How Võõras Sõber uses Zelos to dispatch corporate counselling within 5 business days

How Võõras Sõber uses Zelos

Võõras Sõber (Estonian for “stranger friend”, or as the company prefers, “the friend you don’t know yet”) is an Estonian consultancy that provides work stress prevention for corporate employees. Sessions are practical, problem-solving focused, and booked anonymously. Run by CEO Ave-Gail Kaskla-Kuprys, the company serves around 40 corporate clients with up to 800 employees each, and has scaled from 4 sessions a month to roughly 80 since 2018.

Every client gets a 5-business-day booking guarantee. In over three years of operation, Võõras Sõber has never missed that deadline.

When a corporate employee books a session through Võõras Sõber’s anonymous booking system, the request goes into Zelos and a push notification reaches the active consultant community. The first qualified consultant to claim the booking takes the work. Most bookings are confirmed the same day.

The challenge

A counselling service running a 5-business-day SLA for corporate clients has to confirm bookings fast, usually the same day, and connect each request to a qualified counsellor without back-and-forth.

The work is volume-sensitive in awkward ways. Multiple corporate clients can activate the same week. Other weeks are quiet. Hiring full-time consultants to cover peak loads would leave the business overstaffed during the lulls. Hiring too few would miss the SLA.

Anonymity is non-negotiable. Employees book with a passcode so HR never learns who used the service. The dispatch process has to match a booking to a counsellor without exposing the employee at any point.

Manual coordination cannot scale to all of this. Sending emails and making phone calls for every gig is not viable for a company that runs on consultant fees, not admin overhead. Võõras Sõber has no full-time admin staff to spare.

The solution

Võõras Sõber uses Zelos as a job dispatch app. Around 10 trained, verified consultants stay active in the community at any given time. Some take a session or two a month. Some take 30 or more. The system flexes to each consultant’s availability.

When a booking lands in Zelos, active consultants get an instant push notification. The first to claim it gets the work. The employee is matched, the session scheduled, and the booking is confirmed well before the 5-day clock runs out.

Sessions can be booked weekdays 8 AM to 8 PM and weekends 9 AM to 4 PM, giving employees room to find a slot that does not compete with their working day. Online split-session bookings (two 90-minute Skype meetings instead of three hours on location, designed to reduce screen fatigue) run through the same dispatch flow.

Every consultant in the community holds a university degree in psychology or extensive mental health training. They complete the Võõras Sõber counselling format training and test counsellings before joining the dispatch list. Whoever claims a booking has been pre-vetted. Quality is built in upstream, not enforced job by job.

The results

The client roster now includes around 40 organisations with up to 800 employees each. Customers span private companies, public-sector bodies, and government agencies. Sessions are delivered in three languages: 85% in Estonian, 10% in English, and 5% in Russian. The language mix reflects the large expatriate community in Estonian startups.

The Estonian Employers’ Confederation and Estonian Social Enterprise Network have both recognised the company.

The model has room to grow. Roughly half of available consultant office time is still uncommitted, leaving headroom if demand peaks.

Estonia’s public mental health waiting lists can run several months long. Võõras Sõber’s clients wait at most five business days.