Routing hotline calls to volunteers' cell phones

July 24, 2015 12:31 PM

You work for a hotline or for a service provider that works with one. The hotline has volunteers. Calls to the hotline are routed to volunteers' cell phones. Tell me about that.

I work for an organization that handles a lot of college students programs. One of the programs is a peer listening hotline with lots of student volunteers. It was set up decades ago and the student volunteers still come to a room to sit with landlines for their shifts (even in the middle of the night). For lots of reasons, the leadership at the organization would like that to stop. I'm trying to help a co-worker figure out how to make that happen.

I know that lots of hotlines route calls to a volunteer's cell phone these days, but I don't know how they do it and Googling is turning up a lot of services that seemed geared towards managing customers and selling. We're looking for an option that can route a relatively small number of calls (let's say 1 per day) at unpredictable times to a volunteer's cell phone. There are about 35 volunteers involved with the hotline and they work in 8 hours shifts, so we would need the incoming call to be routed to whomever is on duty.

Where should we be looking? What should we expect to spend to set this sort of thing up? Any guidance would be helpful. Assume I know nothin' about this and feel free to talk me though this like I'm in kindergarden.

posted by pinetree to Technology (6 answers total)

Have you contacted your phone line provider? I worked for a helpline and calls were diverted for night calls to volunteers' own phones. To handover the person on the line enters a code which diverts the calls, then in the morning the volunteer does the same to transfer the line back. It was just a matter of signing up for the call divert service with the telephone provider for a small monthly fee. That's where I'd start.
posted by billiebee at 12:47 PM on July 24, 2015

Try googling "on-call scheduling." Looks like there are some paid solutions (worth talking to any company that does cost per user to see if you could work something else out.) Pager Duty seems like one option (I have no experience with them or any of these services).

If you're working with specific colleges, they likely have a telephone office. Give them a call.
posted by JackBurden at 1:21 PM on July 24, 2015

I think a service like Twilio might be able to help you accomplish this. They have some of their pricing models available on their site to give you an idea of costs.
posted by homesickness at 4:09 PM on July 24, 2015

You might try googling "answering service," if you haven't already. A service that works with doctors or others who might get urgent calls is likely what you want, and it's what we used when I worked on a rape-crisis hotline. The volunteer coordinator had to turn in a schedule to the service, with the scheduled volunteers' contact number, once a month or so.

Depending on the crisis-level of the calls you're receiving, I'd be a bit wary of technical solutions like setting up the main phone to forward calls. One mistyped number and you have no one answering the phones that night and no one being alerted that the calls aren't forwarding correctly.
posted by jaguar at 4:15 PM on July 24, 2015 [1 favorite]

I should have mentioned: The times I've experienced calls forwarding to volunteers, both as a caller and as a volunteer, have all had actual humans answering the calls, getting a quick summary of what was needed, and then forwarding the call to the volunteer. If the volunteer was busy or already on a call, the call would get forwarded to the paid staff member on call that night. (We only ever had one volunteer scheduled per shift. If you had multiple volunteers, then presumably the service could forward the call to the not-busy volunteer.) As a volunteer, having that human transfer was extremely helpful, because if you got woken up in the middle of the night, your panicked "Huh?...What?... Wait... ok" waking-up and pulling-it-together time happened while you were getting the info from the answering service operator, which gave you a few moments to focus before being connected to the hotline caller.
posted by jaguar at 4:19 PM on July 24, 2015 [2 favorites]

The phone system may very well be equipped to do this for you. If it uses a separate standalone voicemail system, that may also have the capability you need - it's less common these days but possible. It's a feature usually referred to as Flexible Call Routing or Intelligent Call Routing.

Many, many systems have the ability to route an inbound call to an external number based on criteria you pick: it could be based on what number was dialed initially, or a schedule, or caller ID, or some combination of all of these.

I would ask whomever manages the phones/lines if the phone system (often called a PBX) has that capability. If it does, it will cost either nothing or very little to have the desired behavior programmed.
posted by Thistledown at 6:09 AM on July 25, 2015