Pieta House

A comprehensive project helping one of the largest mental health charity implement a Cloud-First Strategy

Pieta House is one of the largest mental health charities in Ireland and has been operating across the whole country since 2006 when it was founded.

The charity has helped over 58,000 people since then in suicidal distress or self-harm.

Pieta House, now operates fifteen centres and five outreach services across the whole country and has over 270 therapists and administration staff and manage around 18,000 calls a year through their 24 hour freephone hotline.

Pieta House were experiencing ever increasing demand for their essential counselling services.

In recognising the need to expand the service, they discovered that their current systems were inflexible and did not provide the analytical information required to inform them of the true size of the demand, or a clear picture of the cross section of the community using their service.

At the same time Pieta House were looking to amalgamate the systems used across the charity to provide a more seamless and integrated service to their clients.

Intergence worked closely with the Pieta House senior management team to determine which solution would best met the fast-growing demand for the services, whilst delivering a cost effective and flexible approach which would allow them to expand their capability, and enable counsellors to work from any of the charities centres, and from home.

Intergence recommended that where possible they adopted a “Cloud-First strategy” and helped them to select a cloud-based Contact-Centre-As-a-service, based on Five9 technology.

Five9 was selected due to its pedigree, flexibility and integration opportunities with leading CRM vendors.

The Intergence Five9 solution has allowed Pieta House to strategically expand its critical helpline service offering past what could be provided by its traditional PABX call centre.

It has allowed much more flexible working practices for counsellors from other centres or home which has helped the charity to offer far more flexible work to staff which previously wouldn’t be possible.

This in turn allows Pieta House to be much more responsive to the demand for their services and allocate counsellors accordingly.

It has increased the capability for Pieta House to offer increased helpline services while integrating directly with their existing CRM platform, ensuring that up-to-date client information is always directly at the counsellors fingertips when needed.

Due to its cloud-first approach, Five9 has not only provided Pieta House with a state-of-the-art call centre platform, but removes all of the associated on-premise hardware and maintenance costs for a critical piece of their service infrastructure, replacing it with an “always up”, fully managed system.

For the first time Pieta House can see the true demand for its services irrespective of the number of calls taken.

This provides essential information into service demand trends, client vulnerability and security segmentation, and clear understanding of capacity during promotional campaigns.

This directly assists Pieta House with funding requirements to maintain and grow to meet demand of its essential services.