Portman Building Society Selects Aspect Software

WESTFORD, Mass. — Portman Building Society is generating an additional £3 million (approximately $5.59 million U.S.) of revenue per month as a result of routing varying amounts of new business calls to mortgage managers at its branches using Aspect Spectrum ACD (automatic call distributor). Since implementing the product, the building society in the United Kingdom has reduced call abandonment, increased customer service quality and secured more than £40 million ($74.5 million U.S.) of additional business.

Using the Aspect technology, Portman can add mortgage specialists at varying branches to its pool of Direct Mortgage Contact Center advisers whenever call volume peaks. The Society retains centralized control of operations without having to centralize its personnel in the contact center.

"Our branch-based mortgage managers can log on and receive customer calls just as if they were sitting in our Direct Mortgage Contact Center," said Gary Saddler, associate director of customer contact operations at Portman. "Aspect Spectrum ACD automatically makes routing decisions based on where calls can be handled most efficiently. When we know we're going to get spikes in call traffic from, for example, a new product launch, we can overflow to our branches as extended training times make it impractical to recruit additional staff for short periods. Also, when call volume goes up because of things that can't be predicted, like when a Portman product features heavily in the national press, we're prepared, and our customers don't have to endure long wait times in queue. We can take advantage of all of our personnel, no matter where they are located."

While Portman's contact center employs 120 mortgage consultants and advisors, it has a network of more than 140 branches across the UK. The organization estimates that by embracing the remote call overflow functionality of the Aspect product, it has been able to increase the number of mortgage specialists available to handle Portman Direct customer calls by 50 percent.

Aspect Spectrum ACD supports customer interaction by integrating ACD functionality with computer telephony integration applications in both circuit-switched infrastructures and software-only IP (Internet Protocol) environments.