Becoming a single parent can be a time of huge anxiety and challenges: money, housing, work, childcare and contact arrangements, to say nothing of the emotional upheaval of becoming sole carer and sole breadwinner for your children. It can also be incredibly isolating. Our helpline provides free expert advice on the challenges that single parent face. We can’t answer every call, so we need to make sure that callers with the most complex advice needs get through to a specialist advisor.

We will introduce webchat as an initial assessment tool to guide single parents to tailored information for their advice needs. 67% of callers to our helpline look online first, but still pick up the phone because they can’t find what they need or aren’t sure how the information applies to them. By engaging parents earlier in webchat, we can find those callers who really need to speak to an advisor and direct those with less complex needs to tailored online information.