Reliable Communication for Those Who Need It Most

Introduction

Seattle's Union Gospel Mission is a nonprofit organization that helps address the root causes and break the cycle of homelessness by meeting urgent physical needs and offering long-term recovery programs. From its roots as a soup kitchen during the Great Depression, the Mission has grown to operate across eight locations, employing approximately 160 people, and provides shelter, food, addiction recovery, counselling, and long-term solutions to those in need. Effective, uninterrupted communication isn't just an operational requirement for the Mission; in many cases, it can mean the difference between someone in crisis getting help or not. 

Scenario

Seattle's Union Gospel Mission faced a communication crisis that put its most vital work at risk. Their previous provider, Nextiva, caused repeated service outages that led to dropped calls and left the organization unable to send or receive text messages, cutting off lifelines for community members in distress and disrupting the donation calls the Mission depends on to fund its services.

When issues arose, support requests went unanswered for days, leaving staff without recourse and the organization without reliable communication. Internally, even routine tasks like updating a welcome menu or setting an out-of-office greeting were needlessly complex, creating frustration and dependence on vendor support for basic changes. Meanwhile, costs remained high with no improvement in reliability or service to justify the expense.

The stakes were clear: every missed call was a missed opportunity to serve someone in need or secure a donation. The Mission's communication infrastructure wasn't just underperforming; it was actively getting in the way of its mission.

Outcome

When Lee Derks joined as Head of IT, now Chief Technology Officer, he knew a change was necessary. After evaluating available options, the Mission selected net2phone and implemented the Unite UCaaS platform with Call Center Essentials and AI Coach at roughly two-thirds the cost of their previous solution.

The impact was immediate. Outages disappeared, and with them the dropped calls and missed connections that had put vulnerable community members at risk. The Mission's team gained an intuitive platform that empowered staff to manage call routing, ring groups, and welcome menus independently, without requiring a support ticket. Many staff members installed the mobile application to give themselves the flexibility they need to work beyond their desks and stay connected to the important work they do for their community.

For the first time, administrators gained real visibility into the Referral and Intake team’s performance through enhanced analytics and reporting, enabling smarter, data-driven decisions during high-volume periods. AI Coach automated call categorization and sentiment analysis, freeing staff from manual logging and giving supervisors the insight needed to coach their teams and resolve disputes.

And when the Mission does need support, net2phone's in-house team is available 24/7. The same responsiveness that won them over during the sales process has continued long after implementation.

For Seattle's Union Gospel Mission, net2phone didn't just solve a technology problem; it restored the reliability and peace of mind needed to ensure that anyone reaching out for help can always get through.

With net2phone's analytics and AI Coach, we can easily see how many phone calls per day or week are actually donor specific, how many calls each call center rep is taking, what's their average time to answer, how many calls are we missing. We have all this data-driven information to make these decisions."
Lee Derks, Chief Technology Officer 

Key Statistics