Rethinking the Call Center

CUNA’s E-Scan
June 27, 2011 | COMMENTS

As the financial services industry continues to rebuild its image following the financial crisis, banks are looking to enhance the customer experience as a competitive differentiator in efforts to boost customer acquisition and retention.

Many banks are looking at the performance and capabilities of their call centers and rethinking their contact center strategies to optimize that experience. Achieving this requires both savvy technology implementation and innovative staffing models. Recently, Bank Systems & Technology posed the following question to a panel of experts:

• What metrics are the most important in helping track the productivity and effectiveness of call center employees? • How is social media changing contact center activities? • What is the role of the call center in the 21st century multichannel financial institution?

At Toronto’s TD Bank, the overall service model includes contact centers that are always open, so customers can reach a representative any time they need assistance. Social media is just another extension of that, says Celia Moncholi, phone channel senior vice president, “ensuring that we’re being responsive and interacting with customers in the ways that they want to interact.”

TD Bank hosts a Twitter page, and the bank is looking at how it might expand this and provide other options. “Social media is how our future customers will engage and interact, so we need to be looking at that ourselves,” says Moncholi. “We need to be responsive in whichever avenue our customers choose to go.”

Concerning metrics, the bank is able to measure everything within the contact center with technology that tracks contacts literally down to the second. In addition to measuring first-call resolution, the bank uses traditional metrics such as average handle time and productivity metrics that look at trends and forecast volumes to ensure that staffing matches volumes.

Social media is a gift

In a world linked by social media, you have members and others freely sharing their ideas, their needs, and their complaints. Organizations should have an enterprise-wide social media strategy that involves marketing and the contact center, according to Donna Fluss, founder and president of DMG Consulting.

The contact center shouldn't be an afterthought, but a core contributor to setting strategy and delivering on it. Contact centers should be responsible for responding to customers on social networks, say Fluss. And enterprises need to use text analytics solutions that will structure and find consumer insights and make that information available.

As to metrics, Fluss recommends creating a balanced scorecard in which you find the right balance among productivity, revenue generation, quality, and member satisfaction.

Contact centers are the primary interface in financial services, and they’ll become pivotal in ensuring that consumers receive an outstanding experience. “Technology is an enabler,” says Fluss, “but when it’s all said and done, customers remember the experience they had with the human being.”

Assess member needs

Financial institutions first should evaluate their contact centers with an eye toward the customer or member experience, says Raj Dhinsa, Verizon’s managing principal of financial services practice. Typically these assessments will lead to strategies and prioritized enhancements, including more flexible hosting alternatives and modularized technologies.

Mergers, too, provide institutions with an opportunity to take a fresh look at contact center initiatives. Staying relevant includes the need to incorporate channels such as social networking and mobile communications into the consumers’ experience.

Automated voice messaging for alerts, strategies and built-in capabilities for call deflection, enhanced agent desktop reporting, and cross-channel campaign optimization are examples of possible improvements, says Dhinsa. “Many improvements are driven solely by gathering a comprehensive view of the customer,” he adds.

Hire smart

When staffing the contact center, selecting employees who are most likely to offer better customer service is key. Behavioral assessments built into hiring solutions improve decisions and systematically enhance the overall quality of the workforce, notes Malysa O'Connor, a director at workforce management firm Kronos. This selection science helps predict a candidate’s likelihood of success in the role.

It also is critical to manage planned and unplanned absences as well as extended leave. Automated labor forecasting and scheduling technology help support an optimized workforce deployment.

Traditional metrics are focused on handle times and speed of answer. These are important, says O’Connor, but to measure productivity, call centers should consider quantifying actual costs. Heed the metrics around productive and non-productive time. How much time are employees spending taking contacts versus off-phone work? Understanding direct and indirect costs of that time can help measure effectiveness.

Ultimately, providing an excellent member experience needs to be part of a credit union’s culture, and it needs to come from the top, down. The staff needs the tools and the empowerment to provide an outstanding experience.