Globalfaces Unleashes Next Level AI to Revolutionize Global Charitable Fundraising

Globalfaces Direct is a Canadian-based company that provides face-to-face fundraising services and solutions to nonprofits across more than 75 markets in North America. The company, founded in 2012, has ambassadors who knock on doors and initiate 1,000 face-to-face interactions daily. Globalfaces works with 65 contact center agents handling upwards of 22,000 monthly verification phone calls.

Verifying donor information during a face-to-face interaction

“For nonprofits, reputation is everything; most people give to nonprofits because they’ve heard good things about them,” says Nabila Tisha, SVP of Sales & Operations at Globalfaces. “When you’re signing up a donor and talking about a long-term relationship of monthly giving, they need to ensure that the value, branding, and messaging is on point.”

Unlike its competitors that conduct verification calls after donations have been processed, Globalfaces gets its secure internal verification team to engage directly with the donor prior to the donation to ensure all donor information is accurate and the donor understands exactly what they’re signing up for before money is exchanged over the phone.

“Therein lies the beauty of our model but also the complication, ”Nabila explains. “That conversation can take so many routes as opposed to simple verification. Now, we’re going into concern handling and building legitimacy by curating a donor experience consistent with how the nonprofit organization would cultivate its donor base. And then, there are strict regulatory compliance pieces associated with processing payment details.”

Needing to eliminate blind spots by auditing more calls

When Nabila joined Globalfaces in 2020, the company was auditing just over 4% of its calls, and all of those calls were from confirmed donors. At the time, roughly 45% of all verification calls would convert.

“We weren’t listening to any single coachable opportunities,” Nabila says. “The fact that we had a 45% conversion rate indicated that there was a big problem. But we didn’t have any insight into how we could fix it, in order to increase our conversion rate for charities.”

At the time, Nabila oversaw a team of six Quality Assurance (QA) Analysts that relied on an outdated manual auditing process. Shortly after she came on board, they moved that process to Google Forms and were able to audit 6% of calls as a result. While this was an improvement, they still weren’t able to identify any blind spots. To solve that problem, in-house engineers built a randomizer tool to ensure QA was listening to all different types of calls. By 2022, the Globalfaces team was able to listen to 10% of all calls, and their conversion rate increased to 65%.

There was lots of room to improve.

“It’s impossible to know what’s going on when you don’t have visibility into 90% of the calls coming in — there’s no visibility into emerging trends or understanding what is problematic,” Nabila continues, adding that it takes roughly fifteen-and-a-half minutes to audit a single five-and-a-half minute call manually. With 15,000 calls to review each month, “it would take a lot of time to get full visibility.”

If a team of six was able to analyze 10% of the calls, Nabila would need a team of sixty for complete coverage. With the company growing 20% each year, hiring more people was simply not a scalable option.

Optimizing contact center QA with Level AI

Seeking a better way forward, Nabila and her team began looking for a new solution that would supercharge their contact center quality assurance operation, in order to increase conversion rates and still maintain a quality donor connection.

Therefore the right platform would enable Globalfaces to improve the donor experience while helping the team identify coachable moments in real-time so they could intervene when it made sense. At the same time, the solution would be scalable and also help them ensure regulatory compliance (e.g., with PCI DSS, PIPEDA).

As Nabila and her team began narrowing down their choices, they settled on three potential options: Level AI, Qualtrics, and Tethr. After doing their due diligence, they ultimately decided that Level AI was the best fit for their needs for two key reasons.

While testing the product, the team audited 12,000 calls and landed at 98% accuracy — a number they thought was too good to be true until they were able to repeat the results several times. Additionally, Globalfaces believed they had found a true partner in Level AI, and those hunches turned out to be correct.

“We truly felt a sense of partnership,” Nabila says, “and that’s exactly what we’ve experienced.”

Setting the new standard for nonprofit operations

With Level AI powering its face-to-face fundraising contact center operations — which account for over 90% of its revenue — Globalfaces now enjoys a 75% conversion rate on verification calls. At the same time, what was once a team of six QA auditors is now a team of three.

“Our quality assurance has been revolutionized by Level AI,” Nabila says. “We didn’t let a single person go, we just repurposed them in different parts of the organization.”

Analyzing more calls

Instead of analyzing only a fraction of the verification calls, Globalfaces can now evaluate 100% of these interactions and run their QA scorecards through Level AI. As a result, they’re able to identify early indicators, detect trends, and determine when it might make sense to assist an agent — all without overlooking any important interactions.

Identifying coachable moments in real-time

With Level AI, Nabila can identify coachable moments in real time. For example, the charities Globalfaces works with are most interested in monthly donations instead of one-time gifts, and the system can automatically flag instances where agents mention any dialogue that relates to one-time giving. Whenever a conversation is flagged, the QA auditors can intervene.

“Instead of waiting a whole week to listen to calls, we’re listening to them the next business day,” she says

Improving compliance

Thanks to Level AI, the Globalfaces team can rest comfortably knowing that they’re complying with regulatory requirements, like the PCI DSS, automatically. “Even on the off chance that our telephony systems accidentally captured someone’s credit card information, Level AI would automatically detect and erase it,” Nabila says.

Future-proofing contact center operations

In Level AI, Globalfaces has found a true partner — one they are confident can continue supporting them at scale. “There hasn’t been a single meeting where we’ve requested something and those suggestions weren’t taken into account,” Nabila says. “So many changes that we’ve requested have been implemented.”

Looking ahead, Nabila plans to deploy Level AI for other use cases. For example, agents currently spend roughly 45 seconds at the end of each call collecting feedback. Since they handle 22,000 monthly calls, automating this task with Level AI will enable the company to reclaim 275 hours each month.