Speech deployments can be a tough sell. The considerable expense of implementation must be met—and significantly exceeded—by the long-term impact on a company’s revenue and expenses. The truly outstanding implementations go further than the impressive hard financial numbers; they have a profound impact on productivity and customer service. The four companies featured in the following pages represent a cross section of business—two are banks, one is a law firm, and the fourth is a county government—illustrating the versatility of speech. Some ancillary benefits included better agent training, the coveted higher customer satisfaction scores, and a better allocation of resources. The bottom line? All achieved superior service while cutting costs. Here’s how our four Implementation Awards winners did it.

Customer: McAngus Goudelock & Courie LLC
Vendor: BigHand
Product: Digital Dictation Workflow Software

Like life, when dealing with technology, sometimes you get more than you bargained for. And that truism is one McAngus Goudelock & Courie (MG&C), a Columbia, S.C.–based law firm in the insurance field, would gladly defend.

Two years ago, MG&C decided to replace the analog handheld recorders its lawyers and paralegals used for dictation. “We were just trying to solve the problem of having a modern, digital solution across the enterprise,” says COO Leah Beckham, who joined the firm in 1998, when it had only one office with 10 lawyers. “But, over the course of time, we realized there were a lot of other benefits that could possibly come out of the project as well.”

One of those benefits involved cracking “one of the great mysteries of the legal profession,” Beckham says: the ability to measure precisely how much work MG&C’s legal secretaries were transcribing. With more than 100 lawyers and 40 legal secretaries spread among six locations in the Carolinas, Beckham realized how gauging related efficiencies could directly influence the firm’s bottom line.

Beckham and her team spent six months researching digital dictation solutions and speaking to other law firms, keeping in mind the one she chose had to work on a Citrix platform that already was in place. “We had a test group for each solution,” she explains. “BigHand, by far, was everyone’s favorite in terms of ease of use, clarity, workflow, ease of installation, and that we could use it on a Citrix platform. We based our decision on that.”

Software installation took only four days. BigHand trained one of MG&C’s IT engineers, “and she has become our internal BigHand expert,” Beckham says. “Training literally took a few hours for both lawyers and secretaries, who vary in tech skills across the group. This was one of the easiest, seamless transitions in terms of both training and tech implementation from a server standpoint that I’ve ever experienced.”

Results have been equally impressive. From a usage standpoint, MG&C lawyers record their dictations into a digital device that, when placed in a docking station, automatically emails files to a specific transcriptionist. BigHand also has a mobile application that enables the lawyers—who spend as much as 60 percent of their time traveling to clients—to use their BlackBerrys as they would their digital handhelds. “They often leave their digital recorders on their desks,” Beckham says. “But everyone in America is trained to have their mobile device with them. [BigHand’s mobile app] has helped us increase productivity on the road.”

From a financial perspective, Beckham says, insights gained from BigHand’s reporting module have “conservatively” saved MG&C $250,000 year over year by helping it apply its workforce more strategically. “If we have a secretary working 7.5 hours a day, how much is she spending of that time transcribing? In about 60 percent of cases, it was less than half the day,” she explains. “From a lawyer’s standpoint, we had some lawyers not dictating anything and some who were dictating astronomical amounts of voice.”

With that information in hand, Beckham says, the firm can better allocate resources. For example, if a secretary is out sick, “an office manager can easily route work to someone else in any of the six offices,” Beckham says. “We can also reallocate existing staff to other duties that would have had us hire others, like a file clerk, for example.”

Another powerful example of this increase in efficiencies: Last year, MG&C hired about 24 lawyers and paralegals without having to add one support person. “One of our business strategies in 2010 was to achieve 20 percent growth in the number of lawyers to the firm,” Beckham says. “We exceeded that.”

Beckham also is enthusiastic about her firm’s relationship with BigHand. “Any enhancement we’ve asked for—some specific things we really wanted to measure—they were very accommodating and also interested in helping us,” she says. “They just ‘get it’ as a tech vendor.”
—Gayle Kesten

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Customer: Pinal County, Arizona
Vendor: Interactive Intelligence
Product: Communications-as-a-Service Contact Center

Pinal County in rural central Arizona is home to 325,000 residents who are as diverse as the area’s landscape. From its county seat in Florence, 42 government agencies routinely interact with citizens through the Citizen Contact Center, which is open Monday through Friday from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m.

The center has been operating since June 2007, but it only recently improved service to residents by implementing a communications-as-a-service (CaaS) solution from Interactive Intelligence. The system enabled the Pinal County government to add features such as skills-based call routing, call and screen recording, a speech-enabled interactive voice response system, and supervisory monitoring.

The implementation, which involved changing from a hosted service to on-premises, began a little more than a year ago. “We started watching our call volumes, and we came up with the numbers to justify it,” says Jerry Keely, Pinal County’s customer service administrator, who notes that the contact center’s seven agents field between 10,000 and 15,000 calls a month. “And we had just completed a data center for the county, which gave us the server capacity for an on-premises solution.”

Bringing the technology on-premises removed the distance, Internet reliability, and call quality issues that plagued the county’s previous system, but cost was the biggest factor.

“Cost is not something I have to concern myself with anymore,” Keely says. “I pay an annual maintenance and licensing fee. My costs have become much more fixed.”

With the hosted model, Keely was paying on a per-minute/per-call basis. “At the end of the month, I received my bill and I did not know what those costs would be,” he says. “I was paying $10,000 to $15,000 per month in telecom costs with hosted. Now, my basic circuit costs are about $300 a month.”

But Keely has not soured on the hosted model. In fact, he says the solution was perfect for the county at the time. “Since this was all brand new to the county, we didn’t know how much call volume we would get, so we went with hosting so we could grow the solution as needed,” he says. “Hosted allowed us to expand without being tied to a particular location. We could set up at other locations if needed and offer our agents to work from home.”

The county still has a home-based agent approach, but the difference now is that agents log onto a different server. Pinal County did not abandon its hosted solution, either. Instead, it turned the system over to its Public Health Department for use in the event of a health emergency. “It’s not live now, but they can open it up and turn it on in a moment’s notice if needed,” Keely explains.

Switching from a hosted solution to an on-premises version was an easy process, according to Keely. Interactive Intelligence moved all of Pinal County’s IVR scripting, routing, and other data from its own servers to the new on-premises servers in about three weeks. “The transition was amazingly simple,” Keely says. “I was expecting to have issues, but it was flawless.”

Since the transition, Pinal County has seen its first-call resolution rates jump from 70 percent to 87 percent, and the number of calls answered within 20 seconds has climbed 50 percent. The average call handling time is now 213 seconds, the average wait time is 114 seconds, and the abandon rate is 15 percent.

“The Interactive Intelligence CaaS Contact Center solution has enabled us to automatically connect residents to the right employees faster, as well as adjust routing in real time based on fluctuations in call volume,” Keely says.

“Providing superior service to the citizens of our county is a priority for us,” he adds. “As a result of Interactive’s innovative capabilities, we can continue to improve on our efforts through faster response times, additional ways for residents to contact us, and improved agent training.”
—Leonard Klie

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Customer: Bank of Montreal
Vendor: Verint Systems
Product: Impact 360 Speech Analytics

Financial ROI is well and good, but “anytime you’re making your customers happy and driving their experience, the ROI is immeasurable.”

So says Marc Demers, senior manager of technology and systems support at Bank of Montreal (BMO), a Canada-based North American bank in business since 1817. But this financial institution is as modern as it gets, particularly when it comes to using speech technology within its contact centers.

As a Verint Systems customer for eight years, BMO had been using the vendor’s Impact 360 solution to support its credit card division for regulatory compliance purposes. Satisfied with functionality, BMO last fall decided to spread the software’s wealth across its banking and marketing groups.

“Verint sat down with us and provided us with some insight about what we could be doing,” says Bruce Boyle, BMO’s senior manager of operations and support, who has overall responsibility for Demers’ group, among others.

That included leveraging the speech analytics portion of Verint’s solution. “The voice of the customer [could] tell us about our products and about the processes and positions we were putting our agents in,” Boyle explains.

The benefits of those capabilities quickly became apparent when BMO changed the way interest was calculated on unpaid credit card balances. Despite efforts to communicate the new method, many customers called to express confusion about charges on their statements. Speech analytics enabled BMO to pinpoint and determine exactly why customers were calling. Interestingly, another revelation proved valuable: The contact center agents—numbering about 2,000 and handling as many as 50,000 calls daily—required better training.

“Agents were fumbling. Customers were taking over control of the call,” Boyle says. “We reacted quickly to provide agents with call-control tips to make sure they could quickly get to customers’ needs, which was understanding how interest was being calculated.”

As a result, the average handling time per call decreased, as did the need to hire additional staff to handle the anticipated influx, Demers adds. The results speak for themselves: Call times were cut to about seven minutes from 11. “Handle time costs money. Reduce handle time, and we can contribute back as a profit center,” Demers says. “When you’re able to regain control of the calls and drop handle time, you’re not only making these [credit card] customers happy, but others [who are calling for other reasons], too.” 

Those kinds of results—not only quantitative, but also those based on customer feedback—gave BMO’s contact center a new level of credibility and became a catalyst for change within the bank. With recognized insight about the voice of the customer, groups within BMO now include agents in the planning stages of their new product and service launches.

“They went from just doing their thing themselves to now coming to the call center in advance and asking for input on products,” Demers says. “It became part of the normal practice to reach out to the call center. From a career perspective, the team is becoming a career destination.”

To illustrate his point, Demers says an internal job posting received nearly 100 applicants. “That tells me this is new and cool, and people love it,” he says. “You have to be a gifted listener.”

In addition, since implementing Verint’s solution on a broader scale, BMO’s Net Promoter Score—a tool for measuring customer satisfaction—has risen, Demers says. “This might have started out as a financial ROI, but it quickly turned into a customer experience ROI,” he adds.

Both Demers and Boyle also speak highly of their relationship with Verint and its reseller partners. “The [company has been] represented very well,” Demers says. “The local management team is proactive and understands our needs. They make our business their business.”
—Gayle Kesten

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Customer: ING Direct Canada
Vendor: Verint Systems
Product: Impact 360 Speech Analytics

Improving the customer experience while saving your company millions of dollars—talk about results one could proudly take to the bank. Only they already belong to a bank: ING Direct Canada, whose investment in Verint’s Impact 360 Speech Analytics solution continues to pay healthy dividends.

Headquartered in Toronto, ING Direct opened its virtual doors in the late 1990s. With more than 1.6 million clients and $27 billion in assets, the online bank offers checking, savings, and mutual funds accounts; mortgages; and retirement savings plans. Naturally, such a portfolio doesn’t come without thousands of monthly calls from clients with questions.

“We had call tracking for monitoring volumes, but we had very limited resources when it came to identifying our client and agent interactions,” says David Archard, head of analytics and quality assurance at ING Direct. “We knew how many calls we were getting related to mortgages, deposits, and mutual funds, for example, but that’s where it ended in terms of client interaction reporting.”

When ING Direct first began using Impact 360—selected because it tied in with the bank’s call-recording system already in place—its purpose was to provide data for projects that had been set in motion. “We weren’t using [the solution] to the fullest,” says Archard, who was responsible for determining how to leverage the tool to improve business.

Archard brought in two people, one with analytics know-how from outside the company and another from within the bank. “Our initial plan was to figure out why clients were calling,” he recalls. “If we could start there, we could move forward and build a plan from that.”

Using Verint’s software, the team created reporting templates to identify calls by category, such as mortgages or savings accounts. Each category then was refined based on the nature of the call—questions about a product or rates were considered an “inquiry,” for example. “Then we delved deeper with speech analytics to isolate certain call types to hear why clients were calling,” Archard says. “Once we started doing these deep dives, we could focus on the ‘whys [behind their calls].”

One of those whys, Archard learned, involved the bank’s verbal password process. “When having to reset their PINs, a lot of our clients would have an option to use their verbal passwords, but 83 percent of the time they couldn’t remember them and would have to go through an entire process that was really of no benefit to ether our clients or business,” he says. As a result, ING Direct changed its validation process, ultimately saving the bank $400,000 in the first year and quadrupling ROI for the Verint solution, Archard adds.

Another question involved “first-contact resolution”—why clients were calling back the bank with questions related to an original call. “Our reports found huge areas for improvement,” he says. “Sometimes information was missing from the Web site or it was buried too deeply, and we didn’t realize how important it was to our clients. Reporting highlighted this, and we made changes that helped to reduce our call volume.”

In addition, Archard and his team were able to gauge the effectiveness of the bank’s marketing and report their findings to that department. “Through speech analytics, we have been able to measure the response rate from our marketing campaigns, as well as find any areas to help us manage these campaigns’ responses better through our front-line team,” Archard says. 

But perhaps the most monumental revelation related to customer attrition. “We learned agents were only attempting to retain business for clients who were calling to close their accounts a limited amount of the time—they simply weren’t asking the whys,” he says.

As a result, agents got better training. “We increased our retention attempts by 30 percent within a few weeks, and then up to 74 percent within a few months,” Archard says. “Out of that, we were able to retain more than 50 percent of that business.”

Archard would like to grow his team. “When we opened up the system and started running reports, we could see so many areas of the business we could enhance—little things here and there that could add up to major savings,” he says.
—Gayle Kesten