How Exotel helped Lifeline Foundation during the Pandemic

Case Study

How Exotel helped Lifeline Foundation manage an 80% increase in their traffic during the Pandemic

About Lifeline Foundation

Lifeline Foundation is a 24 years old NGO based out of Kolkata. They run a free helpline in addition to outreach programs to support people suffering from anxiety, emotional turmoil & Depression. Their goal is to break the stigma associated with suicide and contain the number of suicides in India.

Volunteers from all walks of life support them by working their suicide helpline. Every volunteer goes through a stringent training and induction program. Volunteers work in two-hour shifts at their centre in Kolkata as per their convenience. The phone lines were monitored using landlines in their office before the Pandemic struck.

Implemented Use Cases

- Incoming support center

The Challenge

While the above setup served them perfectly, the recent lockdown made the fixed phone lines unusable. With social distancing in place, it was no longer possible for the volunteers to go to the centre to receive the calls. The Lockdown was causing much distress to people and anxiety issues were on the increase all around. To solve this, they needed a system that could enable their volunteers to receive calls at home. That’s when they found Exotel.

Solution – Intelligent call routing to volunteers’ mobile phones using Exotel

Using Exotel’s cloud platform they were able to route all incoming calls directly to volunteers’ mobile phones. This enabled the volunteers to manage calls right from home. Since all calls were routed through a virtual number, the privacy of the caller remained secure and they could talk anonymously.

Call Flow

Lifeline foundation runs two helpline numbers – +91-3340447437 and +91-9088030303. All incoming calls to these numbers are handled by Exotel. Calls are routed to the volunteers according to a planned roster.

Moving to Exotel helped them in the following ways –

They were able to provide emotional support to people whilst following the lockdown guidelines.
Easily manage the surge in the number of calls (almost 80% increase) due to the Pandemic without investing in additional infrastructure.
Provide uninterrupted service to the people when they needed it the most.

The lockdown was having a devastating effect on the mental health of our society and LifeLine Foundation’s free helpline helped the distressed callers to unburden themselves in a confidential environment. Exotel’s user-friendly platform made it easy to divert calls to the mobile phones of our trained volunteers. We thank Exotel for supporting LifeLine and giving back to society when we needed it the most.

Hiteshwar Singh
Trustee – Lifeline Foundation

During the Pandemic, Lifeline Foundation saw an 80% increase in their traffic. Here’s what (Deputy Director) Manjit had to say about the current situation and Exotel –

The Lockdown and the inability to take calls at the centre, left all our volunteers feeling helpless as this was the time when people needed us the most. Anxiety levels were high. People were sinking into Depression because of the distressful scenario all around. The Services provided by Exotel seemed like a blessing in disguise, and we were all set to take calls. A big thank you to Exotel for holding our hands through this Pandemic for running our services seamlessly.

Manjit
Deputy Director – Lifeline Foundation