Boost Your Nonprofit Success with a Cloud Contact Center

When the pandemic began, nearly all facets of life changed. This fact was no different for nonprofit organizations. Nonprofits rely heavily on donors and volunteers and most share a common goal of helping people through education, community development, disaster relief, and other functions.

With the transition to remote work and fewer face-to-face interactions, it became evident that many nonprofits were using outdated technology, particularly within their contact centers. As a result, finding donors and volunteers — and retaining them — became a major challenge. The sustainability of many organizations came into question with the backbone of the industry seemingly in jeopardy.

One area where nonprofits can make a significant difference in worker retention is transitioning their contact centers to cloud solutions. With an updated contact center and the appropriate tools, nonprofits can evolve to connect with people in a more digitally focused world. Cloud contact centers can also provide internal operational benefits, such as providing fast access to data regarding performance, programs, funding, and other essential information.

Omnichannel tools such as Five9 Digital Engagement enable you to deliver exceptional digital-first customer service to people on the move. Consumers have raised their expectations of customer service, including looking for real-time support options from their smartphones. Fresh solutions help you deliver features like IVR, estimated wait time, callback and texting options, visual forms, and surveys.

By integrating your contact center with customer relationship management (CRM) and unified communications (UC) platforms, you can maximize the benefits of your existing investments while building on customer experience.

• Pre-built Five9 integrations with leading CRM solutions from Microsoft, Oracle, Salesforce, ServiceNow, and Zendesk create a seamless, powerful combination of capabilities. The integration can help improve agent efficiency and deliver improved customer experiences.
• Five9 integrations with UCaaS platforms — including Microsoft Teams, RingCentral, and Zoom Phone — can help agents more easily identify the right expert, understand their availability, and click to contact them. With experts at their fingertips, nonprofit organizations can improve first-contact resolution and overall customer satisfaction.

Nonprofits Leveraging the Cloud

Five9 has helped several nonprofit organizations reach more successful outcomes.

Pobl

With almost a half-century of creating affordable homes, Pobl is a not-for-profit organization coordinated from headquarters in Newport and Swansea, Wales. Pobl continues to embrace digitalization and its role in improving and personalizing care.

Pobl had teams working on several unconnected legacy telephone and customer contact systems. The main system was combined with telephone hunt groups and workarounds. As a result, the systems became unreliable — with instances of dropped calls — and no longer met the needs of the business. The systems failed to give Pobl useful data to help manage their customer service teams.

Pobl took the first step on their journey to a fully digital future by rolling out Five9 as the contact center solution for customer interactions. “Five9 is helping us to understand how much resource we need to manage the calls and customer contacts that are coming in,” says Pobl’s Darren Raz-Nik. Five9 integrates seamlessly with Microsoft Dynamics CRM, providing customer service teams with detailed information about a customer, including their call history and individual needs.

Crucially, the Five9 system also reports valuable data that will help shape Pobl’s customer service function in the future. This includes encouraging customers to use Pobl’s web portal for payments and day-to-day interactions, while still providing the option to speak to a team member.

Find out more in Pobl – On the Path to a Digital Future.

Southern New Hampshire University 

SNHU is a private, nonprofit, accredited institution with more than 3,000 on-campus students, over 90,000 online students globally, and an alumni network exceeding 100,000, making it one of the fastest-growing universities in the United States.

The SNHU call center has 1,000+ agents working both inbound and outbound to address admissions, financial aid, and academic advisory services. Each department has agents assigned to handle its particular function.

Everything SNHU does goes toward benefiting their students. Some of the challenges they’ve faced include disconnected customer experience, lack of integrations, and an on-premises contact center. Since partnering with Five9 in 2010, SNHU has become more proactive rather than reactive. As a result, SNHU now uses built-in API integrations with Salesforce Lightning and the university’s student information systems to deliver automated screen pops to help agents access caller information.

“We have over 1,300 concurrent users logging into Five9 at any point in time,” says SNHU’s Alex Montenegro. “We've made leaps and bounds in terms of how we utilize the technology. Being able to use it a lot more intelligently, a lot more proactively rather than reactive.” 

To learn more, watch our video about how Five9 helped SNHU’s contact center evolve.  

NJ 211

A statewide information and referral service, NJ 211 simplifies the ability of New Jersey residents to get assistance finding essential health and human services. NJ 211 also plays a pivotal role during natural disasters and emergency events.

In late October 2012, Hurricane Sandy struck the Atlantic coast. With Five9, NJ 211 handled nearly 90,000 calls during and in the weeks after the storm.

“The best thing that we did was to join Five9,” NJ 211 Executive Director Melissa Acree recalled. “The system performed flawlessly, handled the volume of calls, provided reporting when we needed it, and didn’t crash. It was a noticeable difference from the prior disaster with Hurricane Irene.

Receiving over 15,000 calls per week, NJ 211 realized that this volume could potentially impact other hotlines that NJ 211 operates. IT Manager Rory Britt reprogrammed the IVR campaigns to ensure all callers could reach 211. As the contact center began receiving calls about the COVID-19 pandemic, NJ 211 had to figure out how their team could work remotely and handle the anticipated increase in call volume. With Five9, NJ 211 successfully transitioned to remote work.

Read more about how NJ 211 Stays Open for Its Community During Disasters.

What’s Next

According to IBC, technological deficiencies can cause nonprofits problems regarding growth and fundraising. To avoid such issues, it’s important to provide employees, volunteers, donors, and service recipients with all the essential capabilities.

To find out more about how Five9 works with nonprofit organizations, watch these videos: Five9 Knows State and Local Governments and Take5 with Five9: Michelle Cirocco of Televerde.