At the forefront

A leader in financial services business process outsourcing (BPO), CSC combines deep industry experience with a proven, global infrastructure to deliver best-practice operations support for more than 200 banking, life, annuity, pensions, and property and casualty (general) insurance clients. CSC offers industry-leading vertical BPO solutions like policy and contract administration for insurers and reinsurers, and loan servicing tracking for banks worldwide.

The Business Challenge

CSC’s Banking BPO clients expect to focus on their core competencies to grow revenues, while CSC provides IT and business services for the banks to bring new offerings to market quickly and reliably without having to make the corresponding capital infrastructure investments. In addition, because CSC serves a variety of “private label” clients with an assortment of products, CSC must handle each client’s customer calls differently.

The client is also at the core of CSC’s Six Sigma initiative, a program for measuring and improving quality that strives for near perfection through a disciplined, data-driven approach and methodology. For the Banking BPO, the contact center contributes a significant share of the operational data that must be aggregated and analyzed for Six Sigma.

With enhanced abilities to define, measure, analyze, improve and control its customer service processes, CSC believed it would be able to enhance satisfaction for its clients while driving operational efficiencies for CSC. CSC’s Banking BPO also needed to replace outdated technology in its contact center. Its interactive voice response (IVR) system was old and every time the company needed to change it for clients, the staff needed vendor assistance to do so. This cumbersome process limited CSC’s flexibility and agility, making it difficult to react to its clients’ changing requirements.

The Solution

Originally CSC had made an internal decision on an IVR solution before they contacted Aspect about the vendor’s outbound dialing solution. During the sales process, Aspect discovered CSC’s needs and vision for the future: to offer advanced technologies to clients at extremely competitive rates. Aspect knew that this meant more than an IVR or outbound dialing system, so the company discussed the benefits of the Aspect Unified IP unified contact center solution.

As CSC saw the potential value of a unified platform, it reevaluated its direction. CSC quickly understood that Aspect Unified IP would help maximize efficiency, reduce complexity and provide premium customer service, now and into the future, and selected Aspect Unified IP.

Aspect Unified IP addresses the need for reduced complexity because they are architected and built from the ground up to include multiple applications on a single software platform and provides unified reporting and administration, creating the best total value over other solutions evaluated.

Results

After successfully implementing Aspect Unified IP within the designated 60-day timeframe, CSC immediately began to get benefits it could pass on to its clients, including more robust functionality and increased speed to market.

Aspect Unified IP helped CSC meet its multi-client, private label requirements by allowing the company to transmit unique caller identification information for each bank. In addition, with the non-technical “drag and drop” voice portal script development, easy-to-configure automatic call distributor (ACD), and graphical web-browser agent-scripting environment, CSC was able to start serving its clients with enhanced capabilities quickly. With the new desktop and scripting capabilities, CSC can quickly train and script its agents so their dialogue is controlled and they have the customer details they need to conduct productive calls. This, coupled with the improved agent monitoring tools now available, such as call recording, enables CSC to get a new agent up and running in one week – a process that used to take one month.

In addition, Aspect Unified IP empowered CSC to implement reporting procedures that would expedite the company’s Six Sigma implementation. With access to data, such as who is calling, how frequently they call and the nature of the call, CSC can ensure agents are handling calls appropriately and watch for trends and ways to improve customer service.

For example, with post-call surveys, CSC is able to know if its clients’ customers are satisfied with the way the voice portal is handling their calls and which features and functions should be added to help them. All of these Aspect Unified IP capabilities help CSC understand, analyze, evaluate and improve its contact center quality and processes from a Six Sigma standpoint.

Finally, the Banking BPO Center recognized immediate call center efficiencies. Inbound voice self-service call handling increased by 20 percent. This meant that more of its clients’ customers received help through the voice portal leaving the agents to handle more complex customer issues. In addition, CSC has been able to expand some of its operations through the voice portal and offer enhanced services, such as 24×7 bill payment in its loan servicing operations. With this improvement, its clients’ customers can now pay their bills anytime, day or night.

Additionally, by using desktop automation and skills-based routing, agent productivity increased by 32 percent. Now, customer calls are matched to the proper agent based on skill-set, and with “screenpops,” the agent has all the information needed to ask or answer the caller’s questions.

“Aspect Unified IP has changed the way we view our calls centers,” commented Perry. “With a fully functional, easy-to-use IVR and other new features, including our well-trained agents, we have been able to implement the best practices that help us get Six Sigma improvements and leverage our call center as a competitive advantage”