Donor Outreach Program Saves More Lives by Transforming Operations with Convoso

In the world of blood donation, every connection counts. The blood supply is critical to saving lives, with each donation potentially saving up to three lives. However, maintaining an adequate blood supply is an ongoing challenge. Without a steady stream of donors, hospitals and blood centers must resort to purchasing costly third-party blood products, straining already tight healthcare budgets.

Lapsed donors present a valuable opportunity in this area. They're likely to give again but must be reminded of the impact their donations have. Healthcare facilities lack the infrastructure needed for this type of outreach campaign. That's where 448 Recruitment comes in.

A leader in blood donor outreach since 2008, 448 Recruitment's mission is to bridge the gap between its healthcare clients and lapsed donors. The company plays a vital role in maintaining the blood supply chain by reconnecting lapsed blood donors with hospitals and blood donation centers nationwide.

Although 448 Recruitment's expertise in donor engagement is unmatched, its technology held the team back. We spoke to Heath Wilson, Co-Founder and Vice President of Operations at 448 Recruitment, to learn why his team switched to Convoso's purpose-built sales outreach solution and how it helps them save more lives.

• Dialers won't integrate with the custom recruitment platform

• Agents juggling multiple software systems

• Voicemail wasting agent time & productivity

• Flagged numbers impacting campaign effectiveness

• One powerful, comprehensive dialer software

• Gold-standard voicemail detection accuracy

• Robust caller ID reputation management

• White-glove customer care

• 2X donor talk time

• 2X appointments set per hour

• Reduced agent burnout

• Eliminated need for multiple software solutions

At the heart of 448 Recruitment's challenges was a critical integration issue. The company had a donor management system custom-built for its specific needs, but its previous dialers, such as Five9, couldn't integrate with it. "There were a lot of manual processes going back and forth between the dialer platform and our CRM," Wilson explains.

This lack of integration didn't just frustrate recruiters; it had a ripple effect throughout the entire operation. As recruiters switched between the dialer platform and the custom CRM, it drastically slowed their productivity, reducing the number of blood donors they could contact each day. It also made onboarding new team members a time-consuming challenge, as they had to learn multiple disjointed systems instead of a single, unified platform.

So, when they moved to Convoso, the operation transformed the software seamlessly connected with the company's custom CRM, creating a single, efficient interface for recruiters. No more juggling multiple platforms or doing time-consuming manual data entry — everything agents needed was now at their fingertips.

"Now when our agents are talking to a donor, we're able to display all the donor's contact information on the screen, and with one click, they can pop open our CRM screen. They can update the donor's information and see their scheduled appointments. It's really, really easy," he says.

While integration solved one major hurdle, 448 Recruitment faced another significant challenge in its daily operations — the voicemail void.

One of the most frustrating challenges 448 Recruitment faced was wasting time on voicemail messages. Recruiters found themselves listening to voicemail after voicemail instead of engaging in meaningful conversations with potential donors. This not only reduced productivity but also took a toll on morale. After all, these dedicated professionals joined the team to save lives, not leave messages.

Convoso's effective answering machine detection reduced the number of voicemails agents encountered, allowing them to spend more time in actual conversations with potential donors. This boosted productivity and reinvigorated the team's sense of purpose.

"The answering machine detection was a gigantic win," Wilson says.

It's a huge benefit for our recruiters. For these folks, being able to talk to more donors per hour is absolutely a morale boost, because that's what they're here to do. We're able to keep them talking to more donors every hour, which is just fantastic."

Wilson also praises the accuracy of Convoso's voicemail detection:

"The answering machine detection is very good. Some of the problems that you can have with answering machine detection is that, if it's not very good, you can actually be hanging up on donors. But with Convoso's platform, it's excellent. The intrusion detection is great."

With voicemails no longer clogging up its outreach efforts, 448 Recruitment faced its next hurdle: getting potential donors to answer its calls.

In today's era of increased skepticism towards unknown callers, 448 Recruitment faced a growing challenge as many calls were flagged as "Spam Likely." This erodes trust before conversations even begin, making it harder to connect with potential donors and fulfill its life-saving mission.

Convoso's caller ID management tool, ClearCallerID, helped change this. With this solution, 448 Recruitment now monitors and manages its phone number reputation across carriers, uses prevention tools to inhibit numbers from getting flagged, and benefits from automated remediation to pull flagged numbers out of call campaigns.

"It is a huge deal to be able to monitor your telephone numbers for scam flags," Wilson explains.

"You cannot represent another company's brand or your own brand and have your phone number come up as potential spam or scam likely. With Convoso, we get flagged a lot less frequently.”

Convoso also provides tools that support compliance, including call time restrictions, DNC scrubbing, and list management. With all of the TCPA rules, Wilson says contact centers need to properly manage their data.

“You've got to make sure you're contacting customers at the right time, and that's something that Convoso helps us to do. To make sure that we've got the right cadences and we're contacting customers when we should, and more importantly, that we're not over-contacting.”

With Convoso’s compliance support, Wilson’s team can confidently manage campaigns to reduce costly compliance risks and optimize outreach to generate more conversations.

Convoso offers multiple dialing modes that businesses use depending on campaign needs. 448 Recruitment prefers the power dialer, which automatically dials numbers from a list at a rate set by Wilson’s team. It’s simple to adjust the dial level based on agent availability and performance metrics, keeping agents engaged and productive.

Wilson shared his experience with Convoso’s power dialer:

“You have an excellent, excellent power dialer. The pause really isn’t there, as much as it was on a lot of other dialers. And that was really important to us, because that's a turn off for so many people to have that pause before an agent gets connected.”

Wilson’s attention to providing a seamless and high-quality experience for his donors reflects the same commitment to excellence that Convoso extends through its award-winning customer support.

From expert-led onboarding to always-on tech support, to a dedicated Customer Success Manager, 448 Recruitment enjoys unparalleled support to ensure the platform is always operating at its best.

“I really appreciate the fact that you guys are checking in monthly with us. When I get on the calls with [Convoso’s team], they've looked at our drop rate. They've looked at other things within our account. They're actually actively looking to see if there's any way that we can improve. Very impressed by that. You don't get customer service like that a lot.”

Convoso's powerful suite of tools transformed 448 Recruitment's operations, propelling its life-saving mission to new heights. The impact was both immediate and far-reaching.

"We've more than doubled the number of donors that we're able to talk to on an hourly basis," Wilson reports, "and that drives a lot of additional metrics for us."

This dramatic increase in donor engagement has had a cascading effect on 448 Recruitment's overall performance. They have increased their appointments per hour and the number of donations that they're producing per hour.

The efficiency gains have also been substantial, allowing the company to do more with less. "We're essentially able to accomplish more in less time, so we actually need less labor," Wilson adds.

This surge in productivity isn't just about improving numbers — it's about saving lives. By spending significantly more time in meaningful conversations with potential donors, rather than navigating clunky systems or listening to voicemail messages, agents can connect with and motivate more individuals to donate blood. Each of these connections represents potential lives saved.

The partnership between 448 Recruitment and Convoso has not only revolutionized its current operations but has also set the stage for future innovations in its blood donor outreach. As technology continues to evolve, 448 Recruitment is well-positioned to leverage Convoso’s new features and capabilities, further enhancing its ability to connect donors with life-saving opportunities.

Wilson's team plans to take their productivity even further with Convoso's conversational AI tool. "We're looking at using Voso.ai to automate our confirmation calls to our donors. We can feed in data from our CRM, like the appointment date, time, and location for the donor. Being able to automate those telephone calls will save our company thousands of dollars every year in labor costs," Wilson says.

These cost savings and efficiency gains translate directly into 448 Recruitment's ability to connect more donors with life-saving opportunities. By automating routine tasks, the team can focus more energy on personalized donor engagement, potentially increasing the number of successful donations and, ultimately, the number of lives saved.

The partnership between 448 Recruitment and Convoso demonstrates the powerful synergy of dedicated professionals armed with the right technology. By streamlining processes and more than doubling donor engagement, Convoso has helped 448 Recruitment set new performance benchmarks and amplify its ability to fulfill its vital mission.