The 2011 Implementation Awards
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