How nilo.health Uses Whereby to Bring Better Mental Health to the Workplace

nilo.health is a Berlin-based mental health platform that helps businesses support their employees' mental well-being via 1:1 video sessions with psychologists, self-guided digital programs, and roundtables. Karoon Nair, nilo.health’s Head of Product, describes these video sessions as the company’s “bread and butter.”

But when Karoon joined the team in 2022, he found that the sessions were plagued by technical problems. The embedded video solution they were using was highly unreliable. nilo.health’s user operations team would spend a lot of time fielding complaints from users who couldn’t see or hear their expert, and rushing to set up another call on an external platform.

“Our business is 1:1 video sessions,” Karoon says. “It's what our customers find most valuable.” 

To make matters worse, maintaining the product was just as troublesome. The code had to be hosted and maintained on nilo.health’s servers; doing anything to customize or fix it meant diverting time and resources away from more important tasks and initiatives.

“That time is extremely valuable for us to continue innovating and keeping up with the competition"

For a mental well-being platform like nilo.health, video performance is especially crucial in establishing trust and ensuring that sensitive conversations can occur without interruptions. Recognizing the need for a more reliable and maintenance-friendly embedded video solution, they began exploring alternatives — and soon discovered Whereby.

Improvement right out of the box

While conducting research, Karoon had prioritized performance, ease of maintenance, data privacy, and cost. Given its reputation for reliability, straightforward SDK integration, long-time emphasis on privacy, and affordability, Whereby was the clear winner.

Karoon wrote a ticket to his development team explaining that he was thinking about replacing their existing video solution with Whereby. He asked them to spend half a day researching how an implementation might work, including any steps that might be required of Karoon and his team.

“The implementation was so easy, they did it in the time we had set out for them to do the research,” Karoon says, laughing. “They asked me to test it, we tested it, and it worked.”

As easy as it was to set up Whereby out of the box, Karoon says configuring it to suit nilo.health’s needs was just as straightforward. This included disabling call recording in certain instances, giving users the option to hide their video, and even enabling new features that had been long-requested by nilo.health’s experts, such as picture-in-picture.

On the back end, setup included automating room creation and tying it to the nilo.health platform, so that when users booked a new session it would make a call to Whereby’s API and create an individual room ID. Even that, Karoon says, was straightforward.

“Everyone, especially tech, was shocked at how quick it was,” Karoon says. “We’d always delayed implementing a better solution, thinking it would take a lot of time. But after the research phase it was basically already done, and we just needed to customize a few things.”

As a telehealth business that provides therapy and counseling services, data privacy is also critically important for nilo.health. During onboarding meetings, their CTO understandably had a number of questions about Whereby’s GDPR compliance and data policies. Karoon was able to point to Whereby’s long-standing commitments to data privacy, security, and transparency, including the fact that no call data is stored anywhere on Whereby’s servers.

“With something like a chat, you never know what the therapist and user are sending to each other,” Karoon says. “Knowing that’s not stored anywhere, and that as soon as the call is over, it’s gone — that was a huge requirement and something else that worked right out of the box.”

Delivering on its promise

nilo.health’s team and users saw benefits right away. The biggest driver for using a new video service had been the volume of tickets the user operations team was receiving and the number of hours they had to spend tending to technical issues.

Since switching to Whereby, the user ops team has reported a 60% drop in technical issue tickets.

Meanwhile, user experience for employees has improved dramatically: previously 5% of all video sessions were impacted by technical issues, since moving to Whereby that number is less than 1%.

“I’ve even noticed it doing sessions myself,” Karoon says. “The difference is night and day.”

As the nilo.health team has gotten more familiar with Whereby, they’re discovering new features and benefits they didn’t know existed. For example, after the company’s experts had repeatedly asked for the ability to share their screen, Karoon realized that Whereby already had this feature and he could turn it on simply by toggling a switch. Unlike their previous provider, which rarely updated its video product and never added new features, Karoon says that Whereby’s product team is “always one step ahead of us” and constantly innovating with new features.

“Whenever I get an idea like, ‘Oh, should we do this thing with our video room?’ I immediately stop and think, ‘Whereby will probably add that, so let’s not worry about it yet,’” he says.

nilo.health has also had great experiences with Whereby’s customer success and solutions teams, who Karoon characterizes as responsive and “eager to please.” He’s even a fan of the documentation, which he says is “very thorough” and makes it “very easy” for him as a product manager to address feature requests and find solutions.

After every video session, nilo.health asks users to rate the conversation. Currently, it holds a rating of 4.96 stars. For a company whose core business is 1:1 counseling and therapy sessions, and that prides itself on providing workplace mental health care that employees love, offering reliable, high-quality video sessions is essential to delivering on its promise.

“This is one of the most loved benefits at a company,” Karoon says. “We’ve been told time and time again by employees how important it is, and how it’s a benefit they would never get rid of. That is all enabled by Whereby and held to such a great standard by Whereby. It can’t be underestimated how valuable that is.”