If you want to know where the really interesting trends are in the call center industry, you need look no further than the behemoth sector of financial services. No matter what the state of the economy, the banks, brokerages, insurance companies and other money-related businesses of America handle enormous call volumes at all hours of the day.
They come into contact with a broader cross-section of the general public than almost any other industry.
For decades they've been ahead of the curve in implementing advanced call center technology like speech recognition and workforce management to deal with trend-setting problems like 24x7 service, high churn rates, and the need for self-service alternatives. They came early to the Internet and Web for customer contact. And as a group, they mastered the art of "CRM" - in the form of knowing exactly how to value a customer and treat him or her accordingly - long before the rest of the call center industry was using CRM as a term.
Nowadays the focus is as much on innovative management techniques as it is on the technology. Call centers in financial services have evolved from call crunching powerhouses into more interactive tools that companies can use to solve problems, build brand value, and establish more nuanced relationships with customers.
Here are few examples of how they're making it work.
Personal Finance
Customers calling about very personal and very important financial matters, expect to speak with a representative who's professional and knowledgeable. CUNA Mutual Group, a Madison, WI-headquartered financial services provider, aims to provide both.
CUNA Mutual serves credit unions and their members worldwide through 30 call centers located in the US and Canada. The company's largest center, located in Waverly, IA, assists credit union members with life insurance policies, annuities and brokerage accounts. Approximately 80 representatives handle calls from members. Last year alone, the center received about 820,000 phone calls.
Many of the credit union's members call the Waverly center with questions about their insurance coverage, billing issues, and contract changes. Because these are crucial matters for their customers, CUNA Mutual strives to ensure that customers reach the agents that are most knowledgeable to assist them.
An IVR system from Edify (Santa Clara, CA) helps callers narrow down their issues so calls route to the most appropriate agents. The IVR system works in conjunction with Avaya's (Basking Ridge, NJ) G3R version 8 phone switch and Avaya's skills-based routing software.
Within the skills-based routing, CUNA Mutual is able to change agents' skill priorities, which gives them more control over the types of phone calls a particular agent handles. Some examples of agents' skills are direct response, knowledge of particular product line, and the ability to handle escalated calls. Many of CUNA Mutual's managers and agents have their Series 24, 7, 6 and 63 licenses for Registered Securities and Variable Products. Some agents also have their Individual Life and Health licenses.
To keep track of customer histories and transactions, CUNA Mutual has developed an on-line diary system that centralizes all of this information. Reps use the system to keep track of customers' issues and all the associated documentation.
Another important aspect for CUNA Mutual is their quality assurance program. It's essential for CUNA Mutual to capture all of their phone calls to avoid any potential liability that can come up with customer disputes. To do this, the company uses Nice Systems' (Rutherford NJ) NiceLog software to record 100% of the center's calls.
Going beyond recording for legal reasons, CUNA Mutual uses Nice's NiceUniverse software to monitor performance by selectively recording agents' phone calls along with their accompanying screen activities. The software randomly selects four calls per day to record. Each team leader within the center then chooses five of these calls to evaluate per month. The team leaders use evaluation forms to score and coach agents.
"We try to spend more time focusing on what agents did right rather than what they did wrong," says Diana Beschorner, manager of the Waverly support center. "Agents are constantly bombarded by negatives so we try to avoid that as much as possible."
One of the features that Beschorner finds most valuable is the ability to view evaluation stats across the entire center. "Nice is a really good tool for identifying issues within the call center globally," she says. "For example, I can pick a particular item that was used in the evaluation and see how agents' scores averaged throughout the center. So, if the average score on an item was 85%, I know that's something we need to address in training."
CUNA Mutual also recently created a new position for a quality assurance reviewer. This individual ensures that all of the center's team leaders and managers are using consistent measurements when reviewing agents' calls.
When considering reps to take on additional responsibilities or move up to different positions within the center, CUNA Mutual not only considers their quality assurance scores, attendance records, and availability history but also other factors such as teamwork and contribution to the positive atmosphere in the company.
"We put a high priority in not just answering customers' questions but in building relationships with customers," says Beschorner. "We ask our reps to think beyond the questions they're asked and to identify other needs that we can meet for the customer."
And when the company hires new reps, Beschorner stresses that candidates don't necessarily need to have a background in financial services but rather other essential traits that aren't always so easy to teach. "We look for people who are professional, friendly, have good communication and grammar skills, can think on their feet, and who have basic computer skills," she says.
New-hires start out learning one line of the company's business and as they gain experience move onto other parts of the business. "Some of our agents have one or two skills but our senior representatives can have between eight and ten different skills," says Beschorner.
CUNA Mutual has an extensive training program for new-hires, which gets them up to speed and handling customer contacts on their own within eight weeks. The eight weeks of training includes classroom training and hands-on work in the call center answering actual calls from members. Veteran reps also receive ongoing training so they are constantly expanding their knowledge.
"It's difficult to take reps off the phone because we're so busy but we try to have a general training session at least once a week," says Beschorner. "We also staff the center with enough reps so we can afford to take groups of between six and ten reps into training on any new system or process updates and changes." The amount of training a veteran rep receives depends on how knowledgeable they are and what skills they have. The more lines of business they know, the more hours of training they'll need.
To help make these schedule adjustments as optimally as possible, CUNA Mutual recently purchased IEX's (Richardson, TX) TotalView workforce management software.
Before the purchase, Beschorner handled all of the scheduling manually, which was becoming more and more difficult. "Over the past couple of years, the scheduling process has become more complicated due to our recent growth, expansion of agents' skills and our extended operating hours," she says. "There are so many more options we need to consider to make sure we schedule staff in the most optimal way. We're still in the process of fully implementing the software and I still do some manual inputting but we hope to have TotalView handling all the scheduling by March."
CUNA Mutual has still not made the full leap into serving customers on-line and Beschorner admits this is something CUNA Mutual is still working on. "More and more of our customers want to have access to us through our Web site and there are few things they can do on-line but it's an area we're proceeding into cautiously because of the level of confidentiality we need to uphold," she says. "We have to make sure that when we do it, we do it right."
The company has leveraged the Internet for assisting agents in their handling of customers' calls. CUNA Mutual has developed an on-line knowledge base that they refer to as "Dr. Help." Much of the company's information that was formerly on paper - requiring agents to maintain cheat sheets and to search through different manuals and documents - is now right at their fingertips.
"We use the knowledge base not only to give reps easier access to knowledge when they're on the phone with customers but also during training - we can keep everyone updated on any policy or procedure change," she says.
Car Culture
The financial services industry is more than banks and brokerages. In fact, many people come into daily contact with the sector through an unlikely route - their cars.
The link between the automotive industry and financial services is a close one. Cars are, after all, high-ticket purchases that involve complex financing arrangements for individuals. Owning (or working closely with) an affiliated financial company gives a car company a way to control the relationship between the buyer and the brand long past the initial purchase.
For example, Nissan Motors has an affiliate, the Nissan Motor Acceptance Corporation, that functions as the "captive financial services for Nissan-Infiniti," according to Sean Hicks, NMAC's senior manager of consumer communications.
The role of the financing company is to drive repurchases and function as a link between the company's distribution network, purchasing customer retail and lease contracts from Nissan and Infiniti dealers.
Naturally, NMAC's primary mode of communication with both customers and dealers is through the call center, which in their case is a 400-agent center in Irving, Texas.
The center has been open since 1987, since a group of 21 regional offices was consolidated into a more effective, modern structure. The problem that they faced recently, though, was that they were using early-generation call center techniques and tools to deal with a national customer base that had a twenty-first century set of call center expectations.
NMAC's contact centers had grown to resemble a manufacturing unit that was typical of an automotive company. They were diligently focused on tasks and productivity, exclusively relied on standard fixed eight-hour shifts and had no exposure to workforce planning. Its first challenge was to give its operations an overhaul.
At the same time, the company as a whole was beginning to look to the center as the place where customer loyalty could be controlled and enhanced - even though it was still seen as a cost center, the overall corporate view was beginning to shift to appreciate the role the NMAC call center could play in retaining customers and building the company's automotive brands.
The best way to improve the effectiveness of the call center (and get the biggest bang for their technology dollar) was to implement a workforce optimization program - both through software and through a cultural shift among the agents and managers.
NMAC selected Blue Pumpkin (Sunnyvale, CA) to automate the workforce planning in its contact center. Within the first five months of using Blue Pumpkin's solution in early 2003, NMAC could project a first-year return on investment of nearly 400% and realized gains in many areas.
Tanya Messmer-Himes, workforce management specialist at NMAC, says that the center started with fixed labor shifts that covered the span from 7 am to 7 pm, Monday through Friday. That's not the most flexible arrangement, as it makes no allowance for call volume surges, or peaks and valleys in the customer flow.
"Once we implemented the Blue Pumpkin system," she says, "we prepared for it about a month; then started floating lunches and breaks first. That made a big difference." Instead of using the software to enforce a schedule that was more efficient from the beginning, they used the flexibility of a workforce management system to incrementally loosen the controls over agents' time.
After making lunches and breaks movable, they introduced a voluntary shift of ten hours a day, for four days a week. And they added a starting variance for shifts of half an hour.
Finally, in the complexity coup de grace, NMAC unveiled what they call "progressive shifts": a 12-hour shift on Monday, dropping to ten on Tuesday, eight on Wednesday, and six on Thursday. Having a staff front-loaded in the week helps the center deal with a known surge in calls that come in Mondays and Tuesdays.
And it lets the center manage resources better - instead of being behind the eight ball in a "chronically understaffed" environment, they can use the same number of people to handle the appropriate call volume, and save money on it because they're no longer forced to pay overtime to keep up with spikes. The reactive need for unplanned overtime hours was reduced by 39%. Over a period when call volume rose by 10%, labor hours only increased by 6%, saving about 390 labor hours per month.
"It was a challenge in the beginning," says Messmer-Himes. "We were extremely afraid of doing this." That's why they started out with small-scale changes and worked gradually up to more dramatic ones.
The results have been dramatic, and not just for the agents. "The people who interact with customers are the frontlines of our brand - they directly represent our company," says Sean Hicks. "Faster response times, happier customer service reps, delivering the right answers to inquiries the first time and other benefits from workforce optimization not only save us a lot of money, but they also help build our brand equity and customer loyalty - absolutely critical in our competitive industry."
Call-abandonment rates were cut by 66%, to just 2-5%. Managerial administrative hours fell by 58%. And by creating part-time shifts, floating lunches, and three-day weekends to creatively meet fluctuating customer demand much more effectively, NMAC has become a more agile, nimble operation.
NMAC could respond to customer and dealer inquiries faster, improving average speed of answer by 66% to less than 50 seconds. Agent adherence to their schedules improved from approximately 70% to an outstanding 95%.
Employees now can view their schedules on the Internet and make adjustments, e.g., swap shifts, plan time off.
By taking on the strictures of the old-fashioned workforce plan and replacing it with a more modern, flexible environment, the call center is free to allocate resources to other areas that will in turn improve business even more.
Sean Hicks says that upper management is beginning to view the center differently, as less of a cost center and more of a tool for the benefit of the entire company, and the Nissan brand. "The pendulum is swinging," he says.
A Voice You Can Trust
Installing the latest and greatest technologies available is not the only way to keep up with rising customer expectations. For Northern Trust Company's Investor Services Division when it came time to improve customer satisfaction scores, it was all in agents' voices.
The company's downtown Chicago-area call center serves more than 500,000 investors and corporate clients with Corporate Money Market Accounts, Beneficiary Retained Asset Accounts, and Medical Savings. Agents handle about 55,000 calls per month from their clients' customers. These customers call for assistance with account openings and closings; balance inquiries; and check statuses.
Northern Trust has two methods for measuring the service it provides. The first is conducted internally through a quality monitoring program. Call monitoring software from Verint (Melville, NY) records all of the center's phone calls. Managers then monitor several calls per rep per month. Using an internally developed evaluation scorecard, they grade reps on how they handle each call. In the second method, Northern Trust contracts with a third-party company to contact investors and clients directly to find out what they thought of their experience with the call center.
One of the interesting findings that came up between both service evaluations was that customers often felt agents were not expressing themselves very clearly. Often they felt agents spoke to low and were not very articulate. So although agents might have answered customers' questions, the experience was still not up to par.
To resolve these issues, Northern Trust developed three new training programs for their agents. One class covered quality skills servicing to improve agents' administration skills. A second class taught accurate data transfer to increase one-call resolution rates. And the third class was offered through a partnership with VoiceScape (Chicago, IL), a voice and presentation skills training company.
Over a period of two weeks agents worked on skills such as clear pronunciation, flexible speaking pace and courteous language. What made the training unique was the company's use of voice and speech exercises commonly used by actors before a performance, such as breathing techniques and melody exercises.
When Northern Trust conducted the external survey once again about a year after every agent went through the three-class training curriculum, scores rose dramatically. "The improvements were a result of all three classes but we found that the vocal training was something that really struck a chord with agents," says Darlene Allen-Nichols, Northern Trust's second vice president, worldwide operations and technology. "They really appreciated learning to speak more clearly."
But all this hasn't slowed down the company's investment in call center technologies. According to Allen-Nichols, over the past two years, the company has invested more than one million dollars in new technologies, including Avaya's (Basking Ridge, NJ) CentreVu software to route calls to agents and workforce management software from Blue Pumpkin to automate the scheduling of the company's 40 to 50 representatives.
Allen-Nichols says for now the company is very satisfied with all their recent purchases and the only other purchases they might consider are wireless headsets. "Although we try to discourage it, customers still send paperwork to us via fax, so agents sometimes need to walk away from their desks and over to an administration area where the fax machine is while they're on the phone servicing the customer," says Allen-Nichols. "I've been approached with the idea for wireless headsets but it's something we might consider more seriously down the line."
The company also values employee recognition. "Whenever a representative receives a compliment from an investor, account holder or client, we give them an on-the-spot reward," says Allen-Nichols. This award, which is given by the management team can range from movie tickets and restaurant gift certificates to Northern Trust book bags. "These rewards are just a way to say congratulations and thank you for a job well done," she says. On managers' discretion, the company also offers monetary bonuses to agents that exceed their job expectations consistently for at least one quarter.
As a call center within the financial services industry, Allen-Nichols says the greatest challenge has been in identifying accurate benchmarks and service level measurements. "Our products are so specific that there are not many companies that we're in direct competition with," she says. "Because we don't compare equally to other call centers, it's difficult for us to measure our stats in comparison with industry standards."
