Overview
A leading non-bank mortgage servicing company had an on-premise telephony solution with a plug in that lacked features and capabilities - poor reporting functionality, no real-time statistics, inability to scale, and no predictive dialler. The company was rapidly growing and needed a contact centre solution that could scale and grow with the company, allowing its blended contact centre the ability to build upon its reputation for providing a "white global service" to customers.
Moving to the Cloud
The Call centre operations manager handles all contact centre operations. He had prior experience with Five9, and the implementation, reliability, scalability, and functionality of the company had made a lasting impression. "Five9 handles a lot of the responsibility that you have to fight against in a typical telephony environment. My Five9 experience had bee great. I went back to that," he shared.
Creating a digital-first Omnichannel Experience
Wanting to compete with the top mortgage service providers, the organisation expanded its channels of outreach by enabling Five9 chat and email functionality. Assuming that a typical day would involve no more than 50 chats, the company didn't know what to expect at the beginning. However, the company was soon receiving over 200 chats per day and was able to effectively handle all of the interactions.
"Centralising into a single interface for our contact centre made sense," said the manager. "Being that Five9 chat doesn't require heavy lifting, you are off and running easily. Chat enabled us to bring something to our business that didn't exist at the time with relatively low effort from a technology standpoint."
To ensure that clients receive the same level of service, email and chat channels have the same service goals as voice: one interaction resolution. "We try to keep chat times equal to our less than a call, while we answer emails within a 48-hour window." Moving agents around due to their different skillsets, the business discovered that having a dedicated chat group was most efficient, allowing the company to achieve SLAs after making adjustments.
Working with Five9 Professional Services, the organisation included the ability to attach chat transcripts to its system of record. With chat and email, agents can easily pull up previous interactions by accessing the customer record. "To be able to transition that solely to Five9 gives us a much more robust measurement of all of their communications and not just a subset."
Visual IVR gives customers piece of mind
Being innovative, the company was the first provider to offer forbearance plans where customers can be fully approved for a forbearance online. The business built its "Contact Us" page with Five9 Visual IVR. If a customer selects the Contact Us link, Five9 Visual IVR is launched to offer available resources at the click of a button. Customers can initiate chat, email, or callback requests. The response was enthusiastically received by the customer base.
Due to the pandemic in 2020, the company created a specific COVID-19 support page, receiving tens of thousands of interactions through Five9 Visual IVR and set up between 48,000 to 55,000 forbearance plans in just one month. "If we didn't have Five9 to enable this functionality our customer base would have had a poor experience calling and wanting to transact with agents" explained the manager.
Tracking agent performance
Remotely in 2018, the business strategically introduced a trial work-from-home program involving less than 7% of its agents. When the pandemic hit, it was now necessary for all agents to work remotely and the company was able to migrate its contact centres quickly. Everyone was working remotely within a week and a half. Due to the experience gained through the trial program, it was an easy move. "The agents reacted very well and it was a relief for us. We wondered how agents would react working remotely, but with Five9 the only thing that changed for the agents was their physical location. We did not have to do anything differently. The system is architected in a way that it's irrelevant where agents are located".
Lessons learned through customer behaviour
During COVID-19, customers would call back multiple times in a day looking for a concrete resolution, confirmation that emails were received, or inquire about the status of their request from the website. The organisation knew it needed to adjust quickly and that customers were in need of human empathy.
The business built out an email that would be sent to customers after they completed their request that included more detailed information and resources. This allowed customers to go back to that email and reference what the next steps were. This helped provide customers a sense of relief and decreased the amount of multiple contacts the company was seeing. It has been a learning process for the team.
"Our KPIs took a hit, especially average handle time, but the focus was rightfully on the customer," said the manager. "We told agents to not worry so much about metrics- just to make sure we help every customers. Data will be what ever it is. It's more important that we are helping and not just hitting a KPI. Five9 helped us deliver this 'white glove' treatment for our customers during this pandemic.
