Customerland
Customerland is a podcast about …. Customers. How to get more of them. How to keep them. What makes them tick. We talk to the experts, the technologies and occasionally, actual people – you know, customers – to find out what they’re all about.So if you’re a CX pro, a loyalty marketer, a brand owner, an agency planner … if you’re a CRM & personalization geek, if you’re a customer service / CSAT / NPS nerd – you finally have a home.
Customerland
Customer Experience as a Force for Good
What happens when a nonprofit organization builds customer service operations that directly advance their mission? In this fascinating conversation with Andie Ewing, Chief Operating Officer of Unbound, we explore how this international development organization has reimagined what customer experience can achieve.
Operating across 17 countries in Africa, Asia, India, and Latin America, Unbound has developed a groundbreaking approach to both fighting poverty and delivering exceptional customer service. Unlike traditional contact centers focused on efficiency metrics, Unbound has established global operations in Colombia and the Philippines with a different priority: creating career opportunities for the very families they serve through their programs.
"When you are in a nonprofit, your differentiator is your customer experience, and so it is more crucial than anywhere else I've ever worked to create the ultimate radical customer experience," explains Ewing. With 90% of all donations going directly to families, Unbound operates on a remarkably thin administrative margin while still prioritizing meaningful sponsor interactions over transactional efficiency.
The impact extends far beyond business metrics. Contact center employees become community heroes, representing hope and possibility. One employee shared how his job now allows him to provide a secure home for his mother after growing up in extremely precarious living conditions. When sponsors call, they speak directly with people connected to the communities they support, creating authentic relationships that strengthen commitment and trust.
The results speak volumes: 95% first-call resolution, 92% customer satisfaction, and only a 7.2% sponsor discontinuance rate. Unbound's visionary approach demonstrates how aligning operational excellence with mission can create transformative outcomes for all stakeholders.
Discover how this innovative organization is challenging conventional wisdom about customer experience while breaking cycles of poverty. Visit unboundorg.org to learn more about their work and how you can get involved.
When you are in a nonprofit, your differentiator is your customer experience, and so it is more crucial than anywhere else I've ever worked to create the ultimate radical customer experience.
Speaker 2:Today on Customer Land, Andy Ewing, who's Chief Operating Officer of Unbound and if you're not familiar with Unbound, you might be familiar with their mission. If you're not familiar with their mission, then we have a lot to talk about today. So, but first of all, thank you, Andy. I really appreciate you joining me.
Speaker 1:Thank you for having me.
Speaker 2:So, to be fair and full transparency, andy and I had a conversation maybe a week ago just to talk about what we wanted to talk about, and what ended up happening at least from my perspective was wow, there's a lot to talk about here. So just to set a little context, maybe tell us about what Unbound is and does and your role there.
Speaker 1:For sure. Well Unbound is an international development organization. We work in 17 different countries we are in Africa, asia, india and Latin America and really our goal is to help families overcome the challenges that come with poverty, and we do that through what we consider our five pillars. The first one is eliminate poverty, which we do that with some pretty stringent goal setting. We use a program called Poverty Stoplight where we work with all the individual families to set goals, and those goals can be from everything from starting up their own business to having a separate sleeping area for their children. We also do direct cash transfer, where we help our families establish a bank account and directly transfer the funds from sponsorship into those accounts. This is one of the differences that we have in our model than others. The families are really empowered to decide how to use that money to overcome whatever challenge they have.
Speaker 1:The second pillar is we empower women, and that is really a big focus of our organization is really focusing on the mothers. So in every community we have what we call mothers groups and these mothers groups are ran just like organizations it was the first thing I observed when I went on my first community visit is the mothers groups have presidents, vice presidents, chair leaders, and they are. They are overcoming huge challenges that educated people can't overcome. So so that's a huge, a huge part of our program. And then advanced education is one of our pillars. That's really the foundation of how Unbound came about was really focusing on sponsorship of the child, helping children to stay in school instead of having to leave to go work and provide for their families. Stay in school instead of having to leave to go work and provide for their families. And that's evolved from the sponsorship to now we actually have scholarships for further education as well.
Speaker 1:The fourth one is build community. One of the things that came about from the mothers groups is you brought a whole bunch of mothers together and they started identifying of mothers together and they started identifying hey, my child has issues getting to school clean because of this dirt path, just like your child does. Let's pool together and figure out how to overcome these community problems. And that evolved into a program that we call Agents of Change, where the mothers can put grant requests together. They put like full business case proposals together and then they ask for funding for it, and then we go out and find donors to help fund those grants. Wow, and I'm telling you these mothers, it's, it's pretty remarkable.
Speaker 1:I'm sorry, go ahead, continue on, okay, well, we just have one other pillar, and that is the promote well-being of all ages.
Speaker 1:So I already talked about the child sponsorship, but we also are unique in the fact that we also have a elderly sponsorship program where you can sponsor an elderly in one of these 17 countries as well, which was something that sort of evolved our director of international programs he's just brilliant and recognized that the elderly are a really high risk community as well, and so when they get sponsored, they get into a group program as well, where they have other elderly that they um work with on a weekly basis and and kind of do life with. So, um, kind of back to the mothers, though, one thing I would say is, um, you know organizations. I came from a for profit organization before here. This is my first time working in nonprofit, and I've worked with executives who have wanted to figure out how to empower people, how to create a culture of empowerment or of overcoming crazy obstacles, and my very first time, and every time since, when I go to these mothers groups, they're demonstrating, they're living these characteristics that every executive wants in their organization.
Speaker 2:Right To set a little further context. If you're wondering why Andy and I are talking about this in the first place, that's where this gets really interesting, in my view. About, I'm going to say, three or four weeks prior to this conversation, I found out about what unbound did through an announcement and it was the back story that got me. But explain to to our listeners what the operational aspects are at unbound and what in the world does that have to do with customer centricity and CX and call centers and customer outcomes, because there's a really neat tie in.
Speaker 1:When you are in a nonprofit, your differentiator is your customer experience, and so it is more crucial than anywhere else I've ever worked to create the ultimate radical customer experience. On the flip side of that, it's also extremely important that you're cost conscientious, because we send 90% of all funds that come in to our families, and that's really hard to do, operating on a 10% margin essentially, and so we all know customer experience costs money. It's an investment that organizations have to choose to make. Well, it was sort of a no brainer at Unbound to think about building a global workforce, but this is not just like the same global workforce that organizations that use you know, the BPO industry to do that do. This is an opportunity to think about.
Speaker 1:Okay, so where are the families that we serve? Okay, we know where they are, and they happen to be in countries that have a strong BPO presence. So how can we connect, like career opportunities, with the families that we serve? And that's how this came about. It was just. It was a complete no brainer.
Speaker 1:So we have two global contact centers, one in Medellin, colombia, and then the other one that we just recently opened is in Quezon City in the Philippines, and the mission of the call centers is to create career opportunities for those families that we serve. So when you think about creating this radical customer experience, one of the very first questions I was asked when I joined Unbound was was asked when I joined Unbound was we can't take every sponsor to our communities. That's just not possible. But how can we bring our families to our sponsors? We hire from our families and so when they call in and they talk to our sponsor support team for whether it's updating a payment method or, you know, inquiring about their sponsored child, they're talking to someone right there in the communities where we serve where we serve, and what you may not know about the BPO world is that those jobs in a lot of these countries are very, very sought after jobs.
Speaker 2:Working in a contact center here in the US may not seem like the most glamorous thing, but overseas, in a lot of places, it's the lifeline between poverty and lifting yourself out.
Speaker 2:The other thing that's interesting to me about that is and this is a recent understanding for me is that because those jobs are in such high demand in most places, the people doing the hiring are requiring a very high level of skill and or education to hire those people, which effectively boxes out people who are living in poverty, who may not have the education, who may not really have any real chance at getting hired whatsoever. So I think that's the thing that that caught my. My eye here is that unbounds approach. Is is about building out this beautiful feedback loop of empowerment, of education, of real business utility and watching how the, the money flows, but also how these people grow. I'm editorializing a lot here, but, but I've been so impressed by the, the idea that, wait a second, we could, we could build a thing here, and it kind of completes this circle. Yeah, did I overstate that at all?
Speaker 1:No, it's um, and I'm sorry I'm going to get Terry here, but um, uh, um. So you know it was like a concept and it was a project and I was, you know, working through all the logistics of you know, finding the office space and hiring an HR manager and building a recruiting strategy all of like the business things. You know, finding the office space and hiring an HR manager and building a recruiting strategy all of like the business things that you do. And opening up a call center and with the difference of, you know, recruiting directly from our families and really being very intentional of using these jobs just for that purpose of helping somebody overcome those challenges. I had conversations with peers in the BPO spaces along the way asking like, if we build this thing, would you consider people from our call center as experienced for future endeavors? You know things like that and kind of you know you you're going along the project of it and you've sort of you're just marking off all the tactics that have to be done and then the reality hits, when the first team starts and you start hearing their stories and, um, and it was like that was the moment for me that was like, wow, this is actually. This is actually happening and this is actually having an impact. And so, you know, I got to go meet the team and I literally got to hear their stories. I had one team member share with me that he was just so grateful for this opportunity. He'd grown up in our program, had lived on the river, his home had been washed away multiple times and you know when I'm talking home we're talking sometimes it's, you know, like a tarp over a couple pieces of wood or tin, not like the homes that we're used to here in the US, the homes that we're used to here in the U S Um. But this, this opportunity of getting to come and work at Unbound and have a safe place to work and a good income, is helping him now provide a home for his mom. And those are the stories that. That's why we did it. It was giving people opportunities to break these chains.
Speaker 1:We had another individual when we did the ribbon cutting ceremony the project coordinators, the leaders, like the leads of the social workers that work in their communities. To put it into terms that we'd understand here, those social workers came to the ribbon cutting and the pride that they had of the individuals, that it came from their communities and were working in the call center was like I was not fully expecting that. They're like local heroes. One of the communities actually, if you've ever been to the Philippines or several countries do this like when you go visit a BPO they put on a show for you, a welcome. One of the communities had the individuals that had got jobs in the call center come back to their community and they put on the show for them like they were the special guest.
Speaker 1:Wow. So it's so much bigger than even just creating the opportunity for the individuals working in our call center. It's like an inspiration of hope for all of their communities as well. So, yeah, what you're saying is is spot on and and that's it was. Like you know, I guess what I was saying earlier is you're going through the project and you're treating it just like any other project until, like, you get to the end and the people are there and you're seeing the, the reality of it and how, how impactful it really is.
Speaker 2:That was kind of my moment too, I mean on a much on a much lesser scale. But, um, you know to, to, to look behind the curtain on our side, we get pitched all the time, all day long, interesting stories, some not so interesting, frankly. But you know, there's a lot of work and a lot of news in the call center world and the BPO world and there's not a lot of it. That, I think, is really uh, the kinds of things that are get people's attention in our audience.
Speaker 2:Um, but I'm I'm kind of scanning through the material that your team had sent over and I had one of those moments like this is, this is, this is well, this is way different, first of all, just way different and way better. And having spent some time in the NGO world, spent some time in impoverished countries, having seen it firsthand, having worked through some of that on a very small scale firsthand, small scale firsthand, I have seen the impact that even the smallest effort can make and what you're doing isn't really a small effort in these communities. This is a pretty big deal. This is, this is, you know, feels kind of transformative on that scale. On that scale.
Speaker 1:That's that's our hope, is just that we we want it to be transformative. Um, you know, one of the things um, here at Unbound is we want our sponsors to feel the impact that they make. We want it to be transformative for our sponsors, not just, you know, given money just to get a tax write-off, but to really feel the impact of what they do. And so it's the same thing within our internal team. We want our internal team members to have transformative experiences, and that's not just our families in the areas of, or our team members in the areas of poverty, but I mean even our, you know, us based team members. We want them to have transformative experiences. So, so, you know, one of the important things is is that we create this environment, that is, a culture of development and a culture of relationships, right? And so, you know, one of the things that you'll like kind of notice that's different with us and in our call center operations is if you walk into a BPO, I remember walking into a BPO one time and they had time clocks on their stations and you know I was like, why are those? Why are those there? Well, you know, in a lot of call center operations you're paid either by the phone call or, you know. I mean time is money and that is not something.
Speaker 1:We don't look at AHT as a metric for performance purposes. We actually want the opposite. We want our advocates to really connect with those sponsors on the other side of the phone and have transformative interactions. And you know, if the other thing is is we want to create, like opportunities for learning and development, and so we look at coaching. I mean we follow, you know, an operating rhythm, just like every call center does, but it's really focused on that culture of learning and development and I mean I can share. We just recently were able to promote one of our advocates in Columbia who started as an advocate, didn't have any experience and he just got promoted to to a manager role. So it's working.
Speaker 2:Well, you know, for the more operationally minded amongst the listeners here I think you've said something really interesting first of all. But you know, minded amongst the listeners here, I think you've said something really interesting first of all. But you know, if A-H-T isn't one of the key metrics, if it's really just the opposite of that, I'm dying to know what. You know how you are. You know what are your KPIs, what are your? I know there are some, but you're not going by the typical playbook.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's not. It's not the typical. Well, I mean, we still measure CSAT and NPS. We have a post-call survey. We do measure our SLAs and we also measure first call resolution. For instance, our first call resolution sitting at like 95%, which is pretty remarkable, and you know we have a like 90, our CSAT is a little bit different but it's like sitting in a 92% of satisfactory, of satisfactory. So you know it's just. And we do look at retention too. We very closely pay attention to our retention numbers. We have a 7.2% discontinuance rate. So you know, in reverse of that 92% survivability rate, yeah, that's remarkable.
Speaker 2:You know one question here, and I should have asked this, I think, early on. But do these call centers just service unbound donors themselves, or are these call center services helping other organizations as well?
Speaker 1:It's a good question. So right now just unbound. But we have a future vision of expanding this and offering it to other nonprofits and kind of the vision of that is where we would offer it to other nonprofits, keep the margin low but take any earnings from the service and reinvest it back into the development programs.
Speaker 2:Wow. For those of you listening who operate in the call center and BPO space, take a few minutes to digest what you're hearing here, because Unbound has figured out a way to do BPO for good Not that it was ever bad, but for genuine direct impact good, and I think that's a pretty remarkable thing. A lot of lessons in there for a lot of us there. Andy, thanks a million for this. It's an enlightening conversation. Love what Unbound is doing. We'll certainly pay a lot more closer attention to the news coming out of your world and wish you all the best.
Speaker 1:Thank you. Thank you for having us on and definitely check us out at unboundorg.
