Canadian Red Cross

Vision

An agile contact center that scales in line with demand

The Canadian Red Cross provides assistance when people are at their most vulnerable, when they experience disaster and when they most need support. Their contact center is vital to operations, from the donor and philanthropy side of the organization to the prevention and safety side. It supports contacts from donors and people who have questions about courses the Canadian Red Cross offers.

To deliver an excellent contact center experience for such a wide range of individuals, the organization wanted a provider that could help them harness advancements in technology and offer enhanced reporting and improved scalability. It was critical for the solution to be able to scale as the contact center’s capacity has to be able to change as quickly as emergencies occur and adapt to unpredictable circumstances. When there’s a disaster of any kind, the volume of contacts offering donations and requesting information can increase rapidly, making it necessary to expand contact center capacity and availability outside traditional business hours.

To support both the official languages of Canada, the contact center solution had to support both English and French seamlessly.

Being accessible to donors, course participants, instructors, and training partners is a key pillar of Canadian Red Cross’s service delivery. In partnership with NTT, Canadian Red Cross recently launched a state-of-the-art call back function that not only improves the convenience of reaching a Canadian Red Cross representative, but also improves traceability, transparency and security for all callers. These enhanced technologies enable greater flexibility and time management, ensuring a more consistent and robust calling experience. At the Canadian Red Cross, they are always seeking ways to optimize their service delivery for donors and customers.

Transformation

Outsourcing the contact center and leveraging analytics

“We wanted to outsource our contact center to be fully managed and self-sufficient because it gives us an opportunity to focus more on strategy and spend time where it adds the most value,” explains Suzanna Samaroo, Senior Manager of Customer Experience Operations at Canadian Red Cross.

NTT implemented and managed a contact center for the Canadian Red Cross, which involved combining cost-effective technology and our empathetic agents and leveraged our Contact Center Development Model.

We worked with the Canadian Red Cross to first simplify the complexity of contact center services the Canadian Red Cross offers. Since the call center supports so many functions, NTT identified priority focus areas, such as fundraising for the philanthropy support team. We then started to build the information callers need when they make contact. We reworked the existing information for agents into self-learning modules and included a focus on fundraising, enabling the organization to onboard agents quickly whenever needed.

The contact center leverages tools such as SmartCX to transcribe and analyze all inbound contacts. These tools make it easy to identify contact trends and inform response strategies as events unfold leveraging data-driven decisions. Analytics and reports give the number of contacts as well as the callers’ sentiments and key concerns that are trending. This allows NTT, as the service provider, to offer meaningful advice which contributes to a best-in-class customer experience (CX).

Results

Improving customer experience with empathetic agents and technology-based tools

The Canadian Red Cross’s modernized contact center allows them to add agents and operating times in an emergency and scale down again when circumstances return to normal. The solution also allows them to update the agents quickly if messages change.

Improving customer experience

Having a bilingual contact center allows callers to communicate in the language they’re most comfortable in, which enhances understanding and the overall experience. The Canadian Red Cross can also leverage analytics to improve their CX with tools such as sentiment analysis.

Acting as one organization

Close collaboration and an in-depth understanding of their objectives, allowed us to update the call center hiring profile and choose the best candidates to represent the Canadian Red Cross, enhancing fundraising efforts while supporting the communities they serve.

Cost-effective

The contact center had to be cost-effective since the Canadian Red Cross is a nonprofit organization. Eliminating redundancies and having only the number of agents required to meet demand has kept costs down.