Polaris helps human trafficking victims get the support they need

Challenge

Polaris wanted to make the U.S. National Human Trafficking Hotline more effective so victims could access support services faster. To do this, hotline advocates needed a way to better understand and communicate with people affected by sex or labor trafficking.

Solution

Twilio Flex’s unified platform enables hotline advocates to save time and provide better service to people seeking support. With a simple yet powerful interface, Flex unifies the various communication channels to help maintain context, ensuring a personalized experience for each individual.

Polaris guides victims of human trafficking to the support they need, using data to help orchestrate and accelerate that support. Since 2007, the Washington D.C.-based organization has operated the U.S. National Human Trafficking Hotline on behalf of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, which helps victims and survivors of human trafficking and those close to them by quickly connecting them with local resources. Those resources include a safe place to stay, legal assistance, psychological support, or assisting with reporting to law enforcement.

Hotline advocates receive communications from people in need of varying levels of support and resources. Often those messages are not easy for victims to send, due to the seriousness and urgency of their situations. In every case, it’s crucial that the person in crisis receives support fast and feels like they can trust the person on the other end. 

Polaris ensures that every person reaching out gets the attention, information, and support they need. In addition to their dedicated advocates, the right technology makes it possible. It unifies all that data, and ensures that each interaction is personalized to the individual’s situation and needs. Polaris needed a solution that could align with their goals, and they found it with Twilio Flex.

Merging the lanes of communication

Polaris offers victims of human trafficking five different ways to reach out and find support: phone, text, webchat, online webform, and email. While these various communication methods help more people in need reach the National Human Trafficking Hotline, advocates were having a hard time handling the complexity of multiple interfaces, leading to inefficient task switching. Monica Krebs, Associate Director of Data and Operations at Polaris, said, “The problem was that all of the different methods of communication were being handled differently and using separate interfaces.”

Polaris’ ultimate goal was a single unified platform that would give advocates a better user experience and enable them to provide more timely support. In 2013, Polaris decided to experiment with digital communications, using Twilio to help build out its SMS strategy. This proved to be successful, allowing Polaris to reach more people than they could before in a simple, accessible way.

Polaris saw an opportunity for digital communications to help it better serve victims and survivors. In 2022, the organization began migrating all communication methods onto Flex. In collaboration with external partners, Polaris started reviewing the workflows of hotline advocates for ways to make them more efficient and used these findings when consolidating channels onto one platform.

Making hotline workflows more effective

Forrest Jacobs, Senior Software Developer at Polaris, said there isn’t really any value to having a separate system for each communication channel when it’s essentially the same or a similar process for hotline advocates. With Flex, hotline advocates have a simple and easy-to-navigate single-pane interface that displays relevant information to help them better serve the person in need. Consolidation of channels is key to ensure a consistent process for advocates.

Polaris also uses advanced features such as Interactive Voice Response (IVR) for voice calls and a chatbot implementation for text and chat messages. Both of these self-service experiences allow victims and survivors to engage quickly, share pertinent information, and receive the support they need. 

What sets Polaris apart is how much thought, care, and humanity is put into the implementation of these new technologies. IVR scripts are meticulously tested and iterated on until they are deemed simple and effective, ensuring that people in need are heard initially and quickly get the support they need.

Its chatbot helps to direct people looking for services or support outside of the scope of what Polaris covers by quickly and compassionately redirecting them. This redirect helps reduce the number of unrelated texts and chats fielded to hotline advocates, freeing up these individuals to focus on supporting texts and chats  within their scope.

In both cases, advocates now have more time and bandwidth available to help people more efficiently and in more personalized ways.

Measuring success in minutes saved

How do you measure success when you serve such a broad range of people in a variety of different ways? For Polaris, success is a result of staying close to their guiding principles. 

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Office on Trafficking in Persons provides a framework for Polaris to work within. It encourages a person-centered, trauma-informed, culturally-competent, and language-sensitive approach to communicating with victims, survivors, and the people closest to them.

Megan Cutter, Managing Director of the National Human Trafficking Hotline at Polaris, says that first and foremost it’s about meeting people on their level as a human being. 

“Regardless if the person reaching out is a trafficking survivor, someone calling on behalf of someone else, or someone in a helping profession, we are going to show up with those values and that allows us to build from there and help no matter who we are communicating with,” said Cutter.

Since implementing Twilio Flex, people contacting Polaris have experienced a significant decrease in wait times. Plus, hotline advocates’ workflow has become easier. They can deliver more impactful support with a 45% reduction in workflow steps, plus half as many loading screens to wait through compared to their previous system.

“Now advocates can really see who they are communicating with, what referrals have been provided, what worked, what didn’t, what we want to know, and the safety considerations,” said Cutter. “And the way that is all displayed now is much more clear, easy to access and navigate, and to update in real time. This has really changed how advocates work and helps them feel more confident when interacting with people in need of support.” 

This approach ensures that those seeking help feel heard, as the context from any previous interactions is maintained. This prevents individuals from being retraumatized by having to repeat their experiences.

Innovating and iterating until human trafficking ends 

Polaris was named after the North Star—a symbol of freedom that guides the organization to fight for a more equitable society where no one is trafficked. Working with tech partners, such as Twilio, Polaris has designed, tested, iterated and innovated to provide better support and services to those affected by human trafficking.  

Twilio will continue to support Polaris with the tools, technology, and expertise it needs to grow so the organization can help more people, faster and more reliably than ever before. Krebs said that going forward, their focus will be on continuing to reduce wait times for people seeking help, and the advocates serving them. 

In the future, the partnership between Polaris and Twilio is poised to help even more trafficking victims regain their freedom to choose how they live and work.