309: How Can AI Transform Communication in Childcare? With Kaila Linder

In this episode of "Childcare Conversations," Kate and Carrie sit down with Kaila Linder, an AI trailblazer and preschool owner, to chat about how artificial intelligence is transforming the childcare industry. ☎️🤖 Kayla shares her journey from teacher to tech innovator, introducing tools like “AI Emily” that help centers answer calls, manage messages, and even monitor online reviews. The trio swap practical tips and real-life stories, making AI feel less intimidating and more like a helpful friend—freeing up time so you can focus on what matters most: the children!

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Transcript

Carrie Casey (00:50)
Hey guys, so today we're gonna have a conversation about one of those big things that has changed in the tech world and should be affecting your program. And that's AI with our friend Kayla Linder. We don't only interview people from Texas, but there are a lot of people in Texas. So we do interview people from Texas more than we do other states and provinces and countries.

a little bit of bias. What?

Kate Young (01:20)
But you know what? They

can always decide if they want to join. They can go to childcareconversations.com and click share your story and you can apply to be a guest. We'd love to have you. Okay, sorry, I had to do a shameless plug.

Carrie Casey (01:32)
especially

our listeners that are overseas, our listeners in, you know, Korea, our listeners in ⁓ Australia, New Zealand, Africa, that one person in Germany, Guten tag. So we'd love to share your stories too. But Kayla, why don't you tell the people who haven't met you at 27 conferences, a little bit about you and your journey in the industry.

Kaila Linder (01:59)
So if you ask my husband, I give the worst elevator pitch of who I am, but I will give it a try. ⁓ So I'm Kayla Linder. I'm with Linder Connect, which is an AI based service company. But in addition to that, I've been in the industry 15 plus years. So 15 plus years started from the very bottom as a substitute teacher and worked my way up. ⁓ I now own 16. I'm a part owner in 16 preschools here in Texas. ⁓

That's exciting and now have a new AI support company.

Kate Young (02:31)
Love that. Well, welcome, Kayla. And we are so excited to have you join. ⁓ you know, folks have been listening to us for just a few years. we just, we are starting the 300s, the 300 series. And so we are excited to have you as part of our 300 series. That's going to be my new name for it. I don't know why. It popped into my head and too much caught.

Carrie Casey (02:31)
There we go.

Kaila Linder (02:52)
300 series. I love it.

Carrie Casey (02:52)
Okay, it's like

my brain goes to, know, this is the ⁓ Star Trek D or whatever.

Kaila Linder (03:01)
And I was gonna say, does it make this like the gladiator series? Because they had that 300 movie, right?

Kate Young (03:07)
It's really funny because I went to a Turkey, which is what you get as a 300, you know, to get a 300 in bowling. So ⁓ apparently we are all over the place. We've got gladiators, got turkeys. That should tell you a lot about where this conversation is going to go. So if anybody ever wonders if there are scripted questions or if this is scripted, should be ⁓ a realization that it is anything but scripted. So with that, Kayla, I know.

Kaila Linder (03:11)
you

Carrie Casey (03:14)
Hahaha!

Kaila Linder (03:16)
I'm sorry.

Yeah. ⁓

Clear indicator.

Kate Young (03:37)
lot of folks who are listening are probably not, I mean, they're tech savvy enough to discover a podcast, right? So, but they may not go, ooh, I'm so excited about AI or some new tech something. And those who do know anything about tech, I'm guessing that probably most of us are probably at the chat GPT, co-pilot, perplexity, like word and entry level component. And we may have seen,

Video or an ad or something about other things that are AI? possible Let us tell us a little bit about what's possible First and then we'll come back and have a discussion about how we could possibly use that in childcare other than writing social media posts and then forgetting to take the created by chat GPT content out of

Kaila Linder (04:34)
Yeah, out of the post.

Carrie Casey (04:34)
You

Kaila Linder (04:35)
No, mean, absolutely. So, you know, depending on who you ask, AI, the sky's the limit. You know, anything and everything is possible. You know, I will say I wasn't tech savvy for a long time. I've kind of learned as I go. But what I'm finding with AI is that it's built for people that aren't tech savvy. It's just

I like to call it the 2.0 version. I mean, I use it for everything for checking my emails, for grammar, ⁓ to ⁓ messages to parents. How can I say this a little bit nicer that, hey, if you don't pay me by Wednesday, your kids can't come? ⁓ And it's because we don't want to be rude about it, but at end of the day, we need that. And so AI and chatting between. Yeah.

Carrie Casey (05:20)
Yeah,

have to say that the directors that complain about their staff sending stuff out on the parent platform because the grammar or the spelling is wrong, I'm like, girl, just get Grammarly. Like, what is your problem? Install Grammarly on those iPads so that the staff can use Grammarly in their parent communication. It would solve that whole issue.

Kaila Linder (05:35)
Yeah. Yeah.

Yep.

Kate Young (05:45)
tip, go to a platform that actually has AI built in the parent communication. Plug, plug, look at last quarter sponsor. Um, okay. So, so if, so if, if your software app doesn't have that feature call, and I mean, call, don't send a message, call somebody and say, Hey, my staff really need this feature. There's also some great platforms. If you've got bilingual or language, like different languages, I mean, um,

Kaila Linder (05:51)
Yep.

Yeah, and I mean it.

Carrie Casey (05:56)
Hahaha

Kate Young (06:15)
I love, mean, Carrie and I know probably all of the different platforms, but if you have a high population of either staff who don't speak English or parents who don't speak English, ⁓ check out family because family has a two-way translation component. So if your staff only speak one language and you want them to send good English text messages to the parents, you might need to look at that particular platform for that reason. So, all right.

Kaila Linder (06:43)
Yeah.

Kate Young (06:44)
I'm done, go ahead.

Kaila Linder (06:45)
No, you're good. So yeah. So, you know, we, we actually, that's how AI started. It was, I've got a problem and how do I fix it? And so we do, we had a Spanish immersion school. And so we started with, I have Spanish speaking teachers that want to talk to my English speaking parents and don't know how to do it. Especially in writing, writing is so much harder than, you know, the language, just speaking it. And so we started with inputting an app.

Carrie Casey (06:46)
You

Kaila Linder (07:12)
into our platform because the platform we were using at the time didn't have it. So we ⁓ developed an app that's essentially a chat bot. So you can say, you I want to tell mom that her son was having a great day today and these are the activities that we did. And she puts all that into Spanish and it translates it into English and she can just copy paste and put it in. But yes, if you have the native integration, it's great if you've got the platform for it for sure. ⁓

But yeah, mean, that's really how my AI journey started. And so, you know, I'll talk about how LenderConnect kind of started was that my husband's in a totally different industry and he's a software developer and he was doing some really cool things with AI where he started with giving his clients the, what we call AI Emily. So she is a fully automated voice agent that answers the phone. And he was doing that for his industry. ⁓ And I was like,

I want that for my industry. Cause I was looking at just, just my schools alone. You know, we had at the time about 14 centers, we were losing between 300 and 500 calls weekly after hours calls, weekend calls, directors already on the phone, can't answer a second call. So three to 500 calls weekly. Um, and so we started with an, voice AI agent. So AI Emily is, um, a voice agent. And if the director can't get to the phone,

Carrie Casey (08:18)
Yep.

Kaila Linder (08:34)
she answers the phone and she can give you information about the school. She can set up a tour for you. If you're one of those schools that lets tuition be told on the phone, she can give that out too. ⁓ And so that's where it started. And it was just a really cool thing. And I think when we started in this industry, it scared a lot of people because they didn't want to lose that human touch. And in none of the AI work that I do, I don't want to lose that human touch. I am a mom of two young kids. I understand the value of that. Absolutely.

⁓ But this is a support system. So what we say is let Emily answer the phone so you can focus on what's in the classroom. Let Emily take that message for you so that you're not answering 400 calls. The best thing that I hear from directors, she filters out spam calls. So you're not getting that update your Google voice listing or the marketing agent who wants to know if you need ⁓ paper towels.

Kate Young (09:32)
Does does she answer the parent one that just says hey, I'm running late or you know, like I mean when Carrie and you know Carrie and I participated and and I know you were there and we heard numbers as far as well I don't know if you were in that workshop, but I think you were just about the number of calls an average director gets during the day that are not Revenue producing calls. And so like you said, I mean

Kaila Linder (09:37)
Yup. Yup.

Kate Young (10:00)
So if you do the math, just want to real quick. So folks, and I'm going to make Carrie pull out her calculator. So you guys have 14 schools. So she's got 14 schools and they're losing 300 calls a week. So 300 divided by 14. What does that carry?

Kaila Linder (10:05)
gosh.

Carrie Casey (10:05)
goodness, okay.

Hang on, I hadn't even pulled it up yet. 300. Okay, so that's 4,200. 4,200 calls.

Kaila Linder (10:16)
Hold on. I'm like, I need a calculator too. I can get on the calculator trend with you. But I mean, we were saying an average.

Kate Young (10:16)
well.

direction. I want to know how many per school per week is where I was going.

Kaila Linder (10:28)
other directions, yeah,

so 500, let's say, yep, divided by the 14. So we were losing about 35 calls per location. Yeah.

Kate Young (10:35)
Divide by 14.

Carrie Casey (10:39)
Oh. 36, yeah, 35 point,

yeah.

Kate Young (10:44)
Okay, so if you're listening to this, might be going, that's only like six calls a day. Okay, I don't know about you, but if even one of those calls every day turned into a tour, that is five tours a week. And unless your program has a massive wait list, I bet there's nobody, well, okay, maybe not nobody, but there's probably very few of you who are listening who having...

five tours a week isn't gonna make a huge difference in your profitability of your program. So for the programs who are like, ⁓ I don't need this, we don't get that many calls or I'm not losing. First of all, do you really know if you're not losing? Because if somebody's...

Carrie Casey (11:23)
Right,

because if they don't get an answer in the first three rings, they're hanging up and going on to the next one. They've already stalked your program on social media and on the website, and they made the decision that you were one of the three they were looking at, and if you don't answer the phone, then they know you're not gonna answer the phone when they have a question about their child's sore throat. So they're not gonna go to your program.

And that's the thing that I think people have a hard time with. Okay.

Kate Young (11:50)
All right, so let's Kayla finish telling us more.

Kaila Linder (11:53)
No, no, no, no, you're

fine. You're fine. ⁓ No, I mean, this is exactly the train of thought that we had. was even if one of those 35 calls was an active warm lead that wanted to tour, we lose it. I mean, that's all the research that's coming out. Line Leader just did their benchmark report and that's what it said. If you don't pick up, they're just going on to the next one. You're not going to lead. Yeah. Yeah.

Carrie Casey (11:56)
you

Kate Young (12:14)
Yeah, TeleKids had a similar one, right?

So like, we're all looking at the numbers and if folks have been listening to us at all over the last two years, we've been barking this about answer the dang phone because we call you. And if we're trying to give you something and we call our clients and we have about between six and 800 every year that we go through our list to try to attempt to call.

Kaila Linder (12:27)
Yep.

Kate Young (12:40)
We get folks who don't email, don't call us back, don't email back, don't answer the phone. Just a couple of weeks ago, Carrie and I each had a list of 20 people, because we call about 20 to 40 a week. Like we each got a hold of one, one out of 20.

Kaila Linder (12:55)
Yep. Yeah. I mean, so and that's and we're just talking about missed calls, you know, I mean, what we say is A.I. Emily is never going to replace that dedicated owner who's there, passionate, driven, you know, building that connection over the phone, smiling so you can hear it over the phone type of video. She's not going to replace that person.

Kate Young (12:57)
Heheheheh!

Kaila Linder (13:17)
But your director who's just run from a classroom in the back to answer the phone or your teacher who's sitting there because the director's on bus run and she's going to do better than that. You know, and like I said, the whole purpose was so that the director could focus on what's happening in their center. They could be present for their center without dealing with all of the sort of monotonous questions. You get the same question. What's the tuition? Do you have availability? You know, what's your philosophy? What's the longevity of your teachers?

Emily can answer all those questions. And so she's going to give you that opportunity. Yeah.

Kate Young (13:49)
Love that, love that.

So, Caitlin, this is just for programs with like lots of locations, right? Like this, like I only have 30, I got a program for 30 kids. It's just my program. Is this something I should even think about?

Kaila Linder (14:05)
No, I'm you know much to your point if you're not full you want to take in every lead that you've got so unless you've got a two-year wait list I say it's going to be a benefit to you. ⁓ You know it's we have different plans so we've got plans where people are like I wanted to answer every call because I get consistency through that we see that for lot of multi-site owners because I can't sit next to every single director and answer every single call with them ⁓ but for our smaller schools

just make it the backup, the after hours weekend. Like I said, I have two young kids, four and two. I'm making phone calls, I'm inquiring about things at eight o'clock at night ⁓ when my kids are finally in bed. And so if I wanna know about a program, that's a great opportunity for me to give that call and schedule that tour at eight o'clock when I can't do it during the day, I'm too busy.

Kate Young (14:53)
So, Kayla, let's talk a little bit about, we've talked about, ⁓ you know, we talk to folks all the time in person at our conferences about starting to at least move their tours into, you know, automated automation on their website where somebody can literally schedule it right then and there. I mean, that's a plug and play with Calendly or TidyCal or Acuity or whatever, right? And a lot of our software platforms now have that capability. Does your AI Emily

Kaila Linder (15:00)
Yeah.

Kate Young (15:22)
⁓ Does Emily correlate with current existing software? Is that a future plan? How does that work if you're already using platforms to handle your scheduling?

Kaila Linder (15:29)
Yeah.

Yeah, so absolutely. We can integrate with just about anyone out there. There's a couple of 300 pound dinosaurs out there that we can't integrate with quite. But your your Google Calendar, your Outlook Calendar, your calendarily, absolutely, as well as integrating with platforms themselves. And so our goal is to really jumpstart that lead management system. So like I said, AI was born out of what do I need to help save time? Well, if

Carrie Casey (15:42)
Mm hmm.

Kaila Linder (16:03)
All it's doing is answering the phone and then telling me I have a tour, but it's not going into my calendar. It's not sending me a reminder. It's not sending them a reminder. It's not really helpful to me. So yes, it can do all of that. So once Emily takes that call, she transposes all that information, can input it directly into your CRM system to get your lead funnel working. If you don't have a CRM system, we have one that we can, that's very basic that will start that appointment reminder, tour reminder funnel for you.

And then at the end of the day, does also for my not tech savvy people send you an email. Hey, you've got a new call. You've got a new lead. You've got a tour. So it goes directly to your email box as well. So you don't, yeah. Yeah. So, you know, so you're not required to learn a whole new software. It's still going to send you the email, but it's going to link into all your systems as well.

Kate Young (16:43)
love that! That's my favorite part! Send me an email!

heavy of a lift is this? Like I know that when I have conversations with folks, the whole concept of adding a new piece of tech or changing tech gets so like, it's like, my God, this is so painful. Like Carrie and I have done this like once a year for the last three years. ⁓ Not because we planned it, ⁓ but because we found better, more efficient ways to do it. Right. And so

Carrie Casey (16:58)
and I'm just going to finish.

Kaila Linder (17:12)
Yeah.

sleep.

Kate Young (17:18)
You know, if you're going from, our case, we went from over a thousand dollar a month tech stack to a $300 a month tech stack. It was painful, but it was worth it, right? So what is the, like how painful of a process is this? I mean, obviously they have to probably write the FAQs. They probably have to help write a script, which you probably have AI to help you with, or you have examples. What are we talking as far as the amount of time for setup?

Kaila Linder (17:26)
Yeah. Yeah.

So,

yeah, so I'm gonna tell you, it's basically a Google Sheet. We got some basic information, but to take it one step farther, we're gonna link directly into any publicly available information about your school. So you don't have to give me an FAQ. I'm gonna look into your website, I'm gonna get your hours of operation, I'm gonna get information about your... Yeah, yeah. So we're gonna hope they're up to date for sure. ⁓

Kate Young (18:00)
So we're gonna hope all those are up to date. Is that what you're saying?

Kaila Linder (18:08)
But it'll link into the publicly available information. And then when we first launched this, I spent probably about 600 hours talking to Emily. So she's conversational in what parents want. So I was a prospective parent with a thousand questions. You know, I'm that mom with my list of things. And I spent time just asking her all the hardball questions. So it's set up for childcare. You know, like I said, I've been in this industry, I've done it. So it's set up to answer questions appropriately, respectfully. And so

For setup, you're really just providing us basic information. It's a Google Sheet. You're going to give me some basic information about closures, hours of operation, anything that you want us to highlight, what makes your program special. Give me that information. The more information you give me, the better she's going to be. The more specific she can be about things. But she's also not afraid to say, you know what, I'm not sure. Let me connect you with someone. Let me take a message. Do all of that kind of stuff. So she knows she's not perfect.

And I talk to her, I talk about her like she's a human, she's Emily. So ⁓ she's learning and growing every day.

Carrie Casey (19:09)
Yeah

Kate Young (19:09)
Absolutely. I mean,

we call ours Jodi, so we can respect Emily. So last, maybe not last question, but my next question is, what is the ROI? So I would be remiss without talking, you know, let's talk about dollars and cents or percentages of ROI. So.

Kaila Linder (19:15)
There you go.

you

Carrie Casey (19:29)
Kate, you're using another word as if everybody knows what it is. What is ROI? If they've been listening, but maybe today is the first time because they're a friend of Kayla's. So.

Kate Young (19:34)
They should! ⁓

Kaila Linder (19:39)
Maybe today is the very first day.

Kate Young (19:41)
Maybe it's

because Kayla shared it on her social media, wink, wink, nudge, nudge. Okay, so.

Carrie Casey (19:44)
Yeah. Okay.

So ROI is return on investment. So when you're spending anything that anything in your business, there should be some return on that investment return of time or return of revenue. So when we hire a teacher, we get both, right? That's great. We get the ability to have more revenue and we're not in the classroom.

So what is the ROI, the return on investment of hiring Emily?

Kaila Linder (20:10)
Correct.

Yeah, I mean, you so we talked a little bit about the timepiece. That is our major goal is to give you back that timepiece. But at the end of the day, as we also sort of discussed, it's going to bring in active warm leads into your center. ⁓ And active warm leads means potential enrollment and potential enrollment is your revenue line. So it's a way for you to connect ⁓ with your audience, with your families that you didn't have before. So it can take

up to 1500 calls every second. yeah, yeah, not that you're getting 1500 calls every second, but it has a capacity. Yeah, yeah. So it's, you know, it can

Carrie Casey (20:53)
mean, what a problem. Yeah.

Kate Young (20:54)
solve a lot of problems.

If you're getting that

many calls per second, I wanna see your marketing strategy. I'm like going, I'm like, can you share that? Like I got some people who could use that. Okay, go ahead.

Kaila Linder (21:03)
Yes, exactly. Yeah.

Yes, but

it can handle that. And then, you know, as we continue to grow and we're working with providers, we're also filling in other gaps for them. And so we've had providers, they're like, well, you know what, I don't get a ton of phone calls, but I get a lot of Facebook messages. We now have an autoresponder. Emily can now connect to your Facebook and respond to those messages in there and send that information over to you. at the end of the day, yes, she does. She does. She handles that spam.

Kate Young (21:31)
Does she handle that spam too?

Kaila Linder (21:36)
She also lets you know if somebody has commented negatively about you so that you can respond to that person. ⁓ We've been able to link into people's ⁓ Google reviews and Yelp reviews and Facebook messages. So if somebody's saying something, it'll alert you. It'll let you know that there's a negative comment out there and you can deal with it because reputation management is a huge piece of what we do.

And it's time consuming. It's time consuming to go through all those different websites and check all those places. So this will alert you. And so she's only growing and developing. She started as a voice AI agent. She's now a chat bot, a social media responder, a reputation manager, and she'll only continue to grow as people reach out and let us know what they need. At the end of the day, we want to get people back to caring for children. Caring and educating children is why we do, why most of us, shouldn't say everyone, most of us do what we do.

And we want to get you back to that. You didn't get into this business to answer the phone 100 times a day. You didn't get into this business to talk to the spam calls or filter those messages out. You got into it because you wanted to care for children. So how do we get you back to that?

Kate Young (22:45)
Absolutely. All right. So Carrie, do you have anything else you want to?

Carrie Casey (22:49)
probably have 47 more things that we could say. But what I am gonna say is the problem of answering your messages, answering your emails, and answering your phones is costing you thousands of dollars a month. Figure out a way to get past that. And...

If your center is not answering the phone or responding to social media messages and emails, then you need Kayla or you need someone like her or your software. And if you're not sure because you're, you you think you're getting most of them, I would suggest you get some secret shopping done. ⁓

And we can put you in contact with the secret shopping company that we like in part because our children are the principles of it, childcaremysteryshopping.com. But if you're not sure that your phone is being answered consistently, you need to check. And if it's not being answered consistently, you're losing money. So fix it. ⁓

Kaila Linder (23:59)
Absolutely. Absolutely. He did not agree more.

Kate Young (24:01)
So,

absolutely. So in the show notes, we will have all of the links to connect with Kayla and Linda Connect. ⁓ We might even have some other stuff for you in there. So make sure you go check to see what kind of resources we have in the show notes for the episode. And Carrie, what would you like to say to everybody?

Kaila Linder (24:18)
Absolutely.

Carrie Casey (24:23)
like to say, if you had anything, any feedback on the show, please go into the show notes and text the show. We read all of those and it helps us to determine who we're going to invite in as guests going forward. And of course, share this show with somebody else who needs to know your owner, your board, ⁓ your friend who runs a center across the country, share it with people who need to know because this one had a lot of writer downers. Absolutely.

Kaila Linder (24:52)
Yeah.

Kate Young (24:55)
All right, see y'all in a few days.

Kaila Linder (24:57)
Well, I appreciate it.