500+
Qualified Meetings
700+
Hours Saved
“Through Exceed, we are able to keep up with the volume and still meet our goals, despite having a reduced staff due to Covid-19.”
Amelia Baker, CMO YMCA South Hampton Roads
Background
The YMCA, more commonly referred to as The “Y” is a non-profit organization focused on providing youth and their families with facilities and services such as gyms and recreational centers, financial assistance programs, and child care sites. Within the bounds of South Hampton Roads, The YMCA has grown to 29 locations throughout Southeastern Virginia and Northeast North Carolina, focused on helping to nurture every child, teen and family in need.
The Challenge
The YMCA of South Hampton Roads is known for their diversity of programs and services. With an average of 120,000+ individuals served per month, and a 40% reduction in staff due to the pandemic, they began to seek a tool that would not only allow them to reach out and engage with each of these individuals, but also convey multiple brand messages, and tones of voice, in order to appeal to a wide range of needs and backgrounds.
As CMO Amelia Baker puts it, “One of the things we are known for at the ‘Y’ is our diverse programs. We are literally for all, and we will create programs for all, so it becomes very difficult to segment out and speak to the people with the most relevant programs and simultaneously provide a high level of service.”
At first Amelia and her team started using Conversica, but soon found this tool to be restricting, and uncustomizable.
At this point Amelia and her team had experienced the value that an AI Assistant could offer, and were now looking for a solution that provided a range of engagement tools, and more flexibility and customizability needed to address their goal of conveying multiple brand voices.
The Solution
By making use of Exceed’s Automated AI Assistant and two-way conversational SMS (TextAI) and Email capabilities, the YMCA of South Hampton Roads was able to maintain the necessary level of engagement needed to effectively interact with their audience, through multiple forms of messaging.
”Through Exceed, we were able to keep up with the volume and still meet our goals, despite having a reduced staff due to Covid-19. The primary difference between conversica and Exceed is the customization available.”
Within the first six months, Exceed’s Automated AI Assistant had:
- Automated 4,396 email responses
- Added 18,000 new contacts
- Automatically scheduled over 500 meetings
- Saved over 700 hours of time (that’s a full time employee for 4.5 months)
Despite a shrinking workforce, and an increasing workload, The YMCA of South Hampton Roads was able to maintain consistent output, engagement and growth using Exceed’s Automated AI Assistant.
”The cost to add a new sales representative exceeds the cost to run Exceed on an annual basis and the platform can realistically do more than one person can, so we saw it as a more cost effective way to scale our team.”
