Enabling JustGiving to Grow its Services Globally

Trusted by more than 13,000 charities and used in more than 160 countries, JustGiving has helped 24 million people to raise a staggering $3.3 billion for charity. JustGiving provides the technology, advice and support to help charities and individuals reach a much bigger audience for their fundraising, and raise more money for their cause. It’s quick and easy for someone to find the person or group they want to support, and donate in just a few clicks or taps – sometimes with incredible results. In just one day in September 2014, Manchester Dogs’ Home received £1 million in donations through JustGiving after a suspected arson attack destroyed a rescue center and many of the lives of the dogs which were staying there.

Globally scaling with state of the art technology

Vonage Contact Center is enabling JustGiving to grow its services globally. With a team in Sydney and on-going expansion in the Asia-Pacific region, the Vonage Contact Center for Salesforce can be scaled at any time to meet customer demand thanks to its true cloud technology. Wherever customers call from, they get the same great experience that they do when using the website. Huu Anh Chu, Head of Customer Experience, explains that the business used to be reliant on an outdated customer support system that couldn’t keep pace with the business’s rapid growth. They really valued the quick turnaround from Vonage: “Implementation took 3 or 4 days because it is web-based, and training our support specialists was painless”.

Supporting the ‘human touch’

JustGiving’s core customer support services are a community support team (to help fundraisers and donors), a charity membership team (for onboarding charities that want to join), and a charity support team (for existing charity members). The latter accounts for more than 50% of the 2,000 or so calls taken each week. Huu explains “We emphasize the human touch, charities in particular appreciate the fact that they can speak to an expert on the phone”.

95% customer satisfaction

For JustGiving, customer satisfaction is directly related to call response time. Currently at 95%, Vonage Contact Center is helping JustGiving deal with call fluctuations and provide the level of service demanded by callers. People who contact JustGiving receive an e-mail customer satisfaction survey.

Omni-channel global service

JustGiving is moving ahead fast with its new social giving platform. Whether you are an individual or charity looking for funding, it will provide more opportunities to tap into global donors and sponsors. This next growth phase will require scaled up global customer service experience operating on a ‘follow the sun’ basis mirroring the ‘always available’ feel of the website.

Also, JustGiving plans to increase its Omni-channel offering with additional channels and taking advantage of a virtual ‘waiting room’ within ContactWorld for Service where communications are quickly routed to the right specialist to help them deal with their query. The support team will continue to be there for customers whenever they need help and through any channel.

Using Vonage Contact Center has brought numerous benefits:

System scalability and flexibility – JustGiving can receive extremely high volumes of donations per second and the growth in the number of emergency appeals, means dealing with fluctuating numbers of donors and charities. Although much contact is web-based, these fluctuations impact on call volumes too. Vonage Contact Center allows additional advisors to be added instantaneously, helping JustGiving to manage these variations in contact volume. Dealing with high volumes of interest means more people need to be directed to the right web pages. Emergency appeals also drive more phone queries about how to donate. Conversations with people wishing to make donations are also opportunities to explain how donors can do fundraising themselves.

Better advisor experience – Vonage Contact Center provides ‘whispers’ that let the advisor know who is calling and why, saving time and improving the customer experience. The easy-to-use interface is integrated into the overall monitoring wall to improve awareness of customer activity. This transparency helps in sharing the workload.

Salesforce integration with Vonage – It was important for JustGiving that its new cloud-based system could be easily integrated with Salesforce so there were no worries about costly IT integration, system failure or poor customer records. This was confirmed by Huu: “We had to be with a phone provider that integrated with Salesforce”.

Case-based management and improved workflow – The Salesforce integration means that cases can be transferred between teams with customer records intact. A new workflow has been designed that will ensure cases are resolved more quickly, further improving customer experience.

Disaster recovery at a touch – In the rare event of a crisis (for instance, if something prevented large numbers of advisors getting into work), the team can route calls to staff wherever they are, they just need internet access to log in.

Fast outbound calling for proactive customer care – Click-to-dial functionality means the support teams can contact customers quickly and easily whenever they need to.

Call recording improves advisor training – Vonage's easy-to-access call recording provides a valuable feedback loop, which the business uses to enhance advisor training and development.

Reporting drives customer insight – As Huu says, “Customer feedback is vital, it informs our product development… We tag all of our contacts and that is our main source of customer feedback – it’s what allows us to paint a picture to the rest of the business and lets them know what is going on out there”.

“We needed something that would allow us to scale globally, at low cost, and also rapidly. We effectively outsourced a lot of the technical support that our old system required to Vonage, allowing us to get on with helping people raise more for their causes”.

Huu Anh Chu, Head of Customer Experience, JustGiving