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About

For more than 30 years, Wildlife Victoria have offered the community a Wildlife Emergency Response service that relies on an extensive state-wide network of rescue and transport volunteers and veterinarians, who provide pro-bono services for wildlife, and the licenced carers and shelters, who accept animals into their care for rehabilitation and release.

Employees from Wildlife Victoria’s Emergency Response Service are on call to respond to reports of sick, injured and orphaned native wildlife. Their service provides a vital link between the public and volunteers in the field. Answering calls to their hotline, operators call and record the information reported by the caller, provide appropriate advice to the public and put the call out for nearby appropriately trained volunteers. After hours calls are sometimes answered by Night Emergency Response Operator volunteers.

Their service is staffed with highly trained operators who progress through a series of questions with each caller. This ensures that exact details of each animal and that particular situation are recorded along with gathering all those vital statistics used to improve conditions and advocate wildlife over the longer term.

Why Natterbox?

After the decision to move operations from Fitzroy to a heritage listed building in Abbotsford, Wildlife Victoria went to market to find a new telephony system provider. Rather than moving their outdated legacy PBX phone system, which was dependent on an old ISDN technology, they decided to go for a modern solution. Wildlife Victoria required a telephony solution which could integrate into their cloud-based Salesforce platform as well as giving them the flexibility to move their phone operation easily without being dependent on outdated legacy telephony infrastructure. Co-ordinating wildlife rescued by the general public with a state-wide register of volunteer carers is a challenging service to provide and for the most part is operated by contact center staff. Therefore, it was imperative that Wildlife Victoria had a phone and contact center solution which could deliver both a high quality of voice and high availability, as well as manage nearly 78,000 calls per year.

Ease of use and scalability

The Wildlife Victoria Emergency Response Service receives notifications from members of the public via their emergency phone and online reporting systems. Each year they receive over 86,800 requests for help, with approximately 60,000 of these by phone, and help 50,230 animals. When a member of the public contacts Wildlife Victoria regarding a sick, injured or orphaned animal, their Emergency Response Operators provide advice to help the caller manage the situation as appropriately and calmly as possible. Due to the important nature of the work that Wildlife Victoria’s Emergency Response Operators do, it was imperative that the telephone system required very little training in order for them to operate it effectively. Natterbox were able to offer a solution that was simple to operate so that call center operators could easily focus on helping their callers rather than fiddling around with multiple computer screens and phone systems.

We needed a system that we could be scaled easily in the case of an emergency and Natterbox offered a customized cloud-based communications solution to meet the increasing demands on our emergency phone service.

Salesforce integration

As Wildlife Victoria is a not-for-profit charity that receives no government funding it was important that the solution offered by Natterbox was cost effective and could integrate into their current CRM system without needing lots of ‘extras’ to work effectively.

Full integration with our Salesforce instance was a huge contributing factor in selecting Natterbox as our telephony provider.

Natterbox’s telephony solution was able to seamlessly integrate into their highly customized Salesforce platform.

Wildlife Victoria operated in a highly customized instance of Salesforce with a lot of visual force development which had evolved over a number of years. Originally this posed certain challenges for “click to dial” on open text phones. Natterbox was able to solve Wildlife Victoria’s ‘click-to-dial’ challenges by making every phone field in the Salesforce platform a click to dial number, making the platform even easier for volunteers to use.

Using the Natterbox application meant that we could prioritise within the call queue and this also allowed Wildlife Victoria to improve their emergency case management.