone calls are declining in popularity and offering SMS/Texting and Live Chat to connect with your services is crucial if you want to reach everyone in need, stay relevant, and help more people.
For a limited time, you can add a first or additional Live Chat or SMS/Text Portal to your iCarol system and save 50% off the usual setup costs!
When you integrate these important channels into their iCarol system, you can:
Reach populations of people who either can’t or prefer not to make phone calls
Build rapport and trust by offering a more private way for someone to share their story
Streamline data collection and reporting to include Live Chat/Text
Have complete control over Online/Offline times using your iCarol shift schedule
Access additional reporting on SMS/Text such as offline texts received and overall usage
Plug resource and referral information from your database into the messaging conversation
Triage Live Chat conversations using pre-conversation survey data
Use pre and post conversation information to measure your impact
And much, much more!
This offer is only valid for a limited time — If you haven’t checked out iCarol’s Messaging tools in awhile, now is the time! We have exciting new enhancements coming to Messaging at the end of this month so stay tuned for more information! Also check out these resources to learn more about iCarol Messaging:
We wanted to post a friendly reminder that iCarol’s Customer Conference is just 10 days away!
The team is excited to provide existing iCarol customers, as well as those who don’t yet use iCarol but would like to learn more about us and our software, with a day of discussion and training related to iCarol capabilities as well as industry-specific information. We’ll share information on:
Data and reporting
Resource management
Care coordination
Closed-loop referral
and iCarol’s future development in a User Group session
This year’s conference will be held at the Renaissance Orlando at SeaWorld on Sunday, July 30. We will be in the Tarpon room located on the second floor of the hotel. Refreshments including coffee, iced tea, water, and donuts will be served at the start of our day. While any travel and lodging costs will be your responsibility, there is no cost to attend this event. We do not plan to record any portion of the customer conference, however we will hold a virtual user group session later this year.
In recent years iCarol has welcomed several new customers who are Child Care Resource and Referral agencies. These agencies curate a comprehensive database of child care providers in their state, province, or region. This includes all sorts of information that parents and caregivers need when researching their options and making decisions — hours of operation, current openings, languages spoken, pre-school or educational programs offered, voucher acceptance, locations, and much more.
Child Care Resource and Referral agencies using iCarol have found that iCarol’s resource database offers the ultimate flexibility for their needs. Further, iCarol helps them document and track their interactions with parents, caregivers, and others who are inquiring about available care in their community. iCarol is also helping them send child care referrals by Email and SMS/Text, allowing them to accept online inquiries using Public Web Forms, and keep their listings updated while using less staff resources to do so with Automated Resource Verification.
If you’re going to the conference, please stop by and visit Veronica at our booth, which will be located at the entrance to the exhibition and registration area. We have lots of great information to provide, and you can also download our new eBook. We’re excited to see you in Arlington!
We’ve just added a new resource you may be interested in! Click the image below to download our newest eBook: Choosing Software for Child Care Resource and Referral Agencies.
This resource is designed to help program directors and other leaders at Child Care Resource and Referral agencies wevaluate their needs for software to help them in their work connecting parents and caregivers with the best child care providers to meet their needs. We’ve even included a checklist that helps them see if the software they’re currently using or considering meets these needs.
From Wednesday, April 19 through Friday, April 21, Aaron from the iCarol team will be at the American Association of Suicidology Conference in Portland, Oregon hosting our booth in the exhibit hall and attending other events.
The conference is a convergence of professionals working across the spectrum of the suicide prevention industry, from those operating crisis centers and other direct care services, to professionals working in academic settings conducting suicide prevention research, advocates focused on prevention, education and awareness, and those with lived experience.
So we can continue to stay ahead of the topics that most impact iCarol’s customers and continue to support the work of crisis centers, Aaron will join a number of networking and information events. This includes the Lines for Life crisis center tour, and receptions and networking meetings for 988 centers.
Having supported crisis centers since the earliest days of the Lifeline network, and serving a large portion of the network that are iCarol customers, we have witnessed the Lifeline’s growth year after year, both in the number of participating centers and the volume of contacts the Lifeline receives through calls, chats, and other forms of communication, and eventually transitioning to the 988 initiative. At this year’s update we’re anticipating the latest news on the development and growth of the 988 network. We’re closely following the continuing conversations on how communities are changing their practices around responding to mental health emergencies and similar crises, with a continuing shift towards crisis intervention teams and other professionals leading the response as opposed to law enforcement.
iCarol enthusiastically supports the efforts to reimagine crisis response in communities across the United States. It’s crucial that people everywhere have access to human-focused, culturally competent crisis care that meets their needs whether that be through an empathetic listener on a crisis line, an in-person visit from a mobile crisis response team, or a stay at a crisis stabilization center. It’s our mission to provide tools to crisis centers that help them respond to their community’s needs. We hope you’ll explore our website to learn more about how we are serving this industry.
The discussions at AAS directly inform iCarol’s strategy and product development in the coming months and years, which ensures we will continue to meet the needs of suicide prevention and crisis centers everywhere, providing the tools they need to do their life-saving work. That’s why we want to ensure we take advantage of being together in-person in Portland to have conversations about challenges, needs, and solutions. If you plan to be at the AAS Conference, please stop by our booth to download our guides and materials, including our ebook on choosing software for crisis intervention and suicide prevention services. Aaron will be available for meetings at your convenience to answer your questions, or have conversations about your challenges or projects and explore how iCarol can be of assistance.
Even with increased awareness and understanding about mental health and mental illness, mental health care, particularly psychiatric care, can still be difficult to access. This often leaves Primary Care Physicians (PCPs), nurses, and other healthcare workers on the frontlines of mental health care in the United States.
However, in Utah PCPs can access specialized psychiatric consultations through the Consultation Access Link Line to Utah Psychiatry (CALL-UP) Program. This legislative funded program is designed to address the limited number of psychiatric services in Utah and improve access to them, and serves patients at no cost to providers or patients in the state of Utah.
iCarol is proud to play a role in the service delivery of CALL-UP, through CALL-UP’s use of iCarol for psychiatrist on-call shift sign up, CALL-UP program documentation to maintain state funding, and through iCarol’s Public Web Forms.
Here’s how iCarol fits into the service delivery workflow of the CALL-UP program in Utah:
The on-call service for psychiatry consultation is available Monday through Friday from 12:00pm to 4:30 pm. Participating psychiatrists are invited by the CALL-UP program administrators to sign into the iCarol system to sign up for shifts where they will be on-call for consultations.
Primary Care Physicians (PCPs) are instructed to contact the CALL-UP program to request a consultation. If the PCP calls in, CALL-UP staff collect basic demographic, needs, and other important data from the PCP in order to comply with state funding requirements, which is input by the phone specialist into iCarol, using an iCarol Contact Form. Then, they can forward the call to the on-call psychiatrist for the consultation to occur.
PCPs can also request a consultation online, using an iCarol Public Web Form. The form has a built-in screening element that first ensures the requestor is a physician, as this is a requirement for program access. If they are not a physician, a prompt instructs them to please contact their doctor.
If the requestor is a PCP then they continue to use the form to provide the information needed to obtain a consultation, including the demographic and other information required to maintain state funding.
Once the Public Web Form is received by CALL-UP staff, they have the information they need to contact the PCP requesting consultation, and connect them with the on-call psychiatrist. Because the iCarol Web Form is simply a publicly available iCarol Contact Form, they already have the data they need, automatically submitted to iCarol with the form, to meet their reporting requirements.
For more information about Utah’s CALL-UP Program, visit their website.
Want to learn more about Public Web Forms and talk through how they might be used for your program or partnership?
