Enterprise communications specialist DigitalWell has partnered with national women’s domestic abuse charity Women’s Aid to collaborate on a project that will help the charity increase support for women.
Using state-of-the-art technology, the partnership will make it easier for the charity to support women, including those who do not speak English. The system will use Genesys Cloud CX technology, upgrading the contact centre capability, rolling out webchat and web messenger, along with a chat-based translator that will allow the charity to support multiple languages.
The partnership will see DigitalWell cover Women’s Aid’s costs for calls, making them free of charge to callers in and out of the charity.
Last year, almost 27,000 contacts were made with Women’s Aid frontline services in Ireland, but the charity said the new technology could support more women that may previously have been unable to access the service due to language or technology barriers.
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“Sadly we see a consistent increase in the need for our service, but with the addition of the cost-of-living crisis, we need to be as prepared as we can be to help women when they need us most,” said Linda Smith, 24hr National Freephone Helpline manager.
“The work DigitalWell will do with us will be instrumental in helping us to digitally streamline the work we do and enable our team to get help to people that need us, as quickly as possible. We want to be able to support as many women as possible.
“As Ireland has become more multicultural, so has the need for language translation services at Women’s Aid, enabling us to better support non-English-speaking women. We are also witnessing an increase of contacts via website chat and SMS, as it eliminates the fear of being overheard by an abuser.”
Work on the new system will take place over the next three months with the Genesys Cloud Chat Translator Blueprint technology expected to be ready to support call-handling teams by March 2023.
“Women’s Aid offers amazing support to victims of domestic abuse. With the roll-out of these new contact centre technologies and Genesys Cloud CX system, any language barriers the team have faced in the past will instantly become easier to navigate,” said Albert Keating, head of CX Solutions for DigitalWell.
“The chat translation assistant will support call handlers, across all digital and communications channels, allowing them to quickly help those women who do not have English as their first language.”
On average, more than 2,000 women and 550 children in Ireland accessed supports from a domestic violence service each month from September to December 2020, according to figures from Safe Ireland.
