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: When you receive them, unsolicited, you get into a rage. But admit it, in this hurried existence, where would you be without helplines to get through your day. You are hungry, you call a number. You need to send an anniversary gift you left for too late, you can depend on another number. For your travel needs, you can dial yet another number. It’s a welcome spin-off to the telecom revolution — tele-helplines are sorting out quite a few problems for quite a number of busy people.
The demand was more than enough for Pfizer India to add another phoneline to its address recently. The company launched a toll-free helpline, 1800-4-190190, to help smokers quit. A toll-free number is a telephone number that can be called by customers and prospective customers at no cost to the caller. The cost of the call to the called party is usually based on factors such as the amount of usage the number experiences, the cost of the trunk lines to the facility, and possibly a monthly flat rate service charge. The Pfizer helpline, reached from all mobile and landline numbers from 8 am to 8 pm everyday, aims to educate motivated quitters about nicotine addiction and provides guidance that will help them embark on the journey of staying smoke free. The rest is up to the interested individual, says the company. For Dr Chandrashekhar Potkar, director, Medical and Regulatory Affairs at the pharma major, the helpline is more of a support booster to smokers, and also awareness enhancer about its smoking cessation medication Champix.
A new business, helplines make commercial sense too. Besides the government, with its health and family welfare tele-lines, welfare organisations and corporates, due to service value addition to consumers and social responsibility, all are making people call.
LifeLines India, the social responsibility programme of British Telecom and Cisco, aims to prove the value of digital inclusion, educating rural users to use technology to access advice and learning to improve the future for their families and the local community. Addressing over 800,000 calls each year in a handful of states it is operating in, the service has a database of over 30,000 ‘frequently asked questions’, enabling knowledge workers to provide a very timely response to repeat queries, at a nominal cost. “This speed of response is essential if the service is to achieve its objective of becoming truly self-sustaining. With the...
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