Vonage Contact Center Helps Homeless Link Handle 250% Increase in Calls During COVID-19

LONDON--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Vonage (Nasdaq: VG), a global leader in cloud communications helping businesses accelerate their digital transformation, today announced that Homeless Link has been able to handle a 250 percent increase in calls while operating remotely, in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, with the Vonage Contact Center.

Homeless Link is the national membership charity for organisations working directly with people who become homeless in England and Wales. In partnership with St Mungo’s, the charity uses the Vonage Contact Center to provide its 24/7 StreetLink telephone service which is a means of ensuring rough sleepers are connected to their local services and the support available to them.

With 'business as usual' disrupted amid the COVID-19 pandemic, Vonage enabled StreetLink to seamlessly transition all employees from working at its offices to their homes overnight, while handling up to 700 calls a day.

"When the Government announced the lockdown, calls to StreetLink increased substantially. At the same time, our team needed to start working entirely from home,” said Gareth Thomas, Senior Information Manager at Homeless Link. “The Vonage Contact Center has been absolutely invaluable for StreetLink since it enabled us to quickly react to the changing circumstances and move employees to 100 percent remote work without ever having to disconnect phone service.

“Without the Vonage Contact Center, we would not have been able to offer our phone service at all over the last few weeks.”

Vonage's award-winning contact centre solution integrates communications channels without expensive, disruptive hardware changes and plugs straight into an organisation’s CRM platform, meaning StreetLink’s 20 agents benefit from immediate access to a caller’s history of interactions, improving handling time and the caller experience. As a flexible, scalable cloud solution, agents can log into the Vonage Contact Center wherever they are and it can be easily scaled in line with StreetLink’s needs, effectively boosting the organisation’s response to any increase in demand.

"StreetLink’s volunteer-led service is vital in helping to tackle homelessness by enabling members of the public to link people who are sleeping rough with the local services that can support them. At a time when working at the office isn’t an option, it’s crucial for the charity to stay connected with the public without disruption," said Rodolpho Cardenuto, President, Vonage Applications Group. "We're pleased that the Vonage Contact Center has enabled StreetLink to easily operate remotely and manage the upsurge in call volumes, while delivering the best possible support to callers."

To find out more about Vonage, visit www.vonage.com.

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About Vonage

Vonage, (Nasdaq:VG) a global cloud communications leader, helps businesses accelerate their digital transformation. Vonage's Communications Services Platform is fully programmable and allows for the integration of Video, Voice, Chat, Messaging and Verification into existing products, workflows and systems. Vonage's fully programmable unified communications and contact centre applications are built from the Vonage platform and enable companies to transform how they communicate and operate from the office or anywhere, providing enormous flexibility and ensuring business continuity.

Vonage Holdings Corp. is headquartered in New Jersey, with offices throughout the United States, Europe, Israel, Australia and Asia. To follow Vonage on Twitter, please visit www.twitter.com/vonage. To become a fan on Facebook, go to facebook.com/vonage. To subscribe on YouTube, visit youtube.com/vonage.