Item: VanillaSoft
Rating: 9
Author: Jake Tolbert

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use VanillaSoft to drive our fall and spring phonathon campaigns, where students call alumni and friends of the University and solicit their support. Our specific department, the Alumni & Development Center, uses the software, but we've put our infrastructure to work for the rest of University as well, allowing Admissions to call prospective students and student organizations to call their alumni.

Pros and Cons

VanillaSoft provides a solid call center experience both from a management perspective and from the caller's perspective.
VanillaSoft's call routing is easy to understand and configure, but provides a lot of capabilities: based on the results of the call, you can schedule a callback, mark the person as finished, throw them back in the pool to not be called for a specified period or whatever you want to do.
It's pretty straightforward to load scripts into the system for callers to use. Segmenting those scripts and matching them up with the person being called happens almost automatically--you tie both to a single field so callers never read the wrong script. You can also customize what data callers see about the person their calling, so they have the most important data at their fingertips and can dig in to find the details they may occasionally need.

VanillaSoft's reporting tools can do MOST things, but they're clunky and hard to use--there's a ton of clicking and waiting as different configuration pages load. Too, it's impossible to compare fields to each other, so it's difficult to know when a particular field was updated by a caller.
Because it's licensed by seat, we have each call station assigned to a different seat license. Different callers might sit at different seats each night--without manual, external tracking, we have a hard time tracking caller performance over time.

Return on Investment

Using VanillaSoft, we were able to let our outside contractor go and hire an in-house staff person who can spend time and energy on things beside phonathon.
We consistently see strong ROI from phonathon. Fewer people are picking up the phone these days, but VanillaSoft lets us get through those thing quickly.

Alternatives Considered

We assessed using VanillaSoft with inhouse management against Ruffalo Cody and Wilson Bennet's managed services. The overall cost was between half and 2/3 less than those services, even including an in-house staff member, and the ROI would be comprable. With that in mind, using VanillaSoft allowed us to improve our staffing situation while remaining equally effective.

Other Software Used

QlikView, RStudio, Toad for Oracle

Likelihood to Recommend

VanillaSoft isn't terribly expensive, especially when compared with other outside contractors who offer to handle phonathon operations. It offers a lot of features and capabilities at a fair price, making it well worth the price we pay, even for a smaller nonprofit. Too, the contracts are month to month, so we don't have pay for seats during the summer or winter when we're not doing calling--we simply pay for the months that we use. In short, it's a good value and fairly simple to configure.

VanillaSoft: an affordable call center solution

Overall Satisfaction with VanillaSoft