Where they started
The helpline had run for eight years on voice: a ten-digit toll-free number, 10am–6pm, weekdays, English and Hindi. Volume was flat. Volume was low. Everyone knew why.
A survivor who lives with the person harming her doesn't call a helpline. She might type when he's asleep. She doesn't need someone to pick up on the second ring — she needs a channel that doesn't announce itself.
What we built
- A WhatsApp Business flow with a "silent mode" default — no notifications, no read receipts, no last-seen. Message tones off. Chat visible only when opened.
- An abandon word. If she typed a chosen code word (default: "recipe"), the chat cleared itself and returned a benign recipe response. She could show her partner the screen and it looked like a food conversation.
- Handoff to counsellors, not bots. Automation triaged severity and language. A trained counsellor picked up within four minutes on average. She was never talking to a script when she needed a person.
- Extended hours. Chat scaled beyond voice — three counsellors could hold six conversations each. The helpline went to 24/7 in month four.
- Encrypted case notes, stored in the helpline's own infrastructure. Never on our servers.
What it moved
"The women told us: I would never have called. I typed at 2am with my phone under the pillow. That's not a workflow we knew how to design for."
What we'd do differently
We under-trained counsellors on text-only tone in month one. Voice counsellors are trained to hear pauses and breath. Chat counsellors need to be trained to read silence — a survivor who takes six minutes to reply is not disengaging, she's making sure it's safe to type. That's a distinct skill, and it takes a week of training we didn't budget for at first.