Proactive Contact:

Striking Balance between Compliance and Productivity

Balancing the constant demand for increasing customer contacts against the requirement to stay compliant with call and contact regulations is enough to keep even the most experienced call center managers up at night. Government regulations, technology changes and permissible use definitions change weekly, creating exposure and anxiety within many large outbound contact centers. Addressing the requirements of your corporate compliance officers and continuing to hit your contact goals gets more difficult every day.

Our whitepaper highlights the strategies required for effective proactive contact programs. Learn how to reduce the operational and reputational risk associated with non-compliance, while centralizing and tracking all contact history across multiple contact channels and technology platforms.

Download now!

Large Telecom Provider Increases Productivity and Efficiency

with OnQ™ and CallTech™

The 5th largest telecom provider in North America was looking to increase the productivity of their blended call center staffing while simplifying their outbound dialing management process. Additionally, the company saw great potential in managing outsourced calling groups but needed a way to manage those agents and retain control of their customer information.

They elected to deploy ALI Solutions' CallTech and OnQ software to solve their needs. CallTech maximizes dialer and agent productivity by using Best-Time-To-Call models to build the optimal calling schedule for each outbound campaign. This keeps agents talking to the customers that matter most to their business while minimizing unwanted nuisance calls. OnQ automates and centralizes call center campaign management, with features that continue to re-sort lists and deliver records to active campaigns according to a pre-defined schedule while still allowing dialer administrators to make changes intra-day as required. This allows the company to eliminate costly downtime by ensuring that campaigns never run out of records, as long as there are records left that are legal to call. The company utilizes OnQ to automate file processing, treatment application, list management and policy compliance. Instead of monitoring the delivery of ten separate files and transferring agents as each file arrives, the company relies on OnQ to deliver work to available agents wherever they are, adding each new file to the mix without interrupting the flow of calls. This can include agents at outside agencies. OnQ can serve as a central source of records to be called; delivering only the customer records and information those agencies need to be effective while maintaining centralized control over calling strategy and frequency. The CallTech and OnQ solutions also provide this fast-growing telecom provider with a flexible platform for future expansion. The results to date have exceeded expectations:

• RPC rates have increased by 15-30% across the portfolio, doubling the project goal of 8%
• Agent occupancy rate improved 17%, well above the project goal
• The company also realized a significant reduction in management operational efforts, thanks to automated record segmentation, treatment application and scheduled list management and policy compliance

OnQ 3.3 Feature Updates

ALI Solutions has recently released new feature updates for OnQ 3.3 capability. Here are just a couple key enhancements you will be interested in:

• Multi-Tenant Support – OnQ can now support multiple configuration environments called tenants. Each tenant acts as a separate instance of OnQ. For example, an organization that represents multiple customers could use a separate tenant for each customer or a single company that has multiple departments could use a separate tenant for each department.
• Record Management – Now clients can change messaging strategies without needing to use separate dialer campaigns with custom messaging scripts.

Tricky Balancing Act in Collections

"An estimated 515 different collection agencies and creditors were sued between March 16-31, 2011...Consumers filed an estimated 570 lawsuits under consumer statutes," according to an article in Collections and Credit Risk. Those are disturbing statistics for any banker.

In collections, many complaints arise from three sources: too-frequent calls to the same number in a particular time frame, calls outside of permitted hours and calls to the debtor's workplace beyond those permitted.

Most banks intentionally err on the side of safety. True, collections is a high-volume operation that employs highly trained associates whose productivity can make or break the value of the operation. There is a trade-off between making sure collectors are active and making sure no rules are being broken. When that trade-off is decided in favor of compliance (as it should be) collections results can suffer.

One successful approach is to employ analytics that enable collections management to segment and target the right debtors for contact at the right time in order to increase the chance of reaching the customer at a time when he or she is likely to take the call. Banks that use analytics this way have more productive conversations with customers who are willing to work with collectors.

Industry-leading collections operations are getting more and more sophisticated about assembling analytics that draw data from many sources to accurately predict the right day to call, the right time to call, the right number or device to call. They can help collectors understand what communications channel would be preferable for future contacts, what other obligations the customer might have and the customer's ability to pay.

Who is more likely to file a lawsuit – the customer whose phone rings night and day and possibly at work, or the one who gets one well-timed call and has a fruitful conversation on the spot? And who is more likely to choose to remain a customer of the bank?

The use of customer analytics for marketing purposes is already a well-established practice at many banks. They use analytics to determine their channel preferences, their next product to buy and so on, benefiting the customer and the bank. Applying that same rigor to collections has the potential to improve collections payment rates and reduce collections costs while ensuring collectors adhere to the letter and spirit of the law.

Compliance Risk Assessment

Are you ready to reduce your policy compliance risk? Take this simple quiz and if you answer "yes " to any of these questions, contact us at info@alisolutions.com for a complimentary Call Center Risk Assessment.

1. Do you execute regulatory compliance and corporate policies manually?
   
2. Has manual entering of policies ever put your operation at risk?
   
3. Have resource constraints ever jeopardized compliance?
4. Have you ever experienced compliance failure because of the inability to manage calls across time?
5. Have conflicting company policies ever caused problems for your call center?