All posts tagged Contact

Call Center Book Review

by Mary Cook on October 5, 2011 in Call Centers, Mary Cook with 1 Comment
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If there’s anyone who knows a thing or two about contact center practices and strategies, it’s Greg Levin.  Voted “Most Likely to Write a Top Selling Ebook on Contact Center Best Practices”, he spent 16 years at ICMI witnessing and learning about the most effective practices with regard to workforce management, quality monitoring, customer satisfaction measurement, customer relationship management, agent hiring and retention, email/chat management, IVR and web self-service, outsourcing, home agents, and a lot more.  His popular ebook, Full Contact: Contact Center Practices and Strategies that Make an Impact, combines comedy with practicality.  His light-hearted approach to the topic has revolutionized the way that contact centers handle their business.

His 145 page book is broken down into seven different chapters and addresses best practices in metrics selection and measurement, agent recruiting and assessment, agent training and development, and agent motivation and retention. There’s also advice about workforce management and staffing, quality monitoring and customer satisfaction management, and e-support, self-service, and social media.  Sample questionnaires, forms, agreements, and articles finish out the ebook and give you the tools that you need to lead your contact center to success.

Easy to follow and written in a language that you can understand, Levin explains the importance of educating new hires and reminding existing agents about the meaning and importance of adherence, reducing burn-out by encouraging agents to take longer breaks, involving agents in the scheduling process so they get the time off that they deserve, and coming up with new and creative ways to make the job more enjoyable.  By making the contact center employee accountable, he explains that, “agents are human beings, at least in most contact centers, and thus need to be treated as such when it comes to measuring and 'enforcing' adherence to a schedule.”  He also notes that, “merely telling agents that they need to be in their seats at certain times 'or else' will do little to foster agent buy‐in and commitment, and a lot to foster agent graffiti and arson.”

Levin also talks about “taking hiring by the horns” by always being on the lookout for exceptional individuals who would shine in a contact center environment.  He states that, “typically, an agent hunt does not involve the use of any weapons or camouflaged clothing, but if that’s what it takes to build your frontline dream team, then so be it.  I’m not here to judge.”  The ebook helps identify your ideal agent and states that there are 8 Elements of a Successful Agent Recruiting Program.  Equally important is the “very long engagement” period that it takes to win over and retain agents.

A resource worth checking out, Levin’s Full Contact: Contact Center Practices and Strategies that Make an Impact is a must-have in all contact centers.  If you want to change the way that you do business, you’ll learn a few tips and tricks by reading this ebook.  I’ve gotten acquainted with it and I can’t recommend it highly enough.

Mortgage servicers get help with SPOC implementation

by Brian Moore on July 19, 2011 in Brian Moore, Mortgage, Varolii News with No comments

Over the past four months, mortgage servicers have been inundated by a wave of new guidelines and mandates that threaten to overwhelm their already stressed default servicing operations. Chief among these is the requirement to establish a single point of contact or SPOC for any borrower seeking to prevent loss of their home through one of many foreclosure prevention options.

With record numbers of loans in default, servicers have struggled to handle such borrower requests for assistance. In fact, one of the most frequent borrower complaints concerns their inability to get consistent, accurate information about modifying their mortgage from the variety of representatives they might speak with at their servicer. It is these complaints that have led to the SPOC requirement.

The FDIC, one of the multitude of agencies with oversight of the mortgage industry, said this as they announced their SPOC mandate:

“Having a single point of contact will not prevent all foreclosures, but it will reduce the numbers of avoidable foreclosures, as well as operational risks, associated with foreclosure processes that violate the servicers’ legal obligations.”

While establishing a single point of contact may lessen borrower frustration, it will cause a major disruption for servicers. Moving from a pooled agent contact center operation to one where the borrower speaks with one and only one representative every time they call would require servicers to quintuple their headcount. Even if enough experienced representatives could be found or new ones trained (difficult given the aggressive timelines mandated by the regulators), the costs of SPOC are almost unbearably high.

That's why Varolii has developed a comprehensive SPOC Mortgage Servicing Solution to automate most of the communications required to help move a borrower through a foreclosure prevention process while simultaneously providing them with easy, timely access to their SPOC. We estimate this will reduce demand for new headcount by 15% and could save the servicing industry $100 million per year.

Just as important, it will improve the borrower experience by proactively communicating status, next steps and any actions required on their part as they move through an unfamiliar and undoubtedly worrisome process.

In Search of SPOC - "Single Point of Contact"

by Brian Moore on June 3, 2011 in Banks/Finance, Brian Moore, Mortgage with No comments
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When I sold my first predictive dialer for collections in 1986, one of the major objections I had to overcome was that efficient use of the system required my client to abandon "account ownership" by his collectors.

In this scheme, each collector is assigned a specific set of delinquent accounts, typically numbered in the low to mid hundreds. The collector would be responsible for these accounts "from cradle to grave".

Many collections managers loved this arrangement, as it allowed them to easily measure a collector's effectiveness. All dollars collected, every account cured, every write off recovered would have been due to the effort of the collector as they were the only ones to touch their accounts.

Unfortunately, for a predictive dialer to deliver its benefits, the direct relationship between an individual collector and a specific set of accounts had to be severed. This allowed the system to dial ahead on behalf of a large team of collectors, screen out no answers, busies and answering machines, and connect the longest available collector to the next answered call. Productivity measured in customer contacts per hour increased 300-500% or more, allowing for the ratio of accounts to collector to rise to more than 1000:1.

With gains like that, only the most hard core advocate of account ownership was able to resist this compelling new technology, and the predictive dialer quickly became standard operating equipment for collections.

Fast forward 25 years, and as Yogi Berra might say, "it’s deja vu all over again". Only in reverse.

Reacting to borrower complaints about being unable to get consistent, accurate information about modifying their mortgage from the variety of representatives they might speak with at their servicer, various regulators are in the process of imposing"single point of contact" (SPOC) requirements on the mortgage servicing industry.

While the actual rules are still emerging, all indications are that at some point in the aging of a delinquent mortgage (and possibly even before the loan is past due), servicers will have to assign a Relationship Manager as the SPOC for a borrower seeking assistance with payment of their obligation. In other words, account ownership is back.

Since the predictive dialer is ill equipped to function efficiently unless any answered call it makes can be connected to any available representative, once an account is assigned to a Relationship Manager, servicers are going to struggle to use these systems to help deliver the high volume of contacts required in working through the modification process.

Enter Varolii

Our high quality, interactive voice messaging applications are more than capable of taking on the outbound contact work required. Many of the outbound calls during the modification process are made to provide the borrower with status updates or to make requests for specific documents. These calls do not necessarily require a conversation with a representative, but if the borrower requests to speak with their Relationship Manager, Varolii can facilitate a conversation with the borrower's SPOC.

Closing Thoughts

The SPOC requirements are forcing a significant and demanding change to the mortgage servicing industry at a time when they are already operationally stressed by the record high numbers of delinquent mortgage loans and the ever changing government mandated programs for borrower assistance. That said, the servicers I have spoken with say that the current system of pooled accounts is not well suited to working through the multi-stage process of loan modification and loss mitigation. Both the borrowers and the representatives are frustrated with the lack of continuity and the resulting opportunity for confusion and delay.

So servicers are actively engaged in reorganizing their processes. They are looking for solutions that will improve their productivity and hold down costs, just like they were twenty five years ago. Since Varolii has SPOC-ready applications, the only difference is I don’t have to convince them to abandon account ownership in order to help them.

Instead, I’m going “in search of SPOC”.

 

Collections and the Increasingly Mobile Consumer

by Brian Moore on February 18, 2011 in Brian Moore, Call Centers, Consumer Svcs, Mobile/Telcom with 1 Comment

I gave a presentation last month at a cable industry collections conference on the increasingly mobile consumer and its implications for collections operations. This was an opportunity to educate the audience made up of credit and collections leaders on the rise of the "mobile only" segment of consumers in the market for telecommunications services, with an in depth look at how this impacts their customer relationships. Continue reading →

Hosted communications gain in popularity among contact centers

by Varolii on December 15, 2010 in Call Centers, Industry News with No comments

As a result of the recession, contact center software has been updated and revamped to provide more flexible and cost-effective ways of doing business, a recent report finds.

Contact centers are increasingly moving to hosted solutions, according to the recent 2010-2011 Hosted Contact Center Infrastructure Market Report by DMG Consulting. In fact, the report notes that hosted call center implementations grew by approximately 50 percent between 2008 and 2009.

This growth is expected to continue for the next four years, increasing by 35 percent in 2010, 25 percent in 2011, 20 percent in 2012 and 18 percent in 2013, the study reports.

"The competitive landscape of the contact center infrastructure market is changing," said Donna Fluss, president of DMG Consulting. "We are living and doing business in a different world than we were two or three years ago. Enterprises want more choice, flexibility and functionality for their money, and the hosted market is showing users a lot of promise by delivering and investing in these areas."

Another contact center technology is expected to grow through 2015 as well. A report by Pelorus Associates found that demand for contact center recording systems, which hit sales of $800 million in 2009, are expected increase by a whopping 55 percent by 2015, to total sales of $1.24 billion.