Highlights:
- Lowering telecom costs: By eliminating the need for landlines, phone hardware maintenance, and fax machines, Komen has more money to direct to fighting cancer.
- Increasing telecom flexibility: Because the team can manage their own call queues and directories online, Komen can now make changes more quickly and easily.
- Improving callers’ experience: With RingCentral Contact Center, Komen’s support teams have tools, such as the Salesforce integration, to provide more personalized service to callers.
The world’s leading nonprofit battling breast cancer
In the fight against breast cancer, no single entity has had as much direct impact as Susan G. Komen. The nonprofit has contributed nearly $3 billion to research, community outreach, and advocacy programs all over the world. And the organization’s efforts have been credited with helping to reduce breast-cancer mortality rates in the U.S. by 40% since 1989.
To raise the vast sums of money needed to fund these programs, Komen’s team relies on donations—many of them pledged over the phone. And for that reason, the nonprofit needed a more reliable telephony system.
A phone system too costly, unreliable, and limiting
Prior to RingCentral, Komen’s business phone service ran entirely on an in-house PBX at the organization’s Dallas headquarters. Carlos Soto, Komen’s Hosted System Administrator, says that this outdated system created several challenges—starting with its high price tag.
But Carlos points out, the other challenges—including the inability to administer the system internally, and a total lack of redundancy—were more serious. “We couldn’t make even small changes ourselves, like adding users or moving them into different call queues. We had to put in a ticket and wait. And when the system failed or we had a power outage, we had no phones—which meant missing donations.”
RingCentral helps the team carry out its important work
When Carlos and his team implemented RingCentral MVP with Video across the organization, they managed to solve all the organization’s telephony issues simultaneously—while also adding mobility, easy scalability, and new features the staff never had never had.
“The RingCentral mobile app gives us so much mobility and freedom,” he says. “If I’m on a call or a RingCentral Video meeting on my laptop, and I need to run an errand, I can just switch the call to my mobile phone and head out. It’s fantastic for keeping us all productive and connected without tying us to our desks—or tying us anywhere.”
Another benefit, Carlos notes, was having digital faxing capability built into the RingCentral platform, where employees could now use their business phone numbers to send and receive faxes online. “The fax functionality was a huge bonus,” he says. “We used to have to share fax machines and pay for fax lines. Now nobody needs to wait for a turn at the fax or to stand over a machine waiting for a fax to come in. It’s all digital, on their RingCentral apps.”
And as for the organization’s previous frustration at having to wait for third-party help with making minor adjustments to the company’s phone directory or call queue, Carlos notes that now Komen’s team can do it all in-house because RingCentral’s admin portal is so intuitive.
“We really appreciated being able to adjust the phone system ourselves, online, in minutes,” explains Carlos. “That was such a benefit to our operations, because now our managers and supervisors could quickly add or move users on the fly, whenever their needs changed.”
Improving the caller experience with RingCentral Contact Center
Komen found even more value in the RingCentral cloud platform when they rolled out the RingCentral Contact Center customer support solution.
One of the most significant operational improvements, says Krista Park Berry, Director of Komen’s toll-free Breast Care Helpline, is that Contact Center empowered her team of agents to bring the helpline in-house. “When we brought our helpline program in-house, we wanted a system that would seamlessly triage a variety of communication channels with integrated call log documentation. When supporting over 15,000 calls a year, Contact Center brings increased efficiency to our work..”
Krista also notes that her support teams are improving many aspects of their operations with specific Contact Center functionality. For example, she explains, “One key capability we have now with RingCentral Contact Center is three-way calling to escalate a call—to dial in a supervisor or emergency services if a patient exhibits the potential for self-harm. Having this solution in place for higher intensity calls brings our team confidence and peace of mind.
Another tool that’s improving the Helpline Specialists’ daily operations, Krista says, is the RingCentral integration into Komen’s Salesforce environment. “With the RingCentral Salesforce integration, our agents can easily take notes during a call and not have to re-enter the data. Those notes go straight into that caller’s Salesforce profile, where the next agent can see them.”
But as thrilled as Komen’s support agents are at how much RingCentral for Salesforce is streamlining their workflows, they’re even more pleased at how it can help them ease a tense phone call for a woman calling in for help.
As Krista explains, “For a person going through something as challenging as breast cancer, not having to retell their story each time makes for a much more comfortable experience.”
Originally published Nov 09, 2021
