Community Legal Services accelerates delivery of no-cost legal services to people in need by using the Genesys Cloud™ platform to operate its Helpline legal call center. The platform’s detailed activity tracking has helped the organization cut its average speed of answer by 43% and has nearly tripled the number of calls answered within its target hold time.
15 minutes
to train new users
43% reduction
in average speed of answer
11.8% decrease
in total average target hold time
“Hello! I was served with an eviction that I don’t not understand.”
“Hello! My mobile home park has increased rent again and my spouse and I can’t afford it. We already can’t afford to pay our other bills because the rent is so high, and now debt collectors are calling. What am I supposed to do?”
Emergency situations like these exemplify many of the calls staff receive at Community Legal Services of Mid-Florida, Inc. (CLS), whose goal is to ensure the legal pulse of Central Florida continues to beat by aiding the thousands of Central Floridians in need of help with their emergency legal issues.
CLS is a full-service civil legal aid organization that provides legal access — including no-cost advice, referrals, extended services, and representation — to hundreds of clients per month through its Helpline and law units.
Every second saved in a call matters, as CLS Helpline is staffed by a small but mighty team of attorneys, intake specialists, law students, and pro bono attorneys. These experts answer requests for legal assistance to help stabilize clients with multiple legal issues — from parenting and healthcare to housing and small claims issues.
Managing interactions in this frontline environment is best described as triage. So, it’s no coincidence that Monique Keels, Manager of the Brief Services and Legal Advice Helpline at CLS, describes the operation as a “legal emergency room.”
“What makes us unique is that we deliver legal advice immediately; an attorney may pick up a live call, or an intake specialist may qualify you and immediately patch you over to the attorney to provide the legal advice you need,” said Keels.
To better connect clients with the right resources and revolutionize how the organization delivers those legal services to the community, CLS implemented the Genesys Cloud platform.
Through the skill of the CLS team and the intuitiveness of the platform, CLS can help more residents in less time — reducing the average speed of answer by 43.2% between 2021 and 2024, while increasing the number of calls answered by 69% and keeping the average time it takes to handle calls at a constant rate of between 33 to 39 minutes. The organization is also now able to quickly deliver critical trusted legal information to residents via SMS, sending over 8,000 messages annually.
With Genesys Cloud, CLS gets the enterprise-grade capabilities it needs to maintain —and improve — service quality while addressing the growing legal need in the area it serves. “We want people to be able to call early and often and have a reliable way to contact us, so Genesys is part of our holistic model,” added Keels.
“We’ve been able to increase our capacity because we’re able to leverage Genesys.”
Monique Keels
Manager of the Brief Services and Legal Advice Helpline, Community Legal Services
CLS Helpline now has an average of 25 individuals — ranging from full-time staff to short term volunteers, including legal interns and pro bono attorneys — handling interactions and cases at any given time throughout the year.
In some cases, attorneys can close an interaction by providing advice or writing a simple demand letter to help a client. In other more complex legal cases, where there may be more than one legal issue, intake specialists or attorneys will help clients prioritize their legal needs and refer them for extended services to the organization’s additional stellar legal units. For example, a client may call in regarding a divorce proceeding but may also be facing an eviction, which would be a more time-sensitive issue even if it’s not the top issue on the client’s mind. Staff and volunteers would triage the eviction issue first to help the client avoid displacement, and then provide legal guidance on their divorce, and refer them to a legal forms clinic.
Genesys Cloud is helping to reduce the handle time of these types of interactions. Intake specialists and attorneys can view which legal area each caller is experiencing before the first hello in live call queues. This preview in real time enables generalist attorneys to act quickly to gather relevant information before answering, which reduces call friction — improving the experience for staff, volunteers and clients alike.
“Genesys Cloud gives specialists and attorneys peace of mind because they know what resources to call up before they even get on the line with a client,” said Keels. “This has been a game changer because as generalists, we literally advise on many areas that come through the lines.”
In addition, CLS can now focus on improvements that make a difference to callers, such as getting more attorneys back in queue to take calls.
“We want people to be able to call early and often and have a reliable way to contact us, so Genesys is part of our holistic model.”
Monique Keels
Manager of the Brief Services and Legal Advice Helpline, Community Legal Services
Genesys not only streamlines interactions but it’s also so easy to use that in 2019 CLS began conducting mobile helpline events in the community where they train law students and pro bono lawyers in 15 minutes or less to help handle overflow calls from residents. And over the last three years, CLS has created community partnerships through law schools and private firms to further expand its capacity to serve more clients using Genesys Cloud.
“Genesys is so plug-and-play and ready-to-go that we can take it to law firms and law schools and get volunteers who want to come back to us,” said Keels. “We’ve gone turbo speed with Genesys.”
Another way Genesys has provided simplicity is with access to insight that enables CLS to better serve clients. Genesys Cloud analytics and reporting provide Keels and her team leaders the ability consistently to track talk time with each client, which allows the CLS team ensure services are always improving. For example, they can determine how much time it may take an intake specialist or attorney to handle an eviction call versus a Social Security call.
This equips the Helpline with the data needed to provide more informed training regarding the multiple areas of law, because minutes matter with hundreds of calls waiting. The goal at CLS is to have clients wait 10 minutes or less on average while the team gathers resources and other tools to navigate them through their legal issue.
Access to customer data through Genesys Cloud also has helped CLS increase employee morale. For instance, Genesys AppFoundry® Marketplace partner CX Index, a survey platform, has provided CLS with feedback from more than 5,100 clients over the past five years. This priceless data has shown that CLS Helpline has an average Net Promote Score of over 80 — meaning clients would refer their family and friends to Community Legal Services for legal help at an exceptionally high rate. The surveys also serve as a source of positive reinforcement for Helpline attorneys, who now can review feedback and hear firsthand how much they’ve aided a grateful client.
“I tell my team, especially when someone experiences difficult client interactions, to log in and hear what people are saying about the services they provide, because they’re doing an excellent job,” said Keels. “We don’t always have the best news to deliver, but there is still a level of appreciation from the clients.”
“We’ve gone turbo speed with Genesys.”
Monique Keels
Manager of the Brief Services and Legal Advice Helpline, Community Legal Services
The steady stream of client feedback not only reinforces the team’s impact but also inspires ongoing innovation to find ways to serve more clients faster and with greater empathy.
Keels is at the heart of this. She loves to test the limits of technology and to continually innovate to better serve CLS clients. This powerful combination led her to implement the SMS messaging capabilities in Genesys Cloud for new client intake and ongoing services, in both English and Spanish. These text messages help facilitate the delivery of legal information to clients anywhere.
CLS also strategically applies this text-based outreach during severe weather and other office closures, distributing messages about disaster relief services, FEMA application support and community resource locations, even when the main contact center is offline.
But Keels isn’t stopping there. CLS is currently working on a more sophisticated and automated workflow for text messaging to guide more customers to even faster outcomes. “Because Genesys is user-friendly, we can quickly build on it to reach more people,” said Keels. “And our funders are impressed because it shows that we’re being proactive.”
With interaction volume at CLS doubling in just five years, that proactivity is essential. Few charitable organizations can afford to double staff in response to such an increase in demand. Along with the benefits CLS has seen through innovation, operating its contact center on Genesys Cloud through the Genesys Charitable Discount Program gives the organization access to enterprise-class tools without sacrificing quality.
To learn more about the solutions featured in this case study, visit www.genesys.com.
