Listen carefully: Call centre data improves understanding of refugees’ needs
UNHCR Uganda is capturing people’s lived experiences to improve decision-making, responsiveness, and accountability.
By Amy Lynn Smith — Independent Writer + Strategist
Imagine you’re a refugee living in one of the settlements in Uganda — the UN Refugee Agency’s (UNHCR’s) largest operation in Africa — and the water pump where you live is broken. You could visit the protection desk, but especially in the COVID era it’s more likely you’ll use your cell phone to contact UNHCR’s live interagency support call centre. Just like anyone else who reaches out to a call centre, you want a resolution to your problem. Especially when it comes to essential services such as water — or urgent issues like a threat of violence — you want the quickest possible response.
That’s why, when UNHCR Uganda set up its call centre operation, it also established the Feedback Referral and Resolution Mechanism (FRRM). This unique interagency software tool is used by 68 different UNHCR partners that provide services to displaced communities and host communities across Uganda. UNHCR identifies partners and staff already working in specific functions in various settlements — such as water, sanitation, and hygiene (WASH), education, livelihoods, protection-related issues, and more — and links them into the FRRM’s referral pathway.
If you’re the refugee who called in about a broken water pump, you’ll be connected to an agent — call centre agents speak a total of 38 languages — who records the information about your call, with details needed to pinpoint your location, the issue you’re having, and the phone number from which you called. Callers can choose to be anonymous, although UNHCR ensures the confidentiality of every call. Call centre agents translate the information into English in real time and input it into the FRRM, which immediately sends it to a focal point who can solve the problem.
What’s more, the FRRM can identify if the same person has called multiple times, or if numerous complaints have come in about the water pump. Perhaps these are calls from the same settlement — or maybe the calls come from settlements across Uganda. The tool also lets focal points see individual and average age, gender, and nationality information related to these call trends, and will soon capture information related to special needs and case urgency as well.
This information is put into a dashboard that’s specifically designed to turn the data into a visual representation of the problem, along with a brief narrative record of exactly what the problem is, how urgent it is, and how widespread it may be. Because the information is sent to the responsible focal points within UNHCR or a partner agency, they can look at the easy-to-understand data and see exactly what needs to be done and how quickly. The dashboards are also helpful for senior managers and decision-makers. The data produced by the FRRM allows UNHCR and its partners to view trends related to different sectors and settlements by various demographic indicators. This data can be used by multiple units, such as programme, risk management, external relations, or protection, to inform what the operation does and help it adapt accordingly. It can also be used as an evidence base to appeal for additional funding or staffing. In Nakivale settlement, for example, UNHCR Uganda made changes to the staffing structure of the office based, in part, due to feedback received through the FRRM.
This level of direct feedback collection provides actionable information across various aspects of the humanitarian work done by UNHCR and its partners. The FRRM UNHCR Uganda is piloting is a tool many countries are looking to for inspiration and as a benchmark, because it’s truly a referral and resolution mechanism, as the name indicates.
“The software allows agents to determine if a call is something that can be answered at the call centre level or needs to be referred to a focal point,” says Harrison Lanigan-Coyte, a Protection Officer in the Risk Management and Compliance Unit at UNHCR Uganda, which oversees the management of the FRRM. “The tool measures what sort of challenges refugees are facing and what partners they’re trying to access services and support from. And focal points also need to let us know whether the issue was resolved or not, and the reason behind it not being resolved.”
The fact that the FRRM not only sends data to the responsible parties, but also requires them to report on their actions, is a unique feature in accountability and reporting. The FRRM measures how well UNHCR and its partners are providing services and solutions, as well as identifying areas where programmes may need to be improved or expanded. According to Lanigan-Coyte, the FRRM is a transformative tool that provides a level of detailed insight into the lives of refugees that is already delivering significant benefits to the operation and the people it serves.
“If we get calls from multiple settlements telling us their water pump is broken, then we know we have a maintenance issue,” he explains. “We’ve also established timelines within which partners should respond, so it improves our accountability in terms of responding to the needs of the people who contact us.”
Building a system that delivers data to facilitate the right response
Although the FRRM sounds like a straightforward solution, developing it took a great deal of time and effort from across UNHCR and beyond, with UNHCR Uganda leading the way from the start and in continued efforts to make the system even more effective than it already is.
First established in 2018, the call centre and FRRM were designed and developed with the input of refugees — who said it was difficult for them to reach personnel and get a response to their issues, a challenge any humanitarian organisation can face. The original development also included input from staff, and initially involved just 14 focal points at partner organisations. In the early days, the data wasn’t captured in a way that could support text analysis. But the narrative recorded in a call between a refugee and call centre agent can indeed be analysed. So when UNHCR Uganda wanted to improve on the analysis of the FRRM’s data, it reached out to UNHCR’s Innovation Service to help the operation develop dashboards that analyse the qualitative data from referrals.
“The challenge was that they were receiving a lot of calls, but the data could be used even more effectively to inform decision-making,” says Alice Schaus, a former Associate Innovation Officer who worked on refining the analysis of the data captured by the FRRM for the dashboards. “So the project involved a lot of understanding of how the data collected could be used to better inform decision-making.”
The Innovation Service hosted a workshop in 2020 that involved focal points in various areas such as education and livelihoods, for example, to understand how they were using the FRRM dashboard and what could be improved. During the workshop, the Innovation Service presented prototypes for various new options and asked participants which ones would be useful.
Initially, there were 300 categories — far too many to reasonably present in a dashboard designed for decision-making. So the Innovation Service brought in Anahi Ayala Iacucci, a Consultant in Digital Inclusion and Participation. With a background in developing tools for communicating with communities and for accountability in the delivery of services, she brought valuable expertise to the project.
“The overarching problem was that UNHCR collected a lot of data, but wasn’t necessarily using it efficiently,” Ayala Iacucci says. “First, I mapped out the categories and realised we didn’t need 300 of them. So I created a taxonomy to make it easier for the call centre to share information analysis with.”
The taxonomy narrowed down issues into those that could be addressed while also prioritising their level of urgency. As Lanigan-Coyte points out, the taxonomy allows the operation to more easily share relevant information and analysis with key decision-makers and sector leads so they can adapt their approach at the institutional level. This taxonomy has not yet been integrated into the FRRM, but UNHCR Uganda hopes to do so in the next version of the tool, which is under development.
“We went through five iterations of the taxonomy, to make sure the categories were relevant and useful,” explains Sofia Kyriazi, an Associate Innovation Officer and Data and Artificial Intelligence (AI) Engineer. “We also brought in a visualisation expert who had worked with UN-Habitat and helped us make sure the data was easy to visualise. The dashboard is now more robust and provides more context and specific information to the sector leads.”
For example, she says, if multiple people are complaining about water quality in a specific settlement or area, then the WASH sector is alerted and knows to monitor the dashboards more frequently.
“The ultimate goal is to improve the representation of displaced communities, so sector leads know what people’s needs really are,” Kyriazi says. “Then management can also keep them more accountable. It’s almost like a ticketing system, where people are trying to close the ticket as fast as possible.”
Scaling the system to identify broader — and future — needs
Not only does the FRRM help improve response time, by providing information on areas where action or improvement is needed, it also helps mitigate risks by delivering data on potential future trends.
“It gives us invaluable insight into what populations are facing by various different demographics,” Lanigan-Coyte says. “We have multiple filters that let us see what issues Somali women between the ages of 20 and 35 in different settlements are facing, for example. That helps inform our responses and also see early warning indications of issues such as allegations of misconduct. So it can help mitigate issues such as unrest in the settlements or identify the spread of false information, for instance, so we can respond accordingly.”
Another of UNHCR Uganda’s goals from the start was scalability — something that’s already happening. First, there was the expansion from the initial 14 focal points to more than 800 of them. The call centre is staffed by 34 agents, 18 of which take inbound calls and 12 of which place outgoing calls. Outgoing call agents were added in response to COVID, so UNHCR could seek out feedback from refugees about various programmes, especially protection monitoring. To date, the call centre has received about 415,000 calls since the FRRM was created, related to 120,000 individual queries.
“Call agents record a narrative of one or two paragraphs of information for each query, so we’re able to dig into it on a data and analysis level,” Lanigan-Coyte says. But the dashboard also provides at-a-glance information to help UNHCR and its partners identify the areas of greatest need, so they know which information to explore more carefully.
Ultimately, Ayala Iacucci says, the taxonomy is designed to be used across all touchpoints with displaced people, UNHCR, and partner agencies. “We built it in a modular way, so eventually, the data can be plugged into whatever channels for feedback are set up, such as the protection desk or social media.”
What’s more, the taxonomy is now being used in several countries in the Ukraine response, and is being tested in Uganda as well as Colombia and Rwanda. The goal is to share it with as many country operations as possible.
According to Lanigan-Coyte, “without a shadow of a doubt the FRRM has been a game-changer.” He admits it hasn’t been without its challenges, such as the change management involved in getting people to adapt to a new system and process. But the positive outcomes more than make up for that.
“It’s really bridged the gap between the refugee voice and the agencies that are trying to assist them,” he says. “It’s brought them much closer together and also increased accountability of all the different interactions that individuals are having across the refugee response.”
