It can be easy to forget sometimes that technology exists to enable and isn’t an end goal in itself.
Sure, the ambition and ingenuity behind technological progress we’re observing almost daily in 2024 is a spectacular testament to human achievement. But innovation needs a purpose, and disruption a cause. It’s the groundbreaking real-world applications that transform the ones and zeroes into miracles.
“At Give Kids the World, we provide cost-free vacations for critically ill children and their families,” explained Ian Cole, Chief Innovation Officer at Give Kids The World Village, to UC Today’s Tom Wright at this year’s Avaya Engage event.
“So when a child with a critical illness makes a wish to travel to Central Florida, we handle everything at the site level. We have volunteers that meet them at the airport, we handle their rental car, all the tickets, all the logistics, provide them meals and lodging, and it’s a fairytale village. It looks like castles and cottages, so it’s a very fun place to be.
Our goal is to give them happiness that inspires hope. It’s a big reset for them, away from the doctors, the hospitals, and all the things they’ve been dealing with.”
Every family enjoys an all-inclusive experience that includes accommodations, meals and snacks, donated theme park tickets, nightly entertainment, daily gifts, and endless fun at the Village, which features an array of accessible rides and attractions.
Now, that is a noble purpose for technology to empower.
Modernising A Fairytale
In addition to the generous volunteers, donors, and wish-granting organisations that help support Give Kids The World Village, corporate partners and technology vendors are critical to providing kids and their families with the wonderful experiences they deserve — including Avaya.
The Village uses Avaya Unified Communications, contact centre applications, and an online portal to enable partners to make requests and manage information. However, the phone system remains the primary tool for external comms. A small but dedicated Village Vacation Planning Services (VVPS) team is responsible for facilitating communications and building personal relationships with partnering wish-granting organisations and other stakeholders worldwide.
How did this partnership come about?
“We were on Nortel for many, many years before I arrived,” said Cole. “I joined the Village in 2019. At that time, we were already underway in our conversion to the Avaya platform. We came on on a CM7 on-site prem system. And we’ve got 166 guest rooms that we have to put phones in all the rooms, as well as our offices and all of our other venues. In those five years, we started on CM7. And then, very recently, with the help of the Avaya team, we upgraded and are now on the latest CM10.”
Give Kids The World Village is also working with Avaya on using SENTRY from partner 911Secure, the world’s first enterprise NG911 secure data repository. This upgrade will enable Give Kids The World Village to provide responders with detailed location information, including which gate and building to enter, down to the specific floor and room.
“We’re working with the 911 Secure team. As you can imagine, 911 calls are a daily occurrence in what we do. So we’re working with the 911 Secure product to make sure that first responders can get to where they need to be on the property as soon as possible.
The process of choosing Avaya and then the exact Avaya solution was “very easy”, Cole affirmed.
“Disney is a fantastic partner of ours. Disney had historically supported all the telecom at the Village. So Disney moved on to the Avaya platform and then helped us move on to the Avaya platform.”
“We’ve been extremely fortunate. We get great love and attention from both the Disney team and the Avaya team. We’re a very small organisation, and we don’t have a dedicated phone system person or even a dedicated anything person. A couple of us are generalists and we’re dealing with all the different technology across the Village. So, it only works because we have amazing partners like Disney and Avaya that can help us get it done.”
The initial incentive to modernise was that the UC and CC tech they had available was “ancient and “not going to work for much longer,” which brought the charity to the Avaya platform a few years ago. However, it was Avaya that recently reached out to Give Kids The World Village to suggest a fresh upgrade.
“The Avaya team reached out and said, ‘Hey, you know, you’re still on this CM7 product. We really need to work with you to get you to move forward,'” Cole clarified. “We thought we were going to move to CM8, and then the team came back and said, ‘Actually, if you’re up for it, we’d love to get you all the way to 10.'”
In my case, I’m thinking, ‘Well, that’s great because that’s another upgrade I don’t have to do in two years or whatnot. I can go right there.'”
Progressing from Avaya’s CM6 to 8 to 10 didn’t dramatically alter Cole and Give Kids The World Village’s feature set, but it futureproofed their infrastructure. The Village is currently migrating from analogue phones to fibre and SIP to improve reliability, prevent downtime, and reduce operational costs.
“We’ve got a very large campus today,” Cole expanded. “We’re in the process of deploying fibre to all the villas today. Right now, all the phones to all the villas are copper in the ground, which is not good when you’re the lightning capital of the US. So, we lose a lot of equipment due to underground copper each year.”
“We’re excited because, with these upgrades, we can move to SIP-based phones and bring all of those pieces online, which is really kind of setting the infrastructure for the next 10 years.”
“We’re putting this investment in time in now, and then we’ve got this amazing baseline capability that we can build on, whether it’s moving to SIP and the fibre to the villa, or it’s the 911 secure product, or I’m in the experience hall looking at all the different options that we don’t use that Avaya has, and getting lots of ideas and thinking, ‘This would be amazing. There’s little pieces that we can pull from.'”
A Vision For The Future
When it comes to the future technology that appeals to Cole and Give Kids The World Village, they’re not sure on specifics but are confident in the purpose — preparing the families for their stay at the Village.
“You can imagine if these families have a critically ill child, they’re dealing with all of the things that they have to deal with; medicines and medication and getting travel clearance, and then, for many of them, it’s the first time that they’ve flown together as a family or travelled together as a family like this,” Cole said.
“Then they’re also learning about Disney, Universal, SeaWorld, and all of our partner parks, and so we’re trying to figure out ‘How do we get information to them in the best way possible, and how do we make sure we answer their questions?'”
“For the system we’ve just built, the Avaya ACES (Avaya Customer Experience Services) team worked with us to build an AI-based chatbot.”
“The idea of that is as a family arrives, they can do a scavenger hunt, which seems like just a really fun, enjoyable, ‘Oh, I’m here, let me spend a little time and learn my way around the property.’ But it also helps orient them even better and get them some information because as they find something in the property, we could say, ‘Oh, and this is where you’re going to have all your meals,’ or, ‘Oh, hey, every Wednesday night, there’s a party here’, or ‘every Thursday morning, there will be horses here that you can see.'”
As we try to better prepare those families, I think there’s going to be a different set of technologies that can help us do that and communicate with them in different ways, potentially in multiple languages, and the Avaya team seems very poised to help us in that area with the product suite.”
While happy with the fundamental functionality that Avaya’s technology provides and with the expertise and compassion of its workers and volunteers, Cole asks his team not to rest on their laurels.
“We don’t have a 20-person, 50-person, or 100-person team that’s going to go off and build something amazing. We’re going to do it a little more grassroots. We’re going to work with partners. We’re going to work with volunteers, and if we can just keep kind of doing a little better every day, it’s amazing where you end up a year later or two years later. You just have to find the right pieces and apply them to the challenges or the opportunities that you have, and you can do amazing things.”
Where Technology And Magic Meet
Does Cole consider his role as Chief Innovation Officer to be a technology role, or does technology power the innovation that’s the centre of his focus?
“My personal recipe for innovation is very technology-based,” Cole answered. “I have a computer science degree. If you left me alone for a weekend, I’d be tinkering with something.”
“But also, there’s a lot of change management, and there are a lot of times you have to realise that technology isn’t the challenge and it’s not the solution. I know I’ve made that mistake in my career before, where it was, ‘Oh, we’re going to solve this with tech.’ Then you put the new tech in, and you realise it was a human-based challenge or an organisational-based challenge.”
“We look at a wide range of things that we can do for these families, and some of them very clearly have technology opportunities. Other areas, we say, ‘You know what, need a very specific human touch, and we’ll bring in one of our team members or a volunteer to help in that,’ and so it just really depends on the situation.”
One area in which technology provides a tangible opportunity is in the chatbot Give Kids The World Village uses.
“Alan (Masarek, Avaya CEO), in his keynote this morning, was talking about—I think he used the term deflection—where it’s like, ‘Oh if I can keep these calls off of our call centre because I need them to take higher value or whatnot.'”
“This scavenger hunt use case is one for us where we just wouldn’t have been able to staff it, spend the money, or recruit volunteers to do that. Even recruiting volunteers would have been a very big effort, but if we can give the families something fun to explore, we’re not sort of pushing them to self-service.”
“We’re just saying, ‘Hey, here’s a cool offering. If you like it, you know, go have fun with it.’ I’m really excited to see the feedback we get from the families, especially with the multi-language component that they’ve built in.”
The scavenger hunt use case Cole namechecked functions as a QR code link to a mobile web page that parents can access, although Cole says they plan on integrating it with the charity’s app at some stage.
“The neat part is that we didn’t go after it with an educational purpose, but it is really educating (families) a little bit about the Village and who we are and what we do, potentially in their native language. I think that there are a lot of potential future opportunities if we can use the language capabilities of these AI models to help us in that way.”
As UC Today‘s interview with Cole draws to a close, he enthuses one last time about the impact that Avaya, considerate partners like them, and the technology they produce can have on supporting positive projects like Give Kids The World Village.
“I’ll give the Avaya team credit,” he said. “They came on site. They actually stepped foot on our property, and they looked and listened. So many companies just want to tell you about their product and expect you to apply their product to your needs. And I don’t have the time or the energy. I can only do so many research projects.”
So, the best partners for us are the ones who take time to listen and figure out what you actually need and then provide pragmatic solutions to meet that need versus just saying, ‘Oh, here’s the latest and greatest.’ It’s listening. Listening and being a great advisor and trusted partner go a long way.”
“I think everybody throws the word partners around, but there’s a difference beyond just a supplier-customer relationship. Where there’s something a little bit more. The Avaya, the ACES team, really came to us and said, ‘Hey, we’d like to do something. Could we do something?’ And then they came on site, and they kicked around a few ideas and a few applications, and that’s where the scavenger hunt came from. And I’m excited to see where we take it from there.”
