Canteen invests in AI to improve donor attrition

Canteen Australia is investing in digital to improve the donor experience, and reduce cancellations.

Digital Nation Australia recently spoke to Raul Caceres, general manager for data and technology at Canteen about the not-for-profit’s move to transform its contact centre from inbound to a combination of inbound and outbound, with the purpose of proactively retaining donors.

According to Caceres, “Some of the outbound calls that we're making are based on a machine learning algorithm that we are now using that helps us predict donors that are likely to cancel their regular giving donation. So what we try to do is be much more proactive in the way that we deal with our information. And so we can call that a donor before they actually cancel. And we've seen so far some, some really good results.”

Canteen has experimented with AB testing to reveal the success of outbound calling, and has noticed a reduction in cancellations from donors that received direct calls from agents.

“We take a data set and we split it into AB groups. And then with one of the groups we call them and we see if we are able to reduce the attrition and based on the ones that we are able to call and contact them, just basically thank them for their support or give them more information on how their money is being used and we’re seeing that there’s a small reduction on the percentage of people that cancel.”

Canteen invested in Genesys to power its contact centre, after evaluating multiple vendors in the market, said Caceres. He described the integration with other solutions in the organisation’s tech stack as key to selecting the provider.

“First and foremost, I think that the ability to integrate with some of our other systems so that we were going to be able to ensure that anything that the agent was working in, in terms of data was also flowing into our CRM. And then that also the information from the CRM was coming straight into the screen of the agent so that he was very quickly able to get all of the information on the support there and give a better quality call today to the support desk.”