What do you do when you're a contact center with only enough manpower and capacity to answer 30 percent of your calls? One of two things: you either give up trying or you make some changes to your contact center's infrastructure...MAJOR changes....and move it into the cloud.

Dawson McAllister Association, a call-in radio show aimed at teenagers and young adults under 25, was one such organization. Listeners can call to discuss issues such as broken families, abuse, depression and addiction. In addition, Dawson McAllister also provides an off-air HopeLine, where teens and young adults can find answers to their problems in a one-on-one setting with a trained “phone coach.” Both the show and the HopeLine were experiencing rapid growth: the show was being distributed to five “top 40” stations and both audience and call volume were growing rapidly. The Association faced a dilemma: it had urgent needs for a robust contact center solution to cope with high volumes, but it had little upfront budget for huge capital outlays, and it didn't have nearly enough space on-premises to expand.

It also didn't have a large budget.

“The show relies on many small donors, so we needed to make those dollars stretch as far as possible,” said Micky Thompson, CIO of the Dawson McAllister Association. “Since the show is a nonprofit organization, we felt the obligation to be a responsible steward of those donations.”

The Association needed a new solution, and it needed it quickly.

“We had to make a dramatic change in our technology,” Thompson said. “We had to quickly grow our contact center by a factor of 10 and higher to meet the growing demand.”

The Association owned two Avaya (News - Alert) PBX systems with a total of 30 seat licenses for inbound calling. That capacity had been adequate at the time of purchase, but that was no longer the case: agents were only able to respond to about 30 percent of incoming calls. Purchasing new PBXs was out of the Association's budget, even if they had the physical space to grow the contact center on site, which they didn't. In addition, the Association realized that in order to better communicate with an under-25 age demographic, it needed to support Web chat, something its existing Avaya system didn't do.

The Association needed a special contact center solution: something that didn't require a huge up-front capital outlay, something that supported multimedia contact channels and something that would allow home agents and volunteers in other states to take calls as remote workers. In short, they needed a hosted contact center solution, and they needed it from a company with a long history of developing software-as-a-service contact center application.

The Association ultimately contacted both Cisco (News - Alert) and Interactive Intelligence for demos of their respective hosted contact center solutions. Thompson was already using some Cisco equipment, so initially he considered Cisco the preferred vendor. He changed his mind, however, when he realized that Cisco's experience with deploying a hosted contact center solution was thin at that time, and the Cisco solution was overly complex. Without adding to the IT staff, the Association would find it difficult to administer.

“Each component was licensed separately and Cisco recommended adding up to five people to our IT staff for the deployment,” Thomson (News - Alert) recalls. “But we needed to get up and running fast and we were already tight on resources.”

The Association eventually chose Interactive Intelligence's cloud-based Communications as a Service (CaaS). A hosted, standards-based, all-in-one IP communications software suite, it eliminated the need for the Association to purchase and maintain hardware and hire another IT team, and allowed them to keep their existing PBXs. They were also able to let agents work from home, bringing more people onto the phones without the need to expand premises.

“It was an epiphany,” Thompson said. “We realized that Interactive Intelligence (News - Alert) was the only way to go. It didn’t require us to purchase its hardware, and we could also keep our existing systems, like the Avaya PBXs. We could even have our volunteer agents working at home, since the solution wasn’t location-specific.”

Thompson was also impressed by the reasonable cost of the CaaS Contact Center, especially when compared to Cisco’s on-premise solution.

“The cost for Cisco Unified Contact Center Enterprise would have been $3 million over five years,” Thompson said. “Today, we pay $11,000 per month plus some additional fees for new agents for the Interactive Intelligence CaaS Contact Center. That’s about an 80 percent savings compared to what we would’ve paid for an on-premise Cisco solution.”

When Dawson McAllister Association went live with Interactive Intelligence's CaaS Contact Center, they immediately enabled the show and the HopeLine to grow staff (from 40 to 75 volunteer agents right away) and improve call response. Within four months, the agent staff grew to 175, with 120 of those agents working from home, or from newly established remote contact centers.

But managing a contact center isn't only about telephone calls, so the Association saw an added bonus with the solution's hosted recording and whisper/coaching features. These helped the Association train new agents in the skills needed to handle sensitive calls. Other hosted features currently in use are auto-attendant, automatic call distribution and screen pop.

Immediately, the Association was able to boost the percentage of calls answered from 30 percent to 50 percent. Eventually, that figure rose to 60 percent of calls answered, or about 1,500 calls per week.

To bring the multimedia component into play, the HopeLine deployed the Interactive Intelligence hosted Web chat feature. Chat interactions now make up about 20 percent of current volume. With the addition of chat (and a planned Web callback option in the near future), the Association expects to boost call response to 80 percent.

“The Interactive Intelligence CaaS Contact Center made it possible for us to handle the huge increase in calls from teens over the past year,” Thompson said. “The fact that it’s also a cost-effective solution has enabled us to use our donated funds wisely, while still receiving robust and reliable service.”