All posts in Varolii News

Mortgage Delinquency - Is the glass half empty?

by Brian Moore on May 16, 2012 in Brian Moore, Mortgage, Varolii News with No comments
Half empty or half full?

Or is it half full?

Whether you are optimistic or pessimistic about the direction of past due mortgage debt in the US, one thing revealed by the Mortgage Bankers Association National Delinquency Survey for the first quarter of 2012 is that there's still a lot of water in that glass.

MBANDSQ120121 1024x694 Mortgage Delinquency Is the glass half empty?

On the good news side, there were small decreases in the number of loans 30, 60 and even 90 days past due. But the accounts in the foreclosure process went up slightly.

Overall, delinquency remains more than double historical norms with the MBA estimating there were 5.7 million loans 30 days or more past due.

Eventually the industry will work through the backlog of non-performing accounts, while the tighter lending standards that have been the norm since the start of the crisis will help keep the pace of newly delinquent accounts from filling the resulting gap.

In the meantime, servicers will be very busy collecting or modifying the accounts in the middle.

Everybody grab a straw.

 

 

Distressed borrowers want to know...

by Brian Moore on May 9, 2012 in Brian Moore, Mortgage, Varolii News with No comments
borrower_help

That's all. They just want to know.

They want to know if they've qualified for a loan modification or if they're going to lose their house to foreclosure. Can they make an interest-only payment this month, or perhaps skip a payment altogether?

They want to know any of a variety of things which not knowing causes them to lose sleep.

Who is this distressed borrower? It's not the strategic defaulter we've heard so much about. Distressed borrowers care about maintaining their credit, keeping their home, honoring their obligations and doing what is right. But they are under some sort of economic hardship that is making these things hard to do.

Sometimes the hardship is their own fault. They bought too much house, borrowed too much money, or got a loan on terms that were never going to work in the long run. In other cases, they've lost their job or had unplanned expenses.

Either way, they are worried.

And that's why they want to know.

How do I know?

Varolii works with several of the largest mortgage servicers, hosting a variety of borrower interaction management applications that help them cost effectively communicate with their borrowers on a range of issues. Some of these applications are pure collections - the mortgage is past due and the Varolii application reminds the borrower to make a payment. But others are what we call "loss mitigation statusing" applications, and it's these that demonstrate the distressed borrower's need to know.

When such a borrower engages with their servicer in a discussion of alternatives to foreclosure, its almost never a one-and-done conversation. The process begun in a single call will proceed over the next several weeks or even months as the servicer requests documentation from the borrower that may qualify them for a loan modification or other form of forbearance. Varolii applications in loss mitigation follow up on these requested documents and also keep the borrower informed of the status of their request.

Comparing average borrower response rates to interactive voice messaging applications in collections and loss mitigation, we see a significant increase in the level of borrower engagement for loss mitigation. As shown in the chart below, borrowers who are working with their servicer on foreclosure avoidance are 40% more likely to answer the phone when called, 50% more likely to identify themselves as the right party and 25% more likely to choose an interactive option in response.

collections vs loss mitigation2 Distressed borrowers want to know...

This is not to say that the collections communications are ineffective - they work very well at prompting payment from the delinquent borrower. But because they also provide an option to connect to the servicer's call center, they proactively offer distressed borrowers a way to engage their servicer in a discussion of why they missed a payment and what they can do about it.

Because distressed borrowers really want to know...

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Humanity in Automation

by Mary Cook on April 19, 2012 in Call Centers, Mary Cook, Varolii News with 1 Comment

People often ask me why I left a swashbuckling life of consulting around the globe to come lead Varolii’s Call Center Practice. Varolii is a Software as a Service (SaaS) company that provides cross-channel customer interaction management solutions for the digital world. A far cry from building call centers.

When I joined Varolii almost three years ago, we specialized in outbound proactive communications– automated messaging, if you will. I had never used automation before, so Varolii intrigued me. But what made me fall in love with Varolii was the quality of our interactions. Through using carefully crafted messages, combined with ten years of best practices and using communication methodologies such as the science of influence, Varolii was really holding “conversations” with their customers. We weren’t just blasting messages; rather, we executed interactive dialogue with customers. To add to this, Varolii possesses an interaction design department that employs professional studio voice talent. So Varolii’s outbound communications sound amazing, as well. Not to mention, the patented technology that is behind all of this automation wizardry is a blog on its own...

Why I fell for Varolii
So, here is the kicker. I fell in love with Varolii because, to me, we offer an amazing product that, although is an automated interaction solution, focuses on what is most important – the humanity of it all.

The most important element in the call center is our agents. Human agents. And although Varolii specializes in automation, we focus on quality automation. To me, our outbound interactions are like having a bunch of perfect call center agents – always on time, always in the top quality ranking, easily re-trained, and measureable. Furthermore, when companies use our outbound interaction solutions, not only do they get these perfect “avatar agents,” but they actually reduce resource requirements for their own human counterparts in the call center – which leads management to either free up some operating expenses or reallocate resources for other queues.

How we kept it fresh
Most recently, we launched a new product called Varolii 360, a product I am personally very passionate about. Varolii 360 offers a seamless end-to-end experience across both outbound and inbound channels (voice, text, email and smartphone) with personalized interactions, consistent branding, self-service options and complete reporting and analytics.

Varolii 360 combines automation with human-assisted speech recognition for a more efficient interaction. Silent human “guides” direct the automation in real-time, correcting misheard responses or redirecting the ASR. Guided speech is more affordable than full time agents, provides more efficient self-service options, and reduces customer frustration and opt-outs.

Through our conversational customer interaction management system, we deploy a unique hybrid model combining the best of two worlds: automated and human. Our Guided Inbound feature combines automated speech recognition with real-time, invisible human intervention for superior accuracy and caller experience. And we bring all of the same interaction design and media talent to the table on our inbound solutions as well.

Varolii realizes that automation is an important call center technology that can make a difference in contact centers. But what they REALLY understand is that automation must provide the most meaningful, human-like interaction as possible. They understand that, in order for automation to work, they need to focus on the conversations themselves and the quality of those conversations. Albert Einstein once said, “It has become appallingly obvious that our technology has exceeded our humanity.” I think Varolii got it right – we made sure humanity is imbedded within our technologies.

Mortgage Collections Stuck in Neutral

by Brian Moore on March 30, 2012 in Brian Moore, Mortgage, Varolii News with No comments
Mortgage_Stuck_in_Neutral

A couple of studies released yesterday confirm what anyone involved in collecting past due mortgage loans already knew.

It's a hard job and it's not getting any easier.

CoreLogic reported that 90-day plus delinquency rose in February to 7.3%, an increase of 10 basis points over January. One would have hoped that with tax refunds starting to show up by the end of the month, at least some of that money might have gone toward the mortgage.

But that would have required the reversal of another trend, the tendency of borrowers to pay their credit cards and auto loans ahead of their mortgage. TransUnion reports that the inversion of traditional payment priorities that began in 2008 stubbornly persists in 2012:

"Though the percentage of consumers delinquent on mortgages and current on credit cards has dropped in the last year, the payment hierarchy shift is as strong as it was one year ago, with consumers opting to pay their credit cards before their mortgage payments," said the study's co-author Matt Komos. "We established in our earlier study that this payment hierarchy reversal was chiefly the result of two factors: the decline in house prices and high and persistent unemployment levels."

Since neither housing prices or employment appears likely to improve significantly in the next year, mortgage servicers are challenged to keep their portfolios from deteriorating further through more effective collections strategies.

The GSE's think one way to do this is by accelerating the start and increasing the pace of collections treatment. Their Servicing Alignment Initiative (SAI) requires servicers to begin their attempts to contact past due borrowers on the third day of delinquency and continue every third day with multiple attempts throughout the day until they achieve a quality right party contact (QRPC). While there is allowance for delaying the effort for borrowers scored as low risk, this is a more aggressive treatment timeline than was common prior to the recession and bursting of the housing bubble.

So how do you get this extra work done with flat or decreased budgets for collections, driven in part by the need to also fund major increases in loss mitigation staff to support single point of contact (SPOC) and other foreclosure prevention mandates? One cost-effective way is to shift the burden of outreach off of collections staff and onto hosted borrower interaction systems that use interactive voice messages, email and SMS text to initiate dialogs with borrowers.

If you'd like to learn more about this approach, post a comment below. Or if you'll be attending National Mortgage News Mortgage Servicing Conference in Dallas April 17-19, come to Varolii's Industry Innovation luncheon and we'll show you how we help five of the top 15 servicers get out of neutral and into high gear.

Patients Are More Than Their Diagnosis

by Mary Cook on March 9, 2012 in Varolii News with 1 Comment
more_than_diagnosis

Every patient is different, but the way they want to be treated remains the same.  People want to be handled with dignity and respect from the moment they step into a hospital until the moment that they are released.  With this in mind, the healthcare industry has taken the concept of the “customer experience” and revised it in a way that meets today’s advanced technological world.

A growing number of patients and members of healthcare organizations require immediate access to trusted and reliable health information.  Through a range of online and wireless channels including e-mail, web portals, text messaging, social media outlets, and mobile devices, today’s patient is more informed than ever before.

In order to keep up with patient demands across all demographic groups, providers must engage their patients by interacting with them via the communication method that is most convenient for them.  This is critical because it ensures the health and wellness of consumers. If they receive pertinent information in a timely manner, with self-service options, they are more likely to make informed decisions and engage in programs that impact their health.

There are a number of challenges facing healthcare organizers and providers:

  • Poor Patient Communication.  Appointment no-show rates are 15 to 20 percent.  Each appointment’s value is more than $230. This results in millions of dollars of lost revenue each year per hospital.  Hospitals can only hope to recoup a small portion of this for each missed appointment.
  • Low Patient Adherence and Compliance.  Prescription non-adherence costs the healthcare system an estimated $290 billion annually.  Patients also fail to adhere to wellness programs, medical advice or instructions.  Not reaching out to patients through the proper channels can cost healthcare organizers and providers tremendously because they are stuck relying on live support staff only to provide the outreach, which can cost as much as $20 per contact.
  • Scalability.  Scaling patient engagement efforts can prove to be difficult.  Healthcare organizations need a more cost effective way to handle members.    

Live support staff can only handle a certain amount of requests before becoming inefficient.

Ways to Improve Patient Engagement

There are a number of different ways to improve patient engagement.  Here are a few ways that healthcare providers can assist:

  • Furnishing patients with meaningful and trusted education and information.
  • Delivering information to patients wherever they may be—in the hospital, at home, at work, or in the car.
  • Incorporating technology solutions that are familiar to patients (such as text messages, email and phone calls) and easy to use (such as an online portal to view health records and increase access to information).

In today’s competitive and mobile landscape, healthcare organizations and providers strive to make the customer experience as efficient and successful as possible.  Gaining and retaining the patient’s confidence when it comes to making informed healthcare decision is critical and, if done right, organizations and providers will be in a position to attract new patients and vastly improve patient healthcare outcomes.

If you would like to read more about my thoughts about the evolution of the patient experience, you can download my whitepaper Healthier Connections: The Evolution to More Patient-Centric Customer Interaction Management.

Live From Interaction 12 – Speed Sells

by Brian Moore on March 8, 2012 in Banks/Finance, Brian Moore, Industry News, Varolii News with No comments

One of the most interesting insights shared by a Varolii client at our annual users conference was the impact making a rapid response to a shopper’s web inquiry has on the likelihood of making a sale.

The client in this case is a large mortgage lender, but the finding is applicable across industries that use the web as a lead source for high value sales.

Such large transactions are typically completed in steps, with the process beginning when a shopper fills out some qualifying information on a short web form, which is then followed up on by a sales rep. While the first step is initiated on the web, the sale is usually consummated over the phone. As shown in the chart below, the faster a sales rep calls out to a web lead, the more likely they are to make contact with the prospect. While not all such contacts convert to a sale, no contacts almost never do.

sales lead contacts by delay minutes Live From Interaction 12 – Speed Sells

Responding to a web lead in 15 minutes is more than twice as likely to reach the prospect than if the delay is 20 minutes. Attempting the outcall within 10 minutes is three times more likely to result in contact than 15 minutes. And if you can make the call within 5 minutes, you’ll get five times the contacts you would at 10 minutes.

In this case, lack of speed kills.

Unfortunately, before working with Varolii, our client was experiencing average call back delays of over 40 minutes. By implementing a real-time SOAP integration between his Salesforce.com lead management application and the Varolii Interact platform, we were able to get his lead response time down to an average of just 3 minutes.

The results? Contact rates are over 80%. Lead to sale conversion rates are through the roof. Sales reps are making loans and making money…and not even noticing that they are on the phone talking to prospects almost continuously.

Do you have a web lead program performing below expectations? Better get Salesforce & Varolii…fast!

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