Case Study: How World Vision’s phone orders got a tech upgrade
Nathan, 9, takes care of his family's goats, which they depend on as a source of income. (©2019 World Vision/photo by Laura Reinhardt)
World Vision hit a breaking point: if the ecommerce team didn’t make a change, World Vision was going to lose out on donations during a crucial period.
World Vision is a seasoned global charity aiding vulnerable children. The charity has championed the holiday-giving spirit since Harry Truman was president. For non-Americans and those needing to brush up on their history, that's 70 years of fighting poverty. 🎉
World Vision is highly donor-dependent, and each holiday season, they’re faced with the challenge of amassing new donors. Printed catalogs, digital cards via their online store, and phone orders are the main channels they use for donations.
Dave Owen, World Vision’s Digital Product Manager, directs everything under the online store umbrella, including phone orders. The process of accepting phone donations was causing serious headaches, and Dave’s team was ready to walk out. He had no choice but to reinvent World Vision’s donation process to keep the team on board so they could keep accepting donations.
From Magento to Shopify
This was Dave's first experience with online store processes, and he was on a dramatic roller coaster. Previously, the charity's online store was hosted on Magento but was switched to Shopify in the fall of 2019 for its user-friendliness and cost savings. World Vision is a top-rated charity for its transparency and finances, which made the switch an easy decision.
“One of our core values as a charity is stewardship. When someone makes a donation, we must use the money as best we can. Since we weren’t using the level of functionality Magento provided, we switched to Shopify and downloaded Cleverific Order Editor.”
"One of our core values as a charity is stewardship. When someone makes a donation, we must use the money as best we can. Since we weren't using the level of functionality Magento provided, we switched to Shopify and downloaded Edit Order," said Dave.
World Vision's newly formed in-house development team created the new Shopify store in 2019, and delivery was expected before starting their busiest time; the holiday season. "The website was delivered really close to the campaign launch, so we didn't have the lead time to train our team that handles phone orders," Dave remarked.
Thanks for calling World Vision, how may I direct your call?
Phone orders are a major channel for World Vision. This is how they operate:
World Vision creates a Gift Catalogue filled with gifts specifically requested by communities to create better futures for their children. These gifts include antibacterial soap, books for after-school reading clubs, and goats for children in vulnerable communities. They send these Gift Catalogues to potential donors, who purchase gifts instead of physical presents for their loved ones.
Donors can donate a gift from the catalog by going to World Vision's online store or calling World Vision to donate over the phone.
World Vision hires an agency to support the influx of phone calls they get throughout the holiday season. When a phone call comes in, the phone operator creates a draft order in the Shopify admin.
There is a lot of manual data entry for different gift variants as a part of every phone order, and sometimes mistakes are made. Once the information is collected, the draft order becomes an order, and the donor receives a confirmation email.
Your donation is pooled and will be used right away when a community has an urgent need or emergency hits.
Phone orders and the Shopify admin don't mix well
If your business takes phone orders, you probably understand World Vision's struggles. When taking orders last year, World Vision's telemarketing agency, Supporter Care, was overwhelmed with the amount of manual work they had to do when creating an order in the Shopify admin. To make things worse, if there were any spelling errors with their data entry, they couldn't process the donation. This meant:
The donor couldn't give their intended contribution.
The agency couldn't provide the level of quality service they aim for
World Vision lost the potential to raise funds for their charity work.
Due to the problems caused by the manual workload, Supporter Care threatened to abandon their post and not renew their contract with World Vision for the next holiday season if Dave didn't find a solution.
"They couldn't offer the same quality assurance they wanted to offer as an agency since everything was so manual in the 2019 holiday season," explained Dave. "In terms of scoping out solutions to get the agency back on board this year, I looked at alternatives, and Order Editor was the only app that was going to give us the customization we needed," he said. The team used Order Editor immediately when they switched to Shopify.
“Cleverific Order Editor was the only app offering the functionality we needed in both the frontend and the backend for order management. The smart decision was to see if they could make a few changes for us so we could get our agency back on track for the upcoming holiday season.”
"Order Editor was the only app offering the functionality we needed in both the frontend and the backend for order management. The smart decision was to see if they could make a few changes for us so we could get our agency back on track for the upcoming holiday season," said Dave.
Since most orders for World Vision happen during November and December, they needed to find a reliable fix to remove the risk of losing a significant amount of donations because of Supporter Care dropping out.
Removing manual data entry
Dave got in touch with Order Editor's co-founder, Andrew Le. "Andrew was able to quickly understand what we were trying to do and created a great workable solution for us," he said.
Dave's team at World Vision needed a streamlined process to remove manual data entry with no room for errors. Order Editor's product team is a small group of developers, but Andrew took on the World Vision project personally.
To reduce the pains of manual data entry, he added custom field and line item property customizations to their order creation functionality. He also added a magic icon for dropdown menus in the custom fields, so there's no worry about spelling errors. Properties in the dropdown menus are locked to ensure their system will always get the correct labels and map to the right values.
For those without a geek gene, here's an example of the customizations:
Curious about World Vision's new and improved flow for phone donations?
It’s that time of the year! Your World Vision catalogue arrives in the mail
After some browsing, you call World Vision to make a donation to aid vulnerable children
This is World Vision’s busiest time of year; your call is answered by World Vision’s internal team or their agency hired to help with the extra call volume
When your donation is placed over the phone, a draft order is created in the Shopify admin
It takes less than 5 minutes to create your order thanks to Order Editor’s custom line item properties and customizable fields. No more manual data entry!
Your donation is made (error-free!). The draft order becomes an order, you receive a tax receipt, and a child in need receives a gift.
With these new features, World Vision is more efficient in its order-taking and fulfillment processes.
Now:
A phone call from a donor takes less time, and the data returned to World Vision is accurate.
The charity can now work with their agency of choice because of their improved workflows.
The agency has more customized line item properties and selects the order details they need from the dropdown menu.
“This is a game-changer,” said Dave. This [change] meant that the agency went from not wanting to take on our campaign to being happy and wanting to work with us again.”
"This is a game-changer," said Dave. This [change] meant that the agency went from not wanting to take on our campaign to being happy and wanting to work with us again."
Now that the holiday season is upon us, it's time for World Vision to begin its 2020 holiday donation campaign. First things first, some customer service training. The agency has to get accustomed to its new tools from Order Editor.
“Training the agency with the new workflow was fantastic; an absolute dream. I made a video showing how easy it was to create an order, reduce our bad data, and how much more efficient it will be," said Dave.
World Vision has order processing in the bag
Since last year caused big problems for World Vision's online store, they almost considered dropping Shopify and moving to a new platform.
"When the campaign ended in January, it was clear we needed to change a lot of the online store. There was talk about moving to another platform, but the decision was made in July that we’d stay on Shopify," said Dave.
This year, World Vision needed Shopify even more because of pandemic trends moving transactions from face-to-face to online and over the phone. "Traditionally, we relied on a lot of face-to-face donations, which in the context of this pandemic is either not possible or slower," he said.
“Our in-house team feels valued because we heard their problems and were able to answer them with Order Editor’s solution.”
It was a lot of work for Dave to get his internal teams onboard with Shopify after the holiday breakdown because both their internal teams and their agencies use the Shopify admin to place orders. With their new workflows and fewer data processing mistakes, World Vision's back-office staff spend much less time querying, handling, and repairing bad data. World Vision's agency and internal teams felt happy and heard.
"Our in-house team feels valued because we heard their problems and were able to answer them with Order Editor’s solution," said Dave.
Team satisfaction isn't the only reason Dave should make Santa's Nice List this year. Last year's problem of donors not receiving their orders in time because of mistakes made with Shopify draft orders was significantly reduced!
“It gives us more confidence in Order Editor because we know that orders will be accurate, which means there will be fewer problems down the line... Moving forward, we could start fulfilling more items now that we know we can rely on Order Editor to see where our problems lay and how they could fix them.”
Now that World Vision is over its hurdle from 2019, there are some new possibilities to consider with Edit Order.
“It gives us more confidence in Order Editor because we know that orders will be accurate, which means there will be fewer problems down the line... Moving forward, we could start fulfilling more items now that we know we can rely on Order Editor to see where our problems lay and how they could fix them.”
Ready to find your own solution?
The features Order Editor added to World Vision's Shopify store are only one option out of many features that the app can provide. If you’re interested, make sure to reach out to us and give Order Editor a try today.
