Mobile text-chat is an ideal way of providing HIV counselling: it's cheap for users; people can get counselling from anywhere (like their bedroom); it's efficient for providers (as counsellors can counsel many people at the same time); and it's an appropriate way of getting youth to talk about HIV.
Research has shown that users sometimes struggle to call the National AIDS Helpline from a landline because it's difficult to talk about certain things for fear of someone overhearing. They felt more comfortable using the service on a cellphone as it would seem like they were just chatting with a friend on MXit.
The MXit "splash screen" advertising used on National AIDS Day (1st December 2009) increased the use of the service by roughly 4000%. There were even more people queuing, though unfortunately there were not enough counsellors to handle the demand.
Training counsellors to understand "chat" language allowed them to communicate on the same level as the users. Once they were used to text-based counselling, they were able to handle up to 10+ conversations at the same time. Also, due to the less personal nature of chat, counsellors found that users would get to the point far quicker.
Hoax calls are a big problem for South African helplines; the National AIDS Helpline find that up to 80% of calls are hoax, which wastes a lot of counsellor time. On MXit, this decreased dramatically, and the few that there are are easy to deal with as the counsellor can ignore them and carry on with their other conversations. A possible reason for the decrease in hoax calls is that this costs the user a small amount of airtime that could rather have been spent on chatting with friends.
Below are some other features of the system:
- It’s very cheap to use: a counselling session will cost the user about US$0.01 in airtime.
- Counsellors can view the chat history of clients, removing the need for the client to repeat ground already covered in previous counselling sessions.
- Usage statistics can be obtained as and when needed, making staff and service management easier.
- The conversation text can be made available for analysis (though privacy also needs to be taken into consideration).
- Counselling can be provided from any computer connected to the internet, saving on call-centre infrastructure costs.
