Customers: GECU

A seven-office credit union with more than 235,000 members, GECU consolidated its Loans by Phone and Member Services centers into a single contact center to cut costs and increase efficiency. To ensure that agents still maintained the highest levels of customer service excellence, the credit union adopted Click2Coach^®. In the first year of using the agent effectiveness solution, GECU saw loans grow by $15 million, a 28 percent increase. In addition, member satisfaction scores rose from 5.98 to 6.47 (out of a possible 7) and call abandonment rates fell from 12 percent to 8 percent.

The GECU contact center is dedicated to providing member/owners with a full range of quality financial services. But in these tough economic times, the group also needs to work efficiently and cost-effectively. Click2Coach® helps the center balance these needs, thus simultaneously boosting sales and member satisfaction.

 

Agent Coaching Increases Lending Volume

 

With the right tools, even small contact centers can post huge gains. That's the lesson of GECU of El Paso, Texas. In 2001, GECU combined two contact centers — Loans by Phones and Member Services — into one group. In the first year of using Click2Coach, "Our loan volume increased by 28%, or $15 million," says Remote Services Branch Manager Jenny Turner. "That exceeded our goal by $2 million, and we did it with a staff of only 31 agents."

GECU was chartered in 1932 to provide financial services to civil service employees. Today the credit union has seven offices with approximately 235,000 members and $977 million in assets. Click2Coach is an agent development solution that includes Envision™ Quality Monitoring and Envision™ eLearning.

After only 12 months of using the Envision solution, each GECU agent was responsible for an additional $500,000 in loans. This is remarkable, given that half the agent workforce didn't have any previous sales experience. That's because, when the two contact centers were combined, agents who formerly took only service calls needed to sell products, and agents who previously only sold loans needed to handle service calls effectively. "To increase sales while also increasing member satisfaction, we knew we needed a call monitoring solution," Jenny says. "It came down to choosing between one that did full-time recording for compliance versus quality monitoring for coaching. We chose the route of the employees and making them better agents through coaching. Choosing Envision directly resulted in our ability to make our lending goals."

 

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Agent coaching is worth every penny

 

"Prior to Envision Quality Monitoring and Envision eLearning, we captured conversations with a little tape recorder, then scored the calls and got back to the agents." Jenny describes why this process didn't work. "Unless the agent sat down with the supervisor, he or she couldn't listen to the call. And being able to hear the actual conversation is the best way for an agent to grasp things like where the tone of voice needs to be changed or the member's name used more frequently." Further, the monitoring and feedback process was so time-consuming, supervisors couldn't do more than one evaluation per month per agent.

Envision Quality Monitoring and Envision eLearning changed all that. With its automated call monitoring, supervisors are free to spend more time coaching, resulting in an increase of evaluations to an average of four per month. Because the Envision solution captures a screen recording of agent activity, supervisors easily identify ways agents can work more quickly while still fully serving members' needs. "Say a member calls to get a loan payoff," Jenny explains. "That information can be accessed simply by entering the member's social security number.

 

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It Pays to Coach Agents Effectively...

 

Screen capture shows us when agents take too many steps to access the payoff." It also identifies when agents miss cross-sell opportunities. "We can see that an agent is looking at a member's credit report when processing a car loan. With the member's good rating, the agent should inquire if that individual is also interested in a credit card or other product." This is vital information to convey, because Jenny believes that increased cross-sells had a major impact on meeting and beating last year's revenue goals.

Supervisors share feedback with individual agents by annotating interactions with recorded verbal feedback. When they see a trend emerge, they can quickly create 1- to 1½-minute training videos that document exactly what agents need to do to walk through a process correctly. Jenny appreciates how agents welcome this kind of positive coaching. "At the beginning of every year, we're always bombarded with tax-related calls on account interest, and agents sometimes forget where to access that information quickly. Last year, one of our supervisors created a video documenting the correct process and distributed it to the entire group. By the end of the day, agents were thanking us for making the video available."

To ensure fairness to the agents, Jenny and her supervisors developed a standardized template for evaluations. They also initiated a calibration process in which they meet quarterly to score select calls and compare the results. This helps supervisors be more consistent, so agents know exactly what's expected of them.

 

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Don't just do it — do it better

 

As a member-owned financial institution, member satisfaction is of the utmost importance to GECU. A primary way the company measures this is through "quality loop surveys," in which members rate whether agents were friendly, whether they invited members to purchase other products, and so on. As a result of adopting Envision's solution and its agent- focused coaching approach, Jenny says that the average survey score has increased from 5.98 to 6.47 (out of a possible total of 7), and she expects that number to continue to rise. On a related note, Envision Quality Monitoring has helped the team reduce their call abandonment rate from a high of 12% to an average of 8%. As Jenny explains, "We improved our abandonment rate by reducing call duration. It's good coaching that enabled members to experience better performance even as the calls got shorter."

 

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Reaching new heights over time

 

In the future, GECU plans to expand their use of training videos, personalizing them for individual agents' use. They will share successful interactions across the contact center, establishing them as best practices. They also intend to convert interactions into AVI files, so people in other departments can listen to them without needing Envision Quality Monitoring and Envision eLearning installed on their computers. For example, executives and department managers may be interested in hearing members praise GECU products, service or marketing communications.

Video training, screen capture and the solution's other coaching tools are essential to achieving the department's lending goals for 2004. In 2002, they achieved $44 million in lending dollars. In 2003, when they were fully using Envision Quality Monitoring and Envision eLearning, they increased that to $67 million. And as Jenny predicts, "Our official goal in 2004 is $6 million per month, or $72 million per year, but my personal goal is $75 million. With the Envision solution and the teamwork it promotes, I know we'll get there."

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