Case Study: Age UK achieves safe, scalable, and cost-effective volunteer and helpline services with Twilio Flex and Zing

How Age Uk and Zing Built Safe, Scalable and Cost Effective Services for Volunteers and the Elderly

Age UK supports more than seven million older people each year through services like the Age UK Advice Line and The Silver Line Helpline, but its older, fragmented telephony setup made it hard and costly to run these volunteer- and staff-led services at scale. Age UK chose Twilio Flex, working with Zing, to replace multiple systems and support a mix of staff and volunteers without expensive per-user licenses.

With Twilio Flex and Zing, Age UK moved its main phone lines to a single cloud-based platform in just ten weeks, added web chat and a virtual assistant handoff to advisers, and enabled volunteers to log in from anywhere in the UK. The results included significant cost savings, a 242% increase in volunteer applications since 2020, web chats growing from the low hundreds to thousands per quarter, and customer satisfaction averaging 4.2 out of 5.

Age UK

Alasdair Stewart

Head of National Services