What percentage of your donors or members call your nonprofit … for any reason? What’s the overall volume? And what about ‘over-the-transom’ calls from people not yet connected to you?
Naturally, the numbers vary hugely from nonprofit to nonprofit, and across types of nonprofits.
Do you treat these calls as a cost (i.e., a nuisance) to be managed and minimized?
Or as an opportunity to build relationships? Increasing loyalty amongst existing supporters and winning new ones.
An old friend of ours pointed us to this relationship management case study about American Express in the Financial Times (free registration required).
Looking for a point of differentiation against other credit card companies, AMEX decided to treat customer calls as an opportunity, instead of a cost. Effectively they unleashed their ‘Customer Care Professionals’ (CCPs), allowing them to spend as much time as necessary to deal with callers/cardholders, de-scripting the conversations, personalizing the conversations by making more customer information available at the computer screen of the CCPs, and training them to better educate customers on card benefits.
Here’s how the Financial Times described the results …
“Customers increased their spending on Amex products by approximately 8-10 per cent as CCPs reinforced product benefits through Relationship Care. Customer satisfaction improved substantially too. Amex also saw its CCPs become more efficient: they were able to reduce the average time of a call because they resolved issues more effectively. Service margins widened as a result.”
What does this have to do with nonprofits? Plenty, if yours happens to be one that receives a significant number of calls, or where a high percentage of your supporters have reason to call.
These calls can build loyalty and generate new donors/members.
Remember our friend?
His nonprofit published heaps of patient-empowering health information. So his organization got plenty of calls from members and non-members alike. Here’s what he said in his email …
“We had two people who would always take as much time as a person needed to explain their options, what questions to ask, etc. It always paid off. 80% of non-member callers joined! And of members calling, about 40% raised their contributions in the next appeal after they would call.”
Not a bad return on caller care.
Tom
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I think you’ve hit on a really important issue.
As supporters and potential supporters have increasingly less disposable income charities and NFP’s should take every possible opportunity to differentiate. This of course is achieved by highlighting the impact of the supporters donations and highlighting the need for future income.
However, not enough organisations are focussed on differentiating through supporter service. Every supporter interaction no matter what the cause, yes even complaints and cancelations, are an opportunity to deepen the relationship between supporter and the cause that they support.
If these functions are viewed as admin task and process centres that is all that they will be, the challenge is turning these functions into fundraising and relationship centres – maybe supporter service teams should be set fundraising income targets?
Thanks for the post.
I love the AMEX example… they also incentivized their CCPs to promote various products using a dynamic relationship driven DB – and the offers were ranked (red, yellow. green) based on that consumer’s behavior and whether or not the product seemed relevant – CCPs were bonused more if they ‘sold’ a red product vs. a green one… increased the monitization of each call and really tapped the power of their data!
Perhaps that level of detail isn’t available or relevant for most non profits – but what about setting the home screen to indicate if a member is within a certain number of months from their membershipe expiring…. or, if they aren’t a sustainer, pitching them on monthly giving?
Every contact should be treated as an opportunity to deepen the relationship and engage the supporter.
SO glad you are writing on this – I think most non profits are FAR behind this curve…
Of course, regrettably, our donors call us in droves because they are furious about the mail and our non responsiveness.