Alachua County Crisis Center Telephone System

The Alachua County Crisis Center offers 24/7 crisis and suicide intervention services, including crisis phone counseling, mobile response teams, emergency walk-in services, and ongoing counseling. The Center operates a local crisis hotline as well as answers calls to the national 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline, averaging about 50,000 calls total annually. The Center staff includes 27 paid employees working alongside approximately 100 highly trained volunteers. Staff and volunteers work both in office and remotely around the country. In addition to using the phone system to respond to individuals in crisis, it is used to coordinate activities among staff and volunteers simultaneously. Given the call volume and nature of Center’s operations, administrative staff need to manage the scheduling of call takers with variable shifts (about 70 unique users annually). Additionally, supervisory staff need to be able to monitor calls for training and guidance, so they need to be able to see which call-takers are actively on a call, not currently available, etc. The Center uses iCarol software as its service database to record contact documentation, scheduling, and volunteer and staff management. iCarol offers integration with other software to share data, and telephone system integration with iCarol is important. As a 988 answering point, the Center needs to report on a variety of performance metrices including but not limited to answer rates, rates of dropped and abandoned calls, call duration, time of day, etc. Given the nature of the work and 24/7/365 around the clock operations, up time and response to service disruptions are critical.