The importance of The Salvation Army delivering empathy at scale through its call centres

The Salvation Army has boosted its reach via upgrades to its call centres, allowing the company to focus on its person-centred approach to community care.

Milad Kruze, executive general manager for information technology at The Salvation Army told a Genesys Xperience Sydney audience that “technology plays a pivotal role for our organisation.”

“We talk about increasing our reach and meeting people where they are and this single technology such as contact centres allows us to do that.

“We've come from a very legacy model in the use of technology and Genesys has allowed us to unify our organisation.”

The charity organisation has migrated nine contact centres onto Genesys cloud, according to Kruze. 

He said most people will ask to connect through to one of its stores, which can lead to “conversations about taking peoples’ couch as a donation in one phone call, then on the next we're talking to a domestic violence victim and someone’s about to lose their homes”.

“Especially with times now with our cost of living, [contact centre operators] ability to transfer calls within the organisation to the right place, take that response and not having technology as barrier few, those things are a big deal,” he said.

Kruze said, “There are hundreds of 1000s of safe spaces that we create the nature of those calls”.

“It provides our personnel with that psychological safety to turn up to work on a Monday and feel safe.

“From an accessibility point of view giving the community a choice of channel is a big deal too.

Kruze said The Salvation Army can also now offer financial services support through web chat functionality over the phone.

“Some people prefer to connect with us first before they speak, so we're very much on our first stages of that transformation, but we're a person-centred organisation, that’s what we do.

“Each of us either you know someone that's going through a hardship or a couch to donate so I'm confident to say before I take those calls,” Kruze said.