National carrier outages can happen. For example, in February 2024 AT&T experienced a widespread cellular outage affecting tens of thousands of customers across the US. Nevertheless, you need your hotline to continue running.
In this article, we share a few key features in HelplineSoftware.com that we’ve designed so you can automatically monitor and resolve these issues without being woken up in the middle of the night.
See Cellular Outages in Real-Time
Consider the recent AT&T cellular outage. Our system ensures calls are routed as instructed, even if advocates face an outage. If an on-call person is affected, our system alerts agency administrators by highlighting this issue. See the screenshots below:
We can even take over your phone systems so that your phone and text lines won’t be affected by local internet outages.
Cellular Outages Automatically Managed
Partnering with us allows you to set multiple backup schedules for on-call support. As shown in the screenshot, if the Hotline Primary isn’t available, the Hotline Backup schedule kicks in seamlessly.
In a little more detail, here’s what we’ll do:
When a new hotline call comes in, we’ll contact the Hotline Primary. Then, our intelligent call routing system will:
- Check to see who is on the schedule as the Hotline Primary
- Check if they are on an active call right this second. If they’re on a call, our system can auto-skip them.
- Check to see if they’re on an accompaniment. For example, if they’re on a hospital accompaniment, a shelter run, or otherwise marked as unavailable.
- Call them If something goes wrong, we’ll inform you so you can contact your on-call staff for a solution. Whether it’s a reception issue, a call going to voicemail, a phone being off or on do-not-disturb, or a local cellular outage, we’ve got you covered.
If we can’t reach your on-call staff, we’ll instantly activate your backup plan. You can assign staff to your backup schedule, and some groups have over ten layers to make sure no call is missed.
Want to Manage Your Hotline Like a Pro?
Cellular outages are one of many failure modes that reliable routing must handle. For the complete framework on routing reliability—including fallbacks, overflow behavior, and distinguishing "unreachable" from "no answer"—see call routing solutions.
We provide fully customized hotline management systems for agencies all over. It's not just phone systems though. We also provide fully customized chat and text systems, burnout protection, and answering service replacement software.
Learn more about how our products work here and if you have any questions just reach out on our contact us page. CONTACT OUR TEAM
