Strong ties to Atlanta and a desire to help seniors have fueled the growing popularity of Go Go Quincy, a tech support company helping seniors navigate online with friendly, empathetic support. The service is for those who need help with a range of tech issues from logging in to social media sites to identifying email scams to figuring out streaming.
The company’s founders both did postgraduate work here: Muhammad Abdurrahman is a Morehouse College graduate, and Ryan Greene is an Emory University alum. Although they live across the country from one another now — Minnesota and New York City, respectively — they’ve maintained ties with the Southern city that helped inspire the project.
The beginnings
Greene, a New York City native, didn’t learn how to drive growing up because he didn’t need to. When he arrived in Atlanta for college, he quickly realized he was dependent on other people to help him navigate the city, and that concept eventually inspired him to help older people navigate their online lives.
Credit: contributed by Go Go Quincy
Credit: contributed by Go Go Quincy
Greene recalled visiting his grandfather during the pandemic and helping with some technology tasks.
“He came out of his bedroom,” Greene said, “And he had a yellow legal pad with about 18 computer tasks on it. He was like, ‘Can you help me with this?’ And they were things like, ‘My printer isn’t working. I haven’t received an email in three weeks. I can’t log into Facebook’ … And I looked at it, and I knew, one, that these tasks were relatively simple and, two, that I was going to have to do this because no one else would.”
Greene’s idea to establish support services for these instances really began moving when he and Abdurrahman connected through an organization for entrepreneurs. Like Greene, Abdurrahman remembered being the family tech guy — his experiences date back to his days as an eight-year-old at his grandparents’ house in Stone Mountain where he would fix the VCR clock and fiddle with computers.
Credit: contributed by Go Go Quincy
Credit: contributed by Go Go Quincy
They launched in Florida, New York and Atlanta in the fall of 2021, and by Christmas of that year, when recipients needed help learning to use tech gifts, growth had really taken off, according to Greene. Today, the service is available in all 50 states with customers in 38 states, he said.
How it works
Go Go Quincy has three cost tiers tailored to customers’ needs. The first tier offers free tech assistance and scam identification. The second tier gives users more frequent access to help for a fee, and the third tier is for unlimited, paid tech support.
“All three have the same options,” Greene said. “We just created a few different ways for people to be able to afford the support and the level of coverage that they needed. We don’t believe that some types of assistance should be charged (for). It’s kind of scary out there.”
Users can call in for assistance, or they can click a button online, which notifies staff to call. The company hires not only for tech knowledge but for emotional capabilities, too.
“You are always speaking with a real person. We are spending incredible amounts of time with our team members to work on empathy, bedside manner, patience. That’s almost exclusively what we hire for,” Greene said.
The combination is designed to result in a decluttering of tasks.
“The ideal situation for an older adult is not to be in that position where you let a problem stew … the ideal situation is where you have someone like a Go Go Quincy set up so that you can just get those things knocked out,” Abdurrahman said.
Credit: contributed by Go Go Quincy
Credit: contributed by Go Go Quincy
Who’s using Go Go Quincy
Users often call in to get help with unlocking areas of the internet that will make their lives easier or richer — telehealth, social media, entertainment, and finding merchandise deals online, Greene said.
“When we talk about tech support, it’s really anything that happens as you access your technology,” he said.
One customer vertical is people aging in place. Another is organizations looking to take pressure off of their employees who are caring for older loved ones by integrating Go Go Quincy into employee benefit packages. And another is the sandwich generation members who find the service online.
Abdurrahman recalled helping a woman recently who was trying to watch “Frozen” with her granddaughter.
“What does it mean when grandma’s like, ‘Yeah, we’re going to watch ‘Frozen.’ Oh wait — how do I do that? I don’t know how to do that,” he said. “Like, that’s tough.”
He also described talking with a customer in Atlanta who needed to order groceries. She was delighted, he said, to learn she could watch “The Dick Cavett Show” online. And by the end of their conversation, she’d revealed she was terrified of scams she didn’t know how to avoid, but she learned that Go Go Quincy can help.
Ultimately, Greene said, the mission is about upping accessibility and confidence.
“When they know that if they click on the wrong thing or if something looks unfamiliar but they know that it’s super easy to receive assistance, receive support in a way that’s not intimidating,” he said. “It makes it that the internet — that technology — is no longer scary.”
Find out more information on Go Go Quincy online at gogoquincy.com or call 208-557-8466.
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