The 2014 Implementation Awards
What do a global financial services firm, a medical collection company, and a pioneering home fitness brand have in common? All three have recently discovered the impact speech analytics products can have on agent productivity, customer service, and, as a result of both, their bottom line. The impressive results achieved by these companies are the reason our editors chose to honor them with our 2014 Implementation Awards.
Though every company must find a solution that works for its own needs, our winners have proven that making a smart investment in speech technology can come with a significant payoff.
Customer: Morgan Stanley
Vendor: NICE Systems
Product: NICE Interaction Analytics
Founded in 1935, financial services firm Morgan Stanley operates 1,200 offices in 43 countries, and, as of March 31, had $1.9 trillion in assets under management. The company offers investment management, banking, wealth, and securities services to individuals, institutions, and governments. Its contact centers in the United States, Spain, Australia, and the Philippines employ 1,000 agents, who handle 5.5 million calls annually.
In 2012, the company identified areas for improvement in its internal support structure for its contact centers, which was a highly segmented operation since it supported a wide array of services. The company's goals included better operational performance and efficiency, improving targeted metrics such as decreasing average handle time (AHT), determining and repairing performance issues, and reducing management involvement to resolve problems. Morgan Stanley felt that it would be able to increase internal and external quality metrics and provide agent support with targeted coaching and training, both of which would enrich the total customer experience.
With these objectives in mind, Morgan Stanley implemented NICE Interaction Analytics, which is comprised of six modules: NICE First Contact Resolution, NICE Customer Retention, NICE Customer Satisfaction, NICE Handle Time Optimization, NICE Sales Effectiveness, and NICE Collections Optimization.
The solution suite is able to ferret out contact center data via a combination of speech analytics, voice recording, natural language processing, sentiment analysis, and statistical algorithms, allowing NICE Interaction Analytics to unearth and analyze information gleaned from voice, emails, surveys, online chats, and social media.
"Our Interaction Analytics transcription and phonetics capabilities allowed Morgan Stanley to go even deeper to pinpoint exact calls that were not being handled in the optimal way," says Clark Hill, insight solutions executive at NICE Systems. "By monitoring all their interactions and identifying those that needed attention, Morgan Stanley was able to empower their front-line staff to resolve issues and inefficiencies more quickly and effectively while maintaining their quality standards."
NICE Interaction Analytics capabilities are achieved by mining customer- and agent-generated data that drills down on criteria such as keywords/phrases, voice tone/sentiment, and context. The data is analyzed, aggregated, and presented to contact center workers. Additionally, the solution is able to perform such contact center tasks as analyzing and categorizing verbatim customer responses, providing social media alerts and trends, and offering agents next-best-action guidance.
"It was important for Morgan Stanley to not only get a more accurate understanding of the factors that were impacting their AHT, but to also gain more visibility into how their call center agents were handling and resolving issues," Hill says.
With the implementation, Hill says, Morgan Stanley has been able to reduce AHT by close to two minutes and save its call center operations an estimated $2 million annually while also improving customer satisfaction, quality scores, and service levels. "Morgan Stanley's partnership with NICE enabled them to meet their goal of operational improvement, while not at the expense of quality or other key metrics, and see an ROI within the first year," Hill says.
"This was a very challenging situation that could have easily impacted customer satisfaction and quality of service," says Tom DeCarlo, executive director, global head of Wealth Management Client Services, at Morgan Stanley. "But with NICE, we actually increased both metrics while reducing operating expenses. Call analysis gives us qualitative and quantitative data needed to improve in performance while increasing KPIs and ensuring the best possible experience. NICE helps us improve decision making by giving us a level of insight into our performance through analytics that we did not have before."
The results
After implementing the NICE Interactions Analytics solution suite, Morgan Stanley saw:
- an estimated cost savings of $2 million annually;
- customer satisfaction increase from 78 to 86 percent;
- average handle time fall by nearly ?2 minutes; and
- an increase in key performance indicators of more than 20 percent.
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