How adHere Revived Its Call Center with Five9
“Moving to Five9 saved us. Our call center is now more profitable than any of our other channels.”
adHere
JUMP IN REVENUE GROWTH
As a result of moving to Five9 with outboundANI, adHere’s call center has experienced a 564% year-over-year increase in revenue growth, operating at a +$50,000-per-month profit. The call center now accounts for 12% of the overall revenue, and it’s scaling operations by hiring more staff.
Representatives conduct 20,000 outbound interactions a day, and customers are increasingly asking for the call center channel when engaging with adHere. “Our call center has become our flagship. Now when we tour colleges and universities, there’s a lot of demand for that channel. We’ve even experienced year-over-year growth from September through December, which is unheard of in the educational industry. I’m so thankful we transitioned to Five9,” Resendez said.
Going forward, adHere intends to continue to scale its call center. It plans to expand with SMS and email for follow-up communication and to implement inbound calls based on their paid media campaigns. “Moving to Five9 saved us. Our call center is now more profitable than any of our other channels,” Resendez concluded.
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At the beginning of each workday, adHere, Inc. call center representatives gather on an all- hands call to focus not just on the task ahead, but on gratitude. “Our mission is to inspire others to elevate their lives; you can’t do that if you haven’t elevated your own,” explained Ruben Resendez, President of adHere, an innovative advertising agency that specializes in lead generation for higher educational institutions. “We believe in people and in making a difference in others’ lives.”
The company runs on a proprietary and highly successful lead generation model based on social media channels and first-party data. adHere is renowned for providing the highest quality leads by accurately matching prospective students to colleges and universities. Many of the prospective students are first-generation college hopefuls and have numerous concerns around costs, timing, and their own ability to create a future they dream of.
“We want our people to start their day with positive energy, to help prospective students feel inspired about the future of their education and what they can achieve,” Resendez said.
Putting Hope into Action
Resendez leads with his own positive energy and a belief in what is possible. It wasn’t long ago that this belief led him to give adHere’s failing call center one last chance to turn around. For years, the call center channel underperformed, to the point of operating at a ~$4,000 monthly loss. It accounted for only 4% of the company’s overall revenue. “We knew we had good data because we generate it, and good data is the number one determining factor for contact rates.
The second is the dialer,” said Resendez. “With the dialer we had, the call center was achieving only a 5% contact rate, which for an outbound call center is dismal. We believed the dialer to be at fault.” Their existing dialer required manual configuration and management, which diverted the call center manager’s time away from training and coaching representatives. The company had two choices: Shut down the unprofitable call center or make a final attempt to rescue it. After seeking advice from trusted industry contacts, Resendez was referred to Five9 by Jason Shatzkamer of outboundANI.
“Most would have just shut it down, but we decided to give it one last hurrah and make a significant investment to see if we could turn it around,” Resendez said. “Five9 is the Rolls-Royce of dialers and the gold standard. We decided to see what they could do.”
From Failing to Flagship
Before they could commit to the Five9 dialer, Resendez and his leadership team had another core requirement. They wanted to partner with third-party ANI Inventory Management solution provider outboundANI to improve contact rates and ensure optimal outcomes on outbound dialing. This required their new dialer to be able to easily integrate with outboundANI — something Five9 competitors were unable to prove they could do. “I know Five9 well and knew that it would easily integrate with our software,” said outboundANI CEO and Founding Principal Jason Shatzkamer. “Five9 takes a true partnership approach and worked closely with us for mutual success.”
Teams from adHere, outboundANI, and Five9 collaborated to ensure the integration achieved the required specs and to customize Five9 dialers to meet their unique needs. Today, outboundANI is an Accredited Five9 ISV Partner with a turnkey, plug and play Five9 integration, and shares nearly 100 mutual customers with Five9.
Five9 Smart Dialers automate the dialing process and only connect agents to calls answered by a live prospect, filtering out no answers and busy signals. The Progressive Dialer adaptively controls dialing pace based on past campaign performance. The Predictive Dialer uses advanced algorithms to predict agent availability and dials accordingly. The Power Dialer uses a manually configured calls-to-agent ratio to give you maximum control over dialing rate. And the Preview Dialer pulls customer history from the CRM before each call and pops it to the agent’s screen for review before dialing.
“We couldn’t have done this without our Five9 contact and their team. Our Five9 account manager was one of the biggest pieces of this success. He ensured that information flowed and was on point in getting us signed up. He was perfect in communicating with us and being really strong in addressing all of our challenges and all of our concerns we had in the very beginning. We are really thankful to the Five9 team as they are a big part of our success,” Resendez said.
Challenges
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Unprofitable call center
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Poor contact rate
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Manual dialer configuration
Benefits
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564% YoY increase in revenue growth for call center
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20K live interactions per day
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Automated dialer and configuration
Solutions
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Digital Engagement: Chat
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Outbound
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Technical Account Manager