Finland has 1.3 million seniors. About 600,000 of them don't use the internet at all.

Back to blog

At the end of 2024, Finland had about 1.33 million people over 65. [Statistics Finland 2024] That's nearly a quarter of the entire population. And the group keeps growing every year.

About 600,000 of them don't use the internet at all. [DigiIN project / THL] An even broader estimate suggests up to a million seniors are hesitant about adopting digital services.

What does this mean in practice?

Banking, booking a doctor's appointment, dealing with government agencies, ordering from a shop. More and more of this has moved online. For some seniors, that shift isn't an option, due to missing skills, illness, or declining eyesight or hearing.

Tietoevry surveyed over 3,000 Nordic seniors in 2024. [Tietoevry 2024] The study found 64% of Nordic seniors said they need help using digital services. In Finland, 28% of seniors felt digitalization had weakened their ability to manage independently.

In Statistics Finland's 2024 survey on ICT usage, only 21% of 75–89 year-olds used the internet daily. [Statistics Finland, sutivi 2024] In other words, nearly four out of five people in that age group are not online every day.

The phone is the one channel that requires no digital leap

The phone is a familiar tool for seniors. It requires no username, no app to download, no password to remember. Calling is a skill you learn once.

That's exactly why the phone remains the most important contact channel for the very customers who are excluded from other channels. As a dental clinic, a home care office, or a local service business becomes ever more digital, the phone line is often the one path still left.

But if no one answers it, that path closes too.

An unanswered call closes the last door

In an earlier article we covered the cost of missed calls: 85% of callers don't try again if their first call goes unanswered. Read the article

For seniors, the threshold to call back can be even higher. Hearing loss makes phone conversations more taxing. Hold music and menu trees are frustrating. If the first contact fails, the next one may never come.

Service accessibility isn't just a technical question. It's a customer service question.

How does Puhebotti help?

Puhebotti answers every call, even when the business owner or staff can't. It holds a natural conversation, with no buttons, no menus, no hold queue.

For a senior, the experience is simple: call the number, explain what you need, get an answer or confirmation that it's been noted and someone will get back to you. No app needed. No email needed. No login needed.

An age-friendly phone experience is about more than just answering

For the phone to work as an accessible channel, it has to tolerate different kinds of callers. A senior may speak more slowly, pause mid-sentence, or want something repeated to make sure they understood. A good voice agent adapts to this: it doesn't cut people off, doesn't rush, and doesn't require exact phrasing.

What if the matter is too complex, or the caller gets confused? Then the call is handed to a human. Puhebotti recognizes situations where human contact is the right answer, rather than trying to handle everything itself.

What Puhebotti collects across different industries

Setup requires no complex integrations. Puhebotti collects the details that matter for that particular industry:

• Dental clinic: name, phone number, symptom, and urgency assessment
• Home care services: customer's name, description of the matter, urgency
• Physiotherapy: appointment request, description of the issue or injury, preferred time
• Pharmacy: callback request and the topic of the question, no medical decisions
• Local service business: contact details, service need, preferred schedule

The business owner gets an email summary after every call and can call back on their own schedule.

A realistic perspective

Puhebotti doesn't solve digital exclusion as a whole. It doesn't replace digital skills counseling, a library service desk, or help from a neighbor. Those are societal questions that need broader solutions.

What Puhebotti does: make sure the phone channel works reliably. That the person who has no other way to get in touch gets an answer. Always, evenings and weekends included.

For a business, this means one thing: a customer who would otherwise have gone unserved gets served.