Make-A-Wish UK uses Analytics 365 in Microsoft Teams to enhance communications

Discover how Childrens charity, Make-A-Wish UK is using Analytics 365 to help make more informed decisions, enhance communications, and improve internal processes.

Make-A-Wish UK is using Analytics 365 from Tollring to enhance its communications in Microsoft Teams, with the aim of expanding its reach and granting more wishes to children with life limiting or life changing conditions.

In 2023, the charity expects to grant a record 1200 wishes to children up to the age of 18.  With the aid of technology, the charity aims to reach every eligible child which means granting around 8,000 wishes per year and this will be achieved by significantly increasing its community focus and growing the number of volunteers.

The Challenge

Oli Wilson, Technology and Workplace Manager at Make-A-Wish UK, together with his team, manage the charity’s day-to-day IT services as well as more strategic projects, all designed to create a smarter workplace for its people and enabling the organisation to grow and reach as many children as possible.

As Oli explains, “The charity sector is extremely competitive. We are asking people to donate their hard-earned money or time to support our cause. It’s therefore essential that we deliver a good experience to both those working with us and  our valued donors who are helping us achieve our mission.

“When I joined the charity in 2022, we decided to migrate the whole organisation to Microsoft Teams since the legacy telecoms infrastructure was totally unsuitable. We now have around 200 active users on Teams, and whilst some documents are excluded, our systems are accessible to both volunteers and staff.

“The primary objective in moving to Teams was to understand the number of calls we were receiving, the timing of those calls, and most importantly, to ensure we never missed any.  Beyond the calls, it soon became clear that there was a vast amount of information available from the platform that could help improve our collaboration, our internal processes and achieve transparency across our working environment.

“We specifically wanted visibility of collaboration, both from an internal employee and an external customer experience perspective. We wanted to ensure people were not working beyond capacity as well as ensuring that every call from a potential donor or wish family was answered.”

The Solution 

Make-A-Wish UK is using Analytics 365 to deliver visibility of collaboration and interactions across its Microsoft Teams users in the technology and data team, the central experience team and the extended leadership team, to help drive more informed decisions.

The ability to see trends of both internal and external collaboration in one single view enables the charity to deliver a good customer experience whilst also monitoring internal collaboration to support staff wellbeing.

Oli adds, “Whilst we all work contracted hours, these are flexible with people working from both our office in Reading, Berkshire or from home. The ability to report accurately on interactions within Microsoft Teams, regardless of where people are located, was the first stage in understanding and improving our processes. We can now monitor all Teams phone calls coming in, if calls are going unanswered or dropping off, the average call length as well as the balance of internal versus external engagement across the team.”

In addition to reviewing external calls, the team has created a series of dashboards in Analytics 365 to report on time spent in meetings and who interacts the most and with whom, to identify areas to improve collaboration across the whole organisation.

The Results 

Oli reports that, “Microsoft Teams has been a game changer. We now have unified communications, calendar management, and analytics, all instantly available within Microsoft Teams. And Analytics 365 has been the icing on the cake.

“The call information from Analytics 365 is hugely valuable for the team that looks after supporter experience. This group picks up the calls to our main number, talking to wish families, children, major doners or individual givers. They can now understand how many inbound calls are handled, the length of calls and see those that are missed.

“For example, over the past 30 days, we received 137 inbound calls and spent around seven hours on talk time. Most calls are received between 9 and 10am when no calls were missed.  However, we missed about 40 calls between 5 and 7pm.”

“One of our main KPIs is ensuring the maximum of donated funds goes toward granting wishes. We are now able to measure the cost of any unreturned missed calls based on the average value of a phone donation and the number of calls received. This provides a real return on investment into Analytics 365.”

Katy Meade, the charity’s Impact Data and Experience Lead, manages all the touchpoints with supporters across the website, email, and phone.  Katy adds, “The analytics has been a real eye-opener. The number of missed calls was far higher than we expected. We can now address our shift patterns to ensure every call is answered in future.”

Oli continues, “With insights into how long each team member spends on calls, the number of calls they answer, and who those calls are with, we can also spot if one group spends more time interacting than others. This may indicate that they need more training to manage specific queries.”

From a well-being perspective, Oli reviews overall collaboration time during the working day. He explains, “This is particularly important for such a dedicated group who have a tendency to work long hours. We can now encourage regular breaks or use the data to request additional resources.”

Oli concludes, “Having this new level of transparency is extremely powerful. Analytics 365 is already helping us to understand working patterns, ensure the well-being of our people and to drive more informed business decisions. We can also promote company-wide best practice around voice and collaboration within Microsoft Teams.”