C9 Communications and MaxContact overhaul charity fundraiser's phone system

C9 Communications and MaxContact have come together to overhaul the phone systems of the charity and fundraising-focused call centre business Thomas Direct. 

During the project, C9 Communications handled the sales process and managed the integration of data and voice traffic communications for the Gold Coast-based telemarketer business. 

Meanwhile, the integration of MaxContact’s call centre management platform will support 45 agents over two campaigns with over 20,000 calls being handled every three days, as well as resulting in savings of 25 per cent for Thomas Direct’s agent seat cost. 

Vanessa Gilbert, contact centre operations manager at Thomas Direct, said one of the advantages of the new system is that the business can latch onto additional functionality as its requirements change. 

“This flexibility is important to us,” Gilbert said. 

“Our employees picked up the new system very easily and MaxContact’s streamlined architecture will enable us to leverage our own team’s skills so we can easily manage the system in-house. 

“We expect to see a rapid return on investment from this project over the coming months.  At the same time, knowing we won’t have downtime with MaxContact is a real advantage.” 

The platform can change the business' dialling method from predictive to progressive when the number of agents falls below a set threshold, and vice versa when the agent number increases above the threshold. 

Additionally, the platform can import lists and manage scripts for daily operations, survey donor supporters and build support lists and track sales and donations per hour through a series of application programmable interfaces (APIs) to internal and external facing systems. 

Thomas Direct decided to leverage the service of both companies after a market review with C9 Communications.    

The telemarketing business needed a solution that could support rapid deployment, features that best aligned with its client’s campaigns that contained payment gateway and customer relationship management software that could also integrate into its own systems.

Further, Gilbert was impressed with C9 Communications’ track record to meet Thomas Direct’s specific needs. 

“From day one, we could see that MaxContact would streamline and automate campaigns thereby optimising our overall performance,” she said. 

The decision to overhaul Thomas Direct’s contact centre came as it decided its legacy system – a manual dialler solution – was not able to scale to the organisation’s standards,.

In addition, the company claimed the old system no longer met the requirements of real-time reporting, quality assurance, an effective workflow, business continuity and compliance.