Breaking out of the box - Diversified Investment Advisors' CTI customer support solution - Company Operations

Communications News, April, 1997 by Jim Stewart

An open-systems, standards-compliant approach enables a financial services firm to attain world-class customer service in its call center.

Customers increasingly insist on world-class service from the companies they do business with. In a wide-open market like financial services, customers have lots of choices and companies find it difficult to differentiate themselves.

Like wrestlers grappling for a hold, financial services firms seek competitive advantage by cost-effectively raising the level of customer service they deliver. Thus for many firms, call centers have become strategic assets.

The call centers in turn must stay on the leading edge of call center technology, especially computer telephony integration (CTI) and agent automation--not an easy task. Some firms opt for custom integration, a traditional solution.

While effective, custom CTI solutions carry a hidden cost: the call center gets locked into a vendor-specific integration environment. As CTI software deployment and enhancement become more expensive and cumbersome, options for future growth and continuous improvement are restricted.

As a result, Diversified Investment Advisors, one of America's foremost firms managing 401K plans and other pension funds, ruled out traditional custom solutions. Diversified sought an open-systems, standards-compliant approach to attain world-class customer service improvements.

At Diversified's Purchase, N.Y., call center near New York City, 100 agents interact with an Intervoice voice response unit (VRU) supported by a Nortel Meridian switch to handle 100,000 calls a month from 401K plan participants and other callers.

When a plan participant phoned Diversified, the VRU requested the caller to key his Social Security (SS) number. The call center used the number as a key to retrieve account information and track transactions.

However, when the caller wanted to transfer out of the VRU to a live agent, Diversified's system could manage only a blind transfer. There was no way to send the keyed digits captured by the VRU to the agent, vexing many callers. Customers provided their SS number at the start of the call; why did the agent have to ask for it again?

Like the first falling domino, this blind transfer created a cascade of consequences. Without a key, the call center couldn't easily retrieve the caller's account information without tying up agent resources.

Having the agent enter the SS number and retrieve the initial data consumed time, increasing average call hold time, increasing Diversified's inbound 800 number bills and the average agent-cost per call. It meant hiring and training more agents than would otherwise be necessary to handle the firm's steadily rising call volume.

The situation also threatened to hamper Diversified's sales initiatives. Companies shopping for a 401 K management firm send out requests for proposals (RFPs). A couple of years ago the RFPs typically asked, "How often do you print statements?" Now they were asking, What is your customer service position? What's the response time to answering? What kind of CTI do you have in place?"

Diversified had to provide credible answers before even being invited to bid. State-of-the-art call center technology thus became a necessity for winning new business--a major criterion by which prospective customers judged the firm.

Also, Diversified planned a variety of profit-enhancing service improvements that depended on improving agent effectiveness and productivity. Without certain enablers in place--particularly agent automation technology--these plans would languish.

One alternative was to retire the firm's VRU and switch, replacing them with hardware and software designed to accommodate the data integration and agent automation Diversified sought.

However, the firm was committed to preserving its substantial investment in the existing Nortel and Intervoice devices, and in the staff people who supported them.

Diversified's management team knew it had to raise the customer service level, particularly by improving the call center's response when plan participants needed to speak with a live agent. The changes required would also boost agents' productivity, reducing average call lengths by more than 20 seconds. Obviously the way to go was to automate the agent's handling of the caller's (SS) number and retrieval of account information.

Hence, Diversified faced a double dilemma: How could the firm preserve its hefty investments while achieving its customer service objectives--without resorting to a custom solution?

After a year of research and refinement, three crucial pieces have enabled Diversified to attain its goal: communication hardware-specific software enhancements from Nortel and Intervoice, respectively, and Sixth Sense call center automation software from AnswerSoft.

Because Diversified was committed to keeping its PBX and VRU, the firm sought solutions among Nortel and Intervoice business partners. It found five companies that partnered with both vendors.

The firm discovered that AnswerSoft--a partner of Nortel, Intervoice and other leading equipment makers--shared Diversified's basic vision, providing automation software that was standards-based and, through scripting tools, could be customized to meet the unique challenges of Diversified's call center environment.