Compassion UK makes £250,000 with customer experience software

Fundraising | Gareth Jones | 21 May 2010

Poverty-relief child-sponsorship charity Compassion UK claims to have increased its income by more than £250,000 in the first year of using cloud-based customer experience software from RightNow.

It says it has improved sponsorship retention rates by £140,000, grown supporter numbers by 13 per cent and increased donations by 30 per cent.

It also made improvements to its contact centre, leading to operational savings of £150,000.

Productivity and efficiency has been improved with better access to information and real-time interaction channels like ‘Chat’, which helps agents respond to accurately to supporter queries.

These efficiency savings have enabled the charity to review its staff quotas and reduce its future hiring by two full employees.

Compassion UK says the software has also reduced set-up costs for new territories by removing unnecessary infrastructure costs; in one example, the opening of an operation in Ireland was £70,000 less than the previous norm.

Personalisation is key to the change; the charity now has a single interaction history for each sponsor, allowing customer service agents to handle supporter queries more knowledgably, and its marketing team can use information about preferences to tailor campaigns to the individual.

Richard Atterton, chief operating officer at Compassion UK, said: “During the Haiti earthquake, when supporters were anxious to know about the 70,000 children they sponsor in that country, RightNow enabled us to quickly segment our database so that within 48 hours we were sending sponsors individual update messages.”

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