Enlarge ISU Extension Community Helpline Services

Iowa’s Extension and Outreach program provides resources for communities, businesses, and nonprofits via six help and support hotlines. The use of hotlines has increased dramatically with the onset of COVID-19.  Our team partnered with hotline managers to understand the system architecture, data structure and quality, and past uses of the data generated by the hotlines. Using this information, we piloted interactive dashboards on call topics, outcomes, and emotional content (via sentiment scoring of generated transcripts) to support improved customer service, monitor success, and auto-generate reports so hotline workers can spend more time helping citizens and less time filling out paperwork.