Cancer Council Tasmania optimises customer service and engagement with Pendula

69%

increase

in successful client calls



Increased referrals

by medical practitioners

11

hours

of administration time saved per month



Improved team morale

through a better connection to the client base

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Operated by Cancer Council Tasmania, Quitline is a free, confidential telephone service that offers counselling and advice to assist people in the process of quitting smoking.

Cancer Council Tasmania was an early adopter of Pendula and has been working with our teams since 2018 to:

Ensure communication
with Quitline clients is seamless and effective.
Empower the team of Quitline counsellors
to build stronger, more engaged relationships with their customers.
Increase the number
of successful client interactions.
Develop trusted relationships
with medical providers and referrers.

The challenge

Cancer Council’s team of expert counsellors make regular and meaningful communication with a large database of clients looking to quit smoking, many of whom find themselves in challenging or sensitive situations.

Before Pendula, the team of counsellors were communicating via frustrating manual methods, like scheduled phone calls and SMS messages sent through a shared office mobile phone, to arrange and confirm appointments and medical referrals. This was both a time-consuming and inefficient process, which left little visibility around what communication had taken place and by whom.

Cancer Council Tasmania needed to ensure that its valuable team of counsellors was minimising time spent on administrative tasks, and instead dedicating more time to doing what they do best – helping people.

How Pendula helped

“The biggest success out of Pendula is the fact that we’re more connected to our client base, everything is at our fingertips.”

Sue Hearn, Quitline Team Leader

Cancer Council leveraged Pendula to optimise client communications for its team of five counsellors, who spend their days offering support to those who need it – typically making calls to around 500 people per week. By using Pendula, the counsellors were able to put customers at ease by nurturing effective one-on-one relationships, while avoiding the time-consuming manual data entry associated with traditional communication solutions.

The Cancer Council team drew on Pendula expertise and support to embed a number of automated processes into the Quitline communication systems. These helped to schedule and confirm appointments with clients and to build successful relationships with healthcare suppliers and referrers by providing timely, accurate and trusted communication. Lead nurture triggers were also set up, enabling targeted check-ins with potential clients who had indicated an interest in Quitline, but hadn’t yet committed to a callback.

“We wanted to make the communication between us and our client base as seamless and automatic as possible, removing pain and complexity. For our teams of counsellors, who are not IT specialists, the clear graphics – like seeing a mobile phone on the page - made all the difference. There are so many complexities in the counselling space, it’s not just talking and taking notes, so it is important that our technology solutions do not add to the burden. The counselling team is confident to use Pendula to enable them to perform their job more effectively.”

Sue Hearn, Quitline Team Leader

Pendula functionality employed by Cancer Council Tasmania included:

‍Automated texts reminding clients of appointment times
‍and encouraging attendance or rescheduling, eliminating the need for manual appointment follow-up, and improving successful call rates. ‍
Automated acknowledgement of referrals
building strong referrer relationships and allowing referrals to be made in real-time. ‍
Consistent and personalised communication templates
empowering the team of counsellors to spend their time helping customers, rather than on administration.‍
Building a shared conversation history
making it simple to keep track of and nurture client relationships where several counsellors might deal with one individual, and providing a crucial audit trail as required.‍
Setting up real-time triggers
to better assess and respond to the quality of phone calls. For example, a short phone call might trigger a follow up text message to keep the customer engaged.

For the Cancer Council team, the benefits of Pendula extend beyond the technical:

“This was the simplest and most straightforward IT acquisition I have made. The biggest strength of Pendula is the fact that support is available to help whenever we need it. When you’re faced with a new technology, having such a fantastic source of support makes all the difference. It really gave myself and the team the confidence to embed Pendula into our daily work.”

Sue Hearn, Quitline Team Leader

Overall results

The Pendula platform, including its instant one-on-one conversations and automated processes has contributed towards both improved customer engagement and elevated employee satisfaction at Cancer Council Tasmania, with results including:

‍69% increase in successful client calls
where clients are engaged in discussing with a counsellor.
‍A year-on-year increase in referrals by medical practitioners
resulting in a broader client base and more people with access to counselling.‍
An average of 11 hours of administration time saved per month, per counsellor
allowing for better resource planning of Cancer Council staff.‍
Improvements to team morale
through a greater connection to the client base and easy access to support from the Pendula team.

Cancer Council Tasmania continues to expand Pendula functionality throughout their systems and processes, maturing their customer engagement with the support of the Pendula team.

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