Voice solution is money in the bank - Trends - ABN AMRO Mortgage Group Inc

Communications News, Oct, 2002

During the 2001 refinancing boom, too many phone calls became problematical for ABN AMRO Mortgage Group Inc. (AAMG), the nation's fifth-largest mortgage provider. Two years ago, its Sunrise, FL, location was receiving about 7,000 sales calls, but when the Federal Reserve began whittling interest rates, an unpredicted, sudden demand from customers exploded call volume to 30,000 by January 2002--a 400% increase.

To improve service for its 1.5 million residential mortgage customers, AAMG built a loan-qualification and -application solution using a NetByTel-hosted, voice-enabled phone self-service on a pay-per-call-taken basis. Within a year, AAMG saw its customer-retention rate double--50% of that directly attributable to the hosted solution.

Today, AAMG's voice-enabled system--utilizing NetByTel's loan-capture application and partner SpeechWorks' voice-recognition technology--is allowing the mortgage lender to quickly and accurately serve this continuing large influx of customer requests.

"We began looking at voice-recognition and advanced interactive voice response functions in the beginning of 2001," says Garth Graham, AAMG's senior vice president of customer relations and e-commerce "We needed something that provided instant answers to our customers," Graham says. "We wanted to change the entire process of how customers might get their loans fulfilled."

AAMG wanted a solution that was conversational--one that would ask a customer a question, then provide benefits back. The company also wanted a solution that could look up loan, Social Security or telephone numbers, and route calls depending on the customer's needs. "It's hard to do this with push-button technology such as `press one for this,' or `press two for that,'" Graham says.

Used in call-center environments for years, speech technology is predicted by two leading research firms to experience rapid growth within three years. The worldwide market for telephony speech-processing software is expected to expand to more than $3.5 billion by 2005, according to IDC--a 52% CAGR. Cahners In-Stat Group anticipates the market will evolve from $200 million today to $2.7 billion by then.

The potential savings of adding efficient delivery of services without adding workers, as is the case with AAMG, should drive the speech-recognition market, says Cahners In-Stat. Basic technology improvements that make suitable alternates for traditional technologies; growth in Internet usage; increasing mobility of the workforce; and the desire to improve the services that are provided to callers are major factors cited by IDC that will drive the projected growth of this market.

For AAMG, improved customer satisfaction also was a factor in using speech technology. Customers now call a toll-free number and are immediately recognized through one of several identification methods. Based on their current account information, they receive an instant savings calculation for refinancing from a virtual agent in as little as 30 seconds. Those who meet the qualification criteria are given the opportunity to begin the refinance process immediately. Depending on the type of call, a customer is routed directly to a live agent or is handled entirely by the voice-response system.

"We saw call-center agent productivity double within weeks because callers had already heard some information and been prescreened and had a good experience," Graham says. "We are estimating $4 million to $5 million revenue gains this year due to this solution."

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