The 2011 Implementation Awards

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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