Are you the crisis coordinator at a mental health agency looking for a mental health answering service to take off hours calls and connect them through to the right advocate quickly? The mental health answering service industry is rapidly changing, and there’s a new type of vendor available: “the crisis line answering service”.
Mental health crisis lines all over the country have started using crisis line answering services to:
Minimize missed calls
Reduce hold times
Reduce highly trained staff burnout
Background
At a typical crisis and information line, mental health professionals and volunteers use an answering service to take calls, texts, and voice messages after hours. Live or virtual receptionists at the third party answering service will then patch through the information to agency.
In practice, mental health agencies have very different needs when compared to a more typical business. Mental health crisis lines really need to make sure that no call is missed, and typically need to follow complex schedules and domain specific business logic to make it happen.
Leading crisis agencies across a number of 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’re specialized for nonprofit crisis hotlines (such as mental health crisis lines), and can connect every crisis phone call to your on-call highly trained professionals in a matter of seconds.
What can’t a crisis line answering service do?
Crisis line answering services aren’t designed for businesses that need a more traditional office phone answering service. If your primary goal is to schedule appointments or modify appointments then a mental health answering service probably isn’t the right choice for you. There are a number of excellent human answering service providers available which will meet your needs better.
Bilingual answering services vs mental health answering services
A traditional bilingual answering service may help you improve access to your mental health services, but supporting callers in multiple languages requires so much more. What about Chinese, Hindi, Korean, and the multitude of other languages that your target client population speaks? How can you support all of your callers in all of those languages after hours?
Crisis line answering services tend to be set up to support dozens of languages 24 hours a day. They can probably handle any call or text message in any of your supported languages.
Where can I start?
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 crisis lines it’s important to make sure that every single call is given vip treatment irrespective of when they call, or what language they speak. HelplineSoftware.com can help you do just that.
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