Introducing New Senior Support Service Ahead of Cold & Flu Season

New Senior Support Service helps seniors build confidence with online grocery delivery and stay safer ahead of the upcoming cold and flu season

In the wake of COVID-19, Instacart has become an essential service for anyone looking to limit trips to the store and have their groceries, household goods, and much-needed medications delivered safely. To better support senior customers, Instacart has developed a new Senior Support Service, a high-touch support offering for customers over age 60. The Senior Support Service is designed to help seniors adopt online grocery delivery and stay safer ahead of the upcoming cold and flu season, when they may face increased health risks in light of the ongoing pandemic. In the past month alone, Instacart has brought more than 60,000 seniors online with the Senior Support Service.

The Senior Support Service has proven to be a valuable tool for seniors who want to limit in-person visits to grocery stores during the pandemic, but who may benefit from extra assistance with adopting online grocery delivery. When a customer uses Instacart’s Senior Support Service, a dedicated specialist is ready to assist with a range of high-touch services — from setting up an account, to filling a virtual cart and placing a first order, to providing tutorials on key Instacart features like setting preferred replacements and chatting with their shopper, to troubleshooting problems or questions about an existing order.

“At Instacart, our goal is to make online grocery delivery as seamless and accessible as possible, no matter your age or comfort level with technology,” said Mark Killick, Vice President of Instacart’s Care customer support team.

“Online grocery delivery is one of the safest ways for seniors to get their groceries, household essentials and medications, especially heading into the higher-risk cold and flu season. Many seniors are less accustomed to using an app for ingrained household tasks like grocery shopping, so Instacart’s Senior Support Service is designed to help them build confidence to use online grocery delivery more often and more independently.”

With a team of more than 150 dedicated specialists, Instacart’s Senior Support Service currently assists an average of 2,000 seniors a day with a menu of high-touch services. The Senior Support Service is designed to accommodate more robust assistance and longer, more in-depth conversations, with Senior Support Service contacts lasting on average 20% longer than traditional contacts. With more than 60,000 senior customers brought online in just the past month, the Senior Support Service will continue to scale as necessary to help at-risk seniors more easily adopt online grocery delivery ahead of this year’s cold and flu season.

The Senior Support Line is available in the U.S. and Canada at 1–844–981–3433, daily from 8 a.m. — 11 p.m. ET. For more information, you can visit www.instacart.com/help. The Instacart team is committed to increasing accessibility and serving its entire community safely and effectively. For more information on the additional steps the company has taken in the wake of COVID-19, please visit Instacart’s COVID-19 Resource Center.

Instacart

Instacart is the leading grocery technology company in North America, partnering with more than 1,400 national, regional, and local retail banners to deliver from more than 80,000 stores across more than 14,000 cities in North America. To read more Instacart posts, you can browse the company blog or search by keyword using the search bar at the top of the page.