Are you coordinating crisis calls at a mental health agency and need an efficient out-of-hours service? The landscape for answering services is evolving, and a new solution is here: the crisis line answering service, designed to quickly connect callers to the right advocate.
Mental health call centers all over the country have started using crisis line answering services to:
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Minimize missed calls
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Reduce hold times
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Reduce highly trained staff burnout
How Mental Health Answering Services Work
At most crisis hotlines, mental health workers and volunteers require a dependable system to handle calls, texts, and voicemails after hours. Third-party receptionists, whether live or virtual, then connect the information to the agency.
In practice, mental health call centers have very different needs from those of a typical business. Mental health crisis response teams need to ensure that no call is missed, and they typically need to follow complex schedules and domain-specific business logic to make this happen. For a comprehensive framework on routing reliability—including fallbacks, overflow behavior, and what to require from any system—see call routing solutions.
Leading crisis agencies across many domains such as rape crisis, domestic violence, and substance abuse have switched to using more specialized technology to simplify manning crisis hotlines. HelpineSoftware.com is the leading provider of crisis hotline answering service technology. They understand the significant importance of every crisis call.
What Is a Crisis Line Answering Service?
Crisis line answering services differ significantly from traditional or “human answering services.” They specialize in nonprofit crisis hotlines (such as mental health crisis lines) and can connect every crisis phone call to your on-call, highly trained professionals in seconds.
Limitations of Crisis Line Answering Services
Crisis line answering services are tailored for specific responder needs, not general office tasks. If your main goal is managing appointments, a mental health answering service might not fit best. For scheduling help, consider other quality human answering services.
Mental Health & Crisis Answering Services vs. Traditional Bilingual Services
Using a basic bilingual answering service can boost access to your mental health services, but truly serving callers in many languages needs more. What about Chinese, Hindi, Korean, and other languages important to your clients? How will you support all these languages after hours?
Crisis line answering services tend to be set up to support dozens of languages 24 hours a day and handle any call or text message in any of your supported languages.
How to Choose the Right Mental Health Answering Service
We recommend you start with the industry leader, HelplineSoftware.com. You can see how their system works and contact them. They’ve been selected as the mental health answering service for a number of 24/7 mental health crisis lines across the country.
At mental health call centers, it’s important to ensure that every call is given VIP treatment, regardless of when the call is made or what language the caller speaks. HelplineSoftware.com can help you do just that. CONTACT OUR TEAM
