Financial services firms have traditionally viewed contact centers as operating expenses, with the focus being to answer customer questions as efficiently as possible and to manage average speed of answer and handle times with an eye on decreasing costs year-over-year.

 

Today, however, customers use multiple channels to manage their accounts, including live agent voice and chat, IVR, Web self-service, e-mail, and regular “snail” mail. And rather than separately managing these individual contact points, Frank Madonna, Chief Operating Officer of BNY Mellon Shareowner Services, and his team saw the opportunity, reports Enkata, to create what became known as the Investor Care Network.

 

This would focus on end-to-end management of the customer experience across all channels and then selecting the right partner to mine and report high-value multi-channel customer data. BNY Mellon has 300 contact center agents spread across four sites in New Jersey, Florida, Texas, and The Philippines.

“A vital first step to achieving our vision to transform our contact center into a valued strategic business partner was the creation of our Investor Care Network,” explains Madonna.  “This meant applying a single, consistent strategy across all channels so that all users heard and felt the same experience, regardless of how they contacted us.”

To advance the vision, Madonna had to overcome several internal obstacles, not the least of which was getting the leadership team to share the vision.  He had to debunk the entrenched view of contact centers being cost centers and address the fact that high-value customer data that was being collected spanned multiple applications in incompatible formats.

Overcoming the first two obstacles took months of working with the BNY Mellon Shareowner Services leadership team. Madonna made sure his vision was tied to helping the business line achieve its overall business objectives. When speaking with the product management department, he made sure the ICN activities supported the goal of greater uptake of the complete product offering. For example, if shareholders participating in a dividend reinvestment plan phoned monthly for status of their statement, contact center agents could spend an additional 90 seconds to sign the shareholders up for electronic statement delivery. As a result, the monthly calls are no longer necessary, the customer experience has been enhanced, and the potential return on investment in the form of product uptake could be significant.

With the Marketing department, Madonna linked ICN initiatives to the marketing goal of increasing customer loyalty. He was also convinced that the customer data at his fingertips could also become an integral part of the Marketing team’s Voice of the Client practice that was launched late in 2006. “It was all about aligning the goals and objectives of the Investor Care Network with the goals and objectives of our internal partners,” says Madonna.

 

It wasn’t long before Madonna had the internal stakeholders onboard and the ICN accountable for achieving product uptake goals, revenue targets and research objectives. Achieving those targets was easier said than done, though. The BNY Mellon executive needed the technology to bring together information from the various channels and identify what data was important. The vision was to create a dashboard:  a tool that would harvest all channel information and report it in a metric-driven way that would become as familiar as the current metrics of average speed of answer or average handle time or abandonment rate. In a real sense, Madonna’s ability to develop such a tool would make or break turning his vision into reality.

Enter Enkata.  Madonna first met with the company when BNY Mellon Shareowner Services was looking for a supplier to help implement contact center performance management across various channels and systems. He then installed Enkata’s performance management system to track, analyze and report on metrics including first call resolution and volume statistics in 2007. He then e recognized the value Enkata could help deliver went even deeper.

 

With Enkata, BNY Mellon Shareowner Services found the purpose-built technical capabilities and industry expertise it needed, and the flexibility to rapidly customize and launch targeted solutions to their issues. Because Enkata hosted an on-demand solution also meant BNY Mellon Shareowner Services could focus on its business rather than devoting resources to implementing and maintaining yet another IT system.

Enkata and BNY Mellon Shareowner Services leveraged Enkata’s features, such as accurately determining the reason for an end user’s contact, in combination with a custom algorithm that would assign a value score to each and every interaction. Every metric, every analysis, every interaction value was then delivered to internal users via an intuitive, customizable dashboard for Marketing, Product, Sales or the ICN.

“It was clear Enkata got our vision and could help us close the gap between pure measurement of performance stats for identifying efficiencies and expense reduction opportunities to making a case to invest a portion of those savings into the Investor Care Network,” notes Madonna. “Even though this meant we could actually spend more time on the phone, it also meant we could get more information and accomplish more things that would contribute to achieving our overall business objectives.”

The BNY Mellon Shareowner Services’ ICN management team now has a seat at the table with their external clients. With the help of Enkata, Madonna is armed with fact-based insights into each client’s shareowner behavior. He successfully shifted client discussions from how the contact center can further reduce costs to how clients can use Investor Care data to deliver greater value to their shareowners. This unique service is now seen as giving a competitive advantage to BNY Mellon Shareowner Services clients.

“When we review our findings with clients about their shareowner behavior, conversations quickly move away from how fast and how often we got something done to why things are happening and how we can enhance or change the behavior,” Madonna explains. “These types of discussions differentiate us in the marketplace and create a deeper loyalty among our clients. Our clients see us as a true partner now."

As BNY Mellon Shareowner Services continues to introduce this new value-added service to its clients, the conversations will likely shift from understanding current customer behavior and its drivers to how the value of such interactions trend over time and what that really means to the clients and their end users. Meanwhile the internal obstacles have been overcome; the leadership team is fully supportive of the vision, and the Product Management and Marketing teams recognize the real value of the Investor Care Network.  ICN managers have embraced their new culture and view themselves as a strategic arm of the business, with their fingers on the pulse of the marketplace.

 

“This is the real value that Enkata brings us,” Madonna explains. “We can tangibly and empirically identify the value of every contact, eliminate contacts that offer little to no value, and proliferate contacts that offer greater value. As the market changes – and it always does -- we must continually determine where the value is and we’re going to continue to need Enkata to help us capture and track that value.”