From landline to lifeline: An origin story of call centres in the humanitarian context
By: Unhcr Innovation Service
Tags: Refugees, Origin Stories, Innovation, Accountability, Call Center

The right to access information held by public and international organizations is a fundamental human right. However, it has only been in the last ten years that humanitarian organizations have really focused on providing accessible communication channels to communities. In light of increasing needs, the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR) and other humanitarian organizations have turned to call centres as a popular tool to engage communities despite the limited evidence available on their impact.

While it’s relatively easy to set up a one-person hotline to answer queries from refugees, scaling a call centre is much more challenging. This can only be tackled through institutional frameworks and through cross-operational learning.

Within UNHCR’s Innovation Service, the Digital Access, Inclusion and Participation Programme has been focusing on scaling call centers in support of our focus on digital Accountability to Affected People (AAP) and its institutionalization. AAP is widely used in the humanitarian community to refer to the related commitments and mechanisms humanitarian agencies have in place to ensure that communities are meaningfully and continuously involved in decisions that directly impact their lives.

To provide UNHCR operations and the humanitarian sector with further practical advice, we have written a series of blog posts which are based on learnings from case studies:

This first provides an overview of the history of call centres within the humanitarian context as well as current tools and guidance available.

The second is a practical tool to understand whether a call centre is the most suitable solution for an operation.

The third discusses the different modalities for setting up a call centre and their design.

The last post shares learnings on running a call centre in Jordan.

This blog post serves as an introduction to our series on call centres by providing readers with an overview of the history of call centres in the humanitarian settings. The last decade has seen a proliferation of call centres which have evolved from simply providing information to a tool to provide feedback and complaints about humanitarian services. In the coming years, we can expect further changes driven by new technologies and the ever-changing nature of the humanitarian sector.

For now, we hope that this series will be helpful for any organizations considering or already running humanitarian call centres.

Searching For An Origin Story

We have noticed that many of the call centres within the humanitarian sector, including UNHCR operations, have emerged with limited human-centred tools or guidance. They have left behind little documentation on why and how they were set up, or if they achieved their intended purpose in a timely manner.

However, a few initiatives have attempted to bridge the information gap and provide valuable tools for those looking to bring call centres to new contexts. One of these is a project called Hotline in a Box, which was financed by the Humanitarian Innovation Fund and led by the design studio Dalberg Design in close collaboration with a team of humanitarian partners. Hotline in a Box is a set of tools, case studies, and tip cards that were developed specifically for the humanitarian community to provide guidance on whether hotlines are the most appropriate, relevant, and cost-effective means of circulating information or dealing with feedback and complaints.

Another tool, more focused on the technical aspects of running a call centre, is the International Financial Cooperation Digital Finance Tools: Call Center Management. It provides call centre managers with a series of documents on call centre management. It was designed for mobile financial services, but some of the tools are relevant to all types of call centres — including in the humanitarian space.

Building off those tools and based on our experience, we wanted to complement the available resources with further guidance on humanitarian call centres. The Innovation Service has added value to a number of call centres in the organization by supporting operations in using a human-centred design approach, guiding operations on the principles of AAP and by sharing knowledge across the organization.

Humanitarian Call Centres: The Early Years (2010- 2015)

While the private sector has been using call centre technology since the 1970s, mostly for telephone sales, airline reservations and banking systems, the humanitarian sector has only recently adopted the technology to address the communication needs of communities.

The first humanitarian helplines we have come across during our research were established during the early 2010s. Initially, they were mostly set up during emergencies and were used for humanitarian assistance rather than for raising complaints or concerns about a specific issue. For instance, following the floods in Pakistan in January 2010, the International Organization for Migration (IOM) set up a nationwide humanitarian call centre which was mostly people searching for information about the situation. Or similarly, after the earthquake in Haiti in 2010, the hotline set up by Oxfam received mostly calls for general queries, despite its intention to serve as a channel to receive complaints and feedback (according to a study by ALNAP).

One of the earliest projects using mobile technology in the humanitarian context dedicated to feedback and complaints was a project called “Piloting Accountability Systems for Humanitarian Aid in Somalia”, that was started in 2011 by the Danish Refugee Council (DRC), in partnership with UNICEF. For the first time, Somali people were able to give feedback about projects funded or services provided by the Danish Refugee Council using an SMS or phone call feedback system. The interesting aspect of this project was that all messages and all answers were made public on the platform. This included complaints, messages yet to be addressed, messages of appreciation, and so on. This project demonstrated to the sector that transparency and accountability are not only possible in humanitarian aid, but also can be achieved with very simple technologies.

UNHCR’s Call Centre Journey

The first UNHCR call centres were established in the Middle East, to address queries from people in Iraq internally displaced as a result of the decades of conflict and widespread violence. As of 2019, almost 2 million people remain displaced inside Iraq and 250,000 are hosted in neighbouring countries.

In 2008, the first hotline was set up in Jordan, and in 2015 UNHCR’s Iraq operation established an inter-agency hotline. Both provide information on humanitarian assistance to displaced Iraqi families; enabling them to access the help they needed, raise complaints, and share feedback on the humanitarian response delivered by aid agencies.

Over the years, these call centres have scaled by increasing the number of call operators to respond to the ever-changing and expanding situation. In 2014, following the huge influx of people entering Jordan from neighbouring Syria, the Jordan call centre was upgraded from a two-person helpline system to respond to the increasing number of calls received. The system underwent an additional upgrade in late 2017, with enhanced automated response features aiming to reduce the number of abandoned and unanswered calls.

Following the Jordan and Iraq call centres, UNHCR established call centres in many of its operations to enhance two-way communications between refugees and UNHCR, and to create a more accountable, better informed, and a more responsive protection environment. In East Africa, the Kenya and Uganda UNHCR operations have set up call centres to improve UNHCR’s Accountability to Affected People. In the Americas, since the start of the Venezuela crisis in 2014, protection hotlines have also been set up by offices across the continent from Peru to Costa Rica.

Most recently, the new operational context marked by Covid-19 has led humanitarian operations around the world to rely more on call centres to engage with communities. In situations where in-person counselling was suspended due to isolation or lockdown measures, call centres in some cases presented the main (or only) channel for communities to seek assistance.

By West Midlands Police — Flickr: Day 210 — West Midlands Police — Historical photo of Police contact centre, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=20497104

Evolving with New Technology

In recent years, there have been multiple ways in which call centres have become more complex, bringing new challenges and considerations. Call centres have evolved over the years from simple phone lines, into complex systems with large databases, multiple operators and in some cases multiple channels. Here are four new areas where technology has supported their evolving role in humanitarian contexts:

1. Managing your caller’s information and history

A call centre customer relationship management (CRM) module is a call centre technology tool that provides call operators with access to customer information and history instantly; this allows them to help customers with up-to-date and relevant information. As call centres have grown in size the role of the CRM has become increasingly critical, especially the interoperability between systems as it enables integrations and extension to other channels. All of these new opportunities have also come with data protection implications which need to be considered.

2. Visualising data to understand performance, and support adaptation and learning

Dashboards are reporting tools that display call centre metrics and key performance indicators (KPIs) to allow managers and teams to monitor and optimize performance.

In UNHCR, while many of the call centres have dashboards that display call centre metrics, the information is often not specific and relevant enough to be used for programming.

3. Integrating different channels

Call centres have over the years evolved into contact centres which also handle emails, live chat, chatbots, and social media. A plural channel model will often provide people with choices and improve the accessibility of different groups. This trend has also been reflected in the humanitarian setting where some of our UNHCR call centres also enable refugees to contact them through other channels. In Uganda, the call centre has been using two-way bulk SMS (the ability to both send SMS messages and receive replies to outgoing messages) to target specific groups with informative messages on topics such as education or health.

4. Exploring the use of Artificial Intelligence (AI)

While AI has been extensively used by the private sector to conduct an analysis of organizational data, the humanitarian sector has only more recently been leveraging the technology to analyse the plethora of information they produce.

These AI uses include:

While there are numerous opportunities, the use of AI in call centre operations is nascent at best and requires further consideration to ensure not only compliance with data protection policies and applicable laws, but also that individual interests and the social good are preserved and enhanced. Furthermore, the contextual environment of some of the places humanitarian organizations work will make it challenging for AI tools to be applied because of the use of different languages and dialects. Lastly, to put in place AI solutions requires a strong analytical skill set and a data-driven culture which is often lacking in the humanitarian sector.

Humanitarian call centres have come a long way from simply providing information to being a tool for feedback and complaints. The mechanism has seen its use and offering expand in tandem with evolving humanitarian imperatives and technologies. The next blog post, building on a case study will assess whether a call centre is the best solution in a given context.