How a COVID-19 Hotline Managed a Massive Increase in Call Volume with Five9
When your call center becomes the first touchpoint to impacting a life, how do you ensure that your agents can still receive important calls remotely? As we all shift to a more virtual environment during this time of COVID-19, many companies have had to pivot when it comes to customer service. Five9 is a cloud contact center solution provider that is helping companies pivot quickly during these changing times.
We reached out to Jeremy McCallum, Area Director of Professional Services of Five9, to learn more about how they are helping customers with contact centers.
How has your technology helped customers during this time?
Jeremy McCallum: One Saturday morning in mid-March, a long-time customer that leverages an integration of the Five9 Salesforce adapter to their call center platform called us for help. They needed to add agents to their call center environment to handle the flood of incoming calls to their COVID-19 hotline. Due to the stress of the current situation, this customer was in critical need of a seamless solution that could provide the best possible experience for their distressed callers.
Within 48 hours, we added 50% more agents to the system, along with scripts, IVR prompts, and campaigns to their Salesforce environment — enabling call agents to access the necessary information needed to manage inbound calls. The synergy of Five9 and the Salesforce Platform helped deliver a seamless customer experience, resulting in an increase in call volume from 3–4K calls/day to 100–600K calls/day.
By leveraging Salesforce and Five9 to improve the agent experience, our customer was, in turn, able to impact the overall caller experience. Agents were able to:
- Reduce call times by pulling all key information directly from a holistic view in their Salesforce instance
- Prevent duplicate conversations with a centralized view of their caller’s information
- Increase first call resolution, resulting in overall caller satisfaction
Tell us more about the challenges customers are seeing today due to COVID-19.
McCallum: With the majority of offices closed to employees, companies have faced the challenge of providing a secure work-from-home solution for contact center agents. While the demand for working virtually has increased, it has been a struggle for some companies to implement new technology quickly — especially for emergency response teams. Every minute counts when it comes to saving a life. Thus, time is of the essence.
Our customer with the COVID-19 hotline was able to act quickly because they had Five9’s out-of-the-box integrations with Service and Sales Cloud. Five9 syncs directly with our customer’s Salesforce instance, eliminating integration obstacles.
This rapid set-up enabled COVID-19 calls to be automatically directed to agents who could discuss unemployment benefits and additional government assistance. This helped our customer manage the spike in hotline calls while allowing more individuals to get access to vital government resources.
How else is Five9 helping with COVID-19?
McCallum: In order to support customers during this time of need, Five9 launched a FastTrack Deployment program. This program helps customers to set up a contact center and their remote agents quickly with a predefined set of professional services engagement features, voice with basic screen-pop, ASIC chat, and email, and Zoom phone connectivity.
The implementation of the FastTrack Deployment program enables customers to get their call centers up and running in as little as 24–48 hours from start to finish.
Because the Five9 Intelligent Cloud Contact Center is not location-dependent, it only requires connectivity to the platform itself. Agents simply need to have access to the internet, a computer, and a headset to leverage the Five9 solution.
Learn more about Five9’s Cloud Contact solution on AppExchange and see what other solutions can help during this time on AppExchange COVID-19 Resources for Businesses.
