Opinion

How to Improve Servicing Call Centers with Existing Tech

A call center is the core of a servicer's operations. Each time a borrower calls into his or her servicing company, a simple authentication process of most commonly entering the loan number and the last four digits of the borrower's Social Security number, should be the only task required of them; leaving the rest to the servicer and its implemented technology.

Yet borrowers' most common complaint continues to be time and effort spent on their end inputting and re-inputting the same information to connect with their agent—a waste of time and resources for both parties.

With an increasing industry and regulatory emphasis on streamlined communication with borrowers, servicers should evaluate every opportunity to build efficiencies into their processes. It is possible for servicers to successfully meet these demands while simultaneously increasing customer satisfaction, reducing call times and processing costs by enhancing their call center systems. Computer Telephony Integration-enabled systems leverage existing call center platforms to provide sophisticated screen pop options. The challenge lies in enabling communication between disparate systems and consistently linking caller account information with each call.

So once implemented, what are the key benefits of utilizing screen pops and how do they help servicers better achieve compliance?

Reducing the Average Call Length

Agents spend—on average—15-20 seconds greeting the borrower and asking for his or her account information (which has likely already been keyed in). This is a waste of valuable time for both the borrower and the servicer. Screen pops can reduce the average length of calls, and provide a considerable amount of cost savings, by giving servicers back those 15-20 seconds lost on executing redundant processes and enable them with more time and opportunities to assist other customers.

Increasing Customer Satisfaction

Customer satisfaction has become an increasingly important business consideration, as improvements in customer satisfaction positively impact the overall efficiency of any call center. Call centers using screen pops eliminate the most common customer complaints: the tedious repetition of loan and personal data entry. Borrowers will air their frustrations to servicers once they connect on the phone, lengthening the duration of the call once again.

However, the implementation of screen pops will demonstrate a higher level of interest from servicers when borrowers don’t have to repeat themselves.

Improving Agent Performance

Quality service is infectious in a servicing environment. When agents know their call center is committed to a higher level of customer service, their own performance tends to rise to that higher expectation. The result is often increased levels of customer retention or other cross-selling success. Screen pops create a superior customer interactive environment with increased customer engagement, improving and shortening a servicer’s time spent on individual calls.

Additionally, typical call centers utilize a variety of disparate technologies from different vendors. A CTI-enabled system manages the behind-the-scenes communications by interfacing with pre-existing systems to track the movement of calls throughout the call center, which is vital to generate robust reporting and an audit trail.

Although screen pop solutions are widely utilized in the servicing industry, the cost of compliance and technology implementation has often placed the solution out of reach for many small to midsized servicing call centers.

However, the cost savings and increase in daily operational efficiencies that screen pops offer servicers make the technology more affordable in the long run, especially in the current regulatory environment.

Screen pop technology links with existing servicing technology to provide a simple and efficient borrower experience while improving agent performance and reducing the average call length. By auto-populating borrower information on a servicer’s computer during the routing of a borrower's phone call, call center processes are streamlined, efficiency levels are reached and borrowers' needs are satisfied.

Barry Hays is co-founder and senior vice president of TeleVoice, a provider of customized call center solutions, to the financial services industry.

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Mortgage technology Servicing
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