iCarol Messaging Tools That Improve Your Crisis Intervention Service

When it’s time to pick a Live Chat or Texting platform for your organization, you’ve got a lot to consider. Your crisis intervention service needs tools that will help you meet grant requirements, comply with accreditations and certifications, and report on the data collected during client interactions. But most important of all, you need to be a source of online emotional support for your visitors and provide excellent service to them.

You provide a vital service to your community, and a generic, out-of-the-box chat or text solution just won’t cut it. Here are some components of iCarol that will actually help improve your suicide prevention or crisis intervention service.

Total control of availability – With iCarol messaging you have complete control over when your text or chat service is online and available, using the integrated Shift Scheduling tool right within iCarol. If using Live Chat, visitors to your website will only see you as Online if you have an active shift set up with workers assigned. Similar with texting, if a shift is not set up or no one is assigned to that shift, a visitor who texts in will get a friendly message letting them know your service is currently offline, and it can advise them of when you’re next available.

Bonus – Experiencing a surge of phone calls due to a local event, crisis, or other emergent situation, and need your workers to turn their attention to those calls? Or perhaps your queue of online help-seekers is full and your specialists need time to catch up before inviting more visitors in, to avoid long wait times. You can take your service offline temporarily with the click of a button so your workers can address those messages. You can quickly turn your messaging services back on when you’re ready to open up the queue again.

Collect data up front – iCarol’s optional registration and pre-chat surveys let you collect the necessary data at the start of the chat, and straight from the visitor themselves. You can keep it simple, like asking for basic demographic information, or ask questions like, “What’s your main concern today?” or “How upset are you?” with a list of available options. These questions are highly configurable, so you can collect whatever information you need. This data will be presented to your counselors when they pick up a conversation from the queue, helping prepare them for the conversation and giving them valuable insight on how to best serve the help seeker.

Flag conversations that may be high risk – Answers to your pre-chat survey questions can have configurable values applied to them that can flag a visitor as being potentially high risk when they enter your queue, based on how they answer certain questions or as a calculation of the entirety of their answers. This risk level displayed in the queue helps your volunteers and staff do necessary triage, assign higher risk chats to more experienced counselors, or alert supervisors to take quality assurance measures.

Bonus – Need to limit your interactions to visitors in a certain geographic area due to funding or other restrictions or requirements? We’ve got you covered! iCarol can screen for geographic area, allowing only those in your defined area to participate. Visitors from outside the area will get a friendly list of alternate sources of help.

Support and Supervise Volunteers and Staff – Your Chat Specialists could face some challenging chats. iCarol offers tools that ensure your workers can rely on peers and supervisors for support when needed. Right from within the conversation window a counselor can ask for help from their direct supervisor. Workers can also send an email or text message to any colleague or supervisor, without ever leaving iCarol. Finally, our Internal Chat tool is a way for people signed in to iCarol to type quick messages to one another. Chat Specialists could ask a colleague for advice on appropriate referrals or tips on how to help a visitor. As a Helpline Director you and other supervisors could be available for consultation while you’re in the contact center, or you could sign in from your home computer to check in with workers on shifts occurring after you’ve already left the office for the day.

Resource and Referral – It’s common during conversations, whether they’re over the phone or through live chat or text, that a help-seeker may need services beyond what your organization offers. Food pantries, shelter, financial assistance, or professional counseling are just a few examples. Every standard iCarol system includes a resource database that you can populate with all the information about your own local community service inventory. You can search this database of services while chatting with a visitor and deliver those referrals right within the conversation, so they can get any further help they may need..

Silent Monitoring – Supervisors can navigate to the chat queue and review the active messages going on between their counselors and the visitors. Further, they can look in on those individual conversations to provide help or quality assurance.

Assess Risk – With access to suicide risk assessment tools (developed by the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline) and other experts, your specialists have tools to help guide them through any necessary suicide risk or safety assessment. This includes suggestions for talking points or questions to pose to the visitor or work into the conversation. As those areas are answered, a user-configured gauge provides guidance on risk level. Nothing replaces the experience and gut instinct of your trained specialists, but this tool provides a measurement to help guide them.

Tools for rescue – The anonymity that has so many flocking to this mode of support brings with it some challenges when it comes to imminent danger situations. One of the biggest points of apprehension that we hear about concerning Online Emotional Support concerns the ability to send emergency personnel to help-seekers in imminent danger. Most people just need to express their feelings to someone who won’t become uncomfortable or shut down the conversation, and having a safe place to talk about their feelings is hugely helpful. What people tend to need most when they’re considering suicide is empathetic, non-judgmental listening, and the majority of interactions can be resolved without involving law enforcement or crisis intervention teams.

But, there are those instances where someone may be in imminent danger and in need of intervention. If you’ve determined a visitor is in need of emergency assistance, best practices suggest that it’s best to engage the help-seeker and try to get them to participate in their own rescue by providing that critical location information. But if they will not, iCarol has the option to reveal the Internet Service Provider (ISP) and IP Address which can be turned over to the necessary authorities who will work with that ISP to determine where the user of that IP Address is physically located. With visitors who are texting you, at your discretion you configure your iCarol system to reveal the visitor’s full phone number for use in an emergency.

As your center plans to add Online Emotional Support to your services, it’s a good idea to reach out to the local systems that you might utlize for in-person rescue or intervention, to explore how they might help your center if these situations arise. And if your center does not have a need for this information or if having access to an ISP or IP Address or full phone number of a visitor stands in conflict with your policies about confidentiality and privacy, these tools can be turned off for your iCarol system.

Data Collection for Reporting – Once an interaction ends, counselors fill out a Contact Form to capture important data. Many things on this form are already filled out automatically: Start and end time of interaction, any information entered by the visitor before and after the interaction, the full, time-stamped transcript, and the referrals you’ve made. There’s ample opportunity for further data collection as well, such as issues discussed, risk assessment information, and more. In short, the call report form contains all information you have about the interaction in one convenient place. All of this can be reported on in the Statistics area of iCarol and/or via Contact Record Exports to be analyzed in an external program like Microsoft Access or Excel.

Visitor Feedback – Remember the pre-chat survey? You can add on a post-chat counterpart, and use it to collect your visitor’s feedback and feelings about the service you provided, self-assessment following the chat, or anything else you’d like them to share with you.

Feedback and Quality Assurance – One aspect of your chat reporting form will be the chat transcript. That’s right, whether the interaction was via text message or live chat, the full time-stamped transcript of that interaction will become a part of your report form. This comes in extra handy when it comes time for supervisors to review interactions and give feedback. You can give very specific guidance to your workers using these transcripts, pointing out specific moments in the conversation where they really connected with what the visitor was saying, or perhaps where an opportunity was missed. Further, these transcripts can make for excellent training tools for new volunteers who are learning how to provide Online Emotional Support.

Some services prefer not to save the transcript for privacy purposes. This is particularly common for our customers who serve survivors of sexual or intimate partner violence. iCarol customers can configure this to meet their needs, and can choose to not save the transcript and instead have it be digitally shredded when the conversation ends.

Follow-up – There are many reasons you may be re-engaging with a client once the initial interaction has ended. Safety planning and ongoing contact with support systems are extremely important for people who are having thoughts of suicide. You may also want to see if the referrals a caller was given were able to help them, or use a follow-up call or text as an opportunity to conduct a satisfaction or quality assurance survey. If a person reaches your service via Text message, they may want to receive their “call back” this way as well. With our Follow-up activity you can follow-up via phone call or text message. Our handy character counter will even help you keep that message under the limit so that your content can be sent in one single text message.

Load balancing and collaboration – Say you want to provide your chat service 24 hours a day, but only have the staff to provide this service for some of that time. Or, maybe your center is part of a network of centers within a state or region that would like to come together to offer Online Emotional Support, and want to share responsibility for offering that service. There are several options where, using iCarol, you can partner, contract, and have chats routed according to the partnerships you’ve formed. If you haven’t found a partner, we can help connect you with centers who you may be able to build that relationship with.

Reports for your CEO or funders – We offer a robust set of statistical tools offering many charts and graphs at your disposal, along with more advanced exporting if you’d like to import your data into external programs for further analysis. Reports on the number of interactions your center is handling, pie charts showing the location, demographic, or issues/needs data, are just a few examples of the types of reports you could run. And practically anything you collect on the call reporting form can also be turned into a Content Filter. So run that chart showing the number of messaging interactions that were logged in your system last month, and using the filters you can determine how many of those came from Males between the ages of 40 and 60 who messaged you about an Addiction, if you collect that data. What you can report on is limited only in what you choose to collect on your highly configurable Contact Form.

What’s Private Stays Private – Text and Live Chat conversations often deal with sensitive subjects. Data stored in iCarol, including messaging data, is encrypted at a level used by financial institutions, so rest assured your data is secure. Our exclusive focus working with non-profit help centers, crisis centers, and information centers assures our understanding of your needs in this area. Be aware, however, that text messages travel over telephony provider networks, and that part of the interaction is out of any text service provider’s control, including iCarol.

Grow and Expand your service – Perhaps you want to set up a new text or chat service aimed specifically at teens. Using “Portals” iCarol can separate these new programs from the rest of your messaging platform. This program might have its own hours of operation, and you need to collect different data for that program than you would for your base chat/text service, all of which is possible now that you’ve separated this service out via Portals.

At iCarol we pride ourselves on being a choice solution for crisis centers and suicide prevention services, due in part to our vast experience and intimate knowledge of the industry, and our Live Chat and SMS/Texting capabilities follow those same principles. To learn more about using iCarol to provide services by Live Chat or SMS/Text, current iCarol users can check out the tutorial videos and articles found in the iCarol Help Center, and open a ticket to ask questions or add a service to your organization’s iCarol system. If you’re not yet an iCarol customer, simply email us or schedule a meeting, and we’ll be delighted to discuss our solutions and answer your questions.