How technology helps meet rising service demand

It’s a paradox of success: as your reputation grows, so does your demand. Service users hear about your successful services and realise you can support their needs. Increasing service user demand can often appear suddenly, seemingly out of nowhere, leaving unprepared charity teams out of their depths, scrambling to find a scalable solution.  

So how can charities manage increased service user demand? What are the key steps they need to take? And how can tech help you with the challenge of scale? In this article, we take lessons from the Salvation Army and how they dealt with rising demands by scaling their tech offering.  

The problem 

The Salvation Army is one of the most famous charities on the planet. They currently have more than 67,000 employees, operating from more than 7500 centres, and serving millions of people every year. They provide vital support and services to defend vulnerable people around the world. 

And the charity has been successful. In their battle against poverty in the US, the Salvation Army saw a decline in the number of people seeking support. Then, in 2016, everything changed: the charity saw a 15% spike in their Human Needs index. That meant more demand, more demand meant more stress on the charity, more stress on the charity meant more stress on employees.  

Charities, faced with problems of scale, can turn to tech. Tech helps to streamline, free up resources, extend reach, and so much more. The Salvation Army did just that. Until 2016, the charity used an in-house system to handle requests for IT support, a system that was slow, inefficient, and could not allow any of the thousands of employees to self-serve. To meet the issues of scale, the Salvation Army realised they had to make a significant change.  

The solution 

Katina Durrent, Assistant Director of IT Support for the Salvation Army Western Territory, knew they needed a more efficient IT solution and, more specifically, she wanted to implement a feature-rich help centre to serve as a knowledge base for the entire organisation.  

“Our vision was to get all the departments on board,” Durrent says, “so that all the documentation they needed was in one place, whether it was an organisational chart, instructions for adding a signature to Outlook, or a step-by-step guide to using the donor system.” 

Scaling does not rely on any tech, but the best possible tech. That means clearly identifying the problem, scoping out potential solutions, and finding the tech that bridges that gap. For the Salvation Army, that meant exploring various solutions to their IT support system, judging them against needs and objectives, then finding the one that relieved pressure on the charity.  

Durrent opted for Zendesk. The platform provided the best combinations of features, functionality, and value, meeting the charity’s demand to scale-up.  

Durrent rolled out Zendesk Support and Zendesk Guide across the western territory, quickly figuring out the appropriate ticket fields, ticket forms, and organisation fields needed to represent not only the many departments and divisions. “Getting Zendesk set up was really easy,” she said. 

Scaling often requires quick planning, especially around tech. That’s because, if scaling up tech, you need to ensure it fits well within your wider tech eco-system. Durrent required two integrations, for example, which would allow her to synchronise Zendesk with Microsoft Active Directory and to connect Zendesk to a Cisco phone system. That meant working with the supplier, ensuring they knew the requirements, and providing the right amount of time for implementation. 

One core risk of scaling up is leaving people behind. Durrent prepared videos and how-to articles for the agents that would use Zendesk. She planned light training sessions on a videoconferencing platform, on which she enacted different ticket scenarios, providing real-life examples for them to learn.“All of the agents picked up on Zendesk really quickly,” she said.  

She turned attention to the knowledge base, ensuring all departments had valuable information that allowed them to effectively navigate the tech, ensuring new users were not left in the dark. 

Durrent took all the right steps. She identified the rising demand, found a route to fixing the increased demand, then chose the best tech to solve that problem. Then she quickly focussed on seamless integration and informed others of the best way to navigate the tech.  

Charities looking for an example of how to scale up with tech, look no further.  

The result 

So what happened next? In October of 2017, the IT department received more than 6,500 new tickets. An incredible 6,298 were solved, the majority of which were solved within two hours. The customer satisfaction level rose to 99%, which is pretty close to perfect.  

“With Zendesk Guide, everything we need is in one place – from an org chart to instructions for setting up a new donor in our system,” Durrent says. “Zendesk Support allows us to collaborate, report on our resolution time, and even suggest article to help people resolve issues faster.” 

For more information on Zendesk, or to read the case study in its entirety, click below.