On demand call center helps financial services firm beat the bear trend

This Best Practice is part of a collection of advice provided by information technology professionals on how they have solved various challenges, and addressed IT priorities within their organizations.

Company: AccountNow, Inc.

Challenge: AccountNow's customer base was growing rapidly and its existing call center technology could not meet the demand. In addition, call volumes fluctuate weekly and seasonally, so AccountNow was looking for a solution that provided a cost-effective way to meet the spikes in call volumes while ensuring optimum customer service. It also needed to expand its use of remote agents as well as adding additional sites.

Solution: Echopass and its hosted Contact Center On-Demand solution.

The Echopass solution allowed AccountNow to easily meet its increasing number of customer calls. The hosted technology included a seamless way for customer contact information to be delivered to agents concurrent with the call, making agents 30% more efficient. The Echopass technology also included a comprehensive Interactive Voice Response (IVR) system allowing for a greater percentage of customers to obtain required information without agent assistance, while enabling live agent interaction as the initial customer preference or once self service had been completed. Today, 90% of customer calls are resolved by this self service option. Increased agent efficiency and the IVR system meant AccountNow could meet increased call volumes without adding agents.

Echopass' hosted call center technology made it possible - easy, in fact - to meet fluctuating call volumes. To handle both weekly and seasonal call increases, AccountNow calls Echopass to add capacity on demand. When call volumes drop to average levels, the staff is scaled back. Account now pays only for the capacity it uses.

AccountNow has also saved facilities cost by using remote agents. Since the Echopass solution enables multi-sourcing of agent pools, AccountNow can add remote agents and manage them as if they were working within the call center. Supervisors see statistics, monitor calls and track activities of all agents - both remote and onsite - in real time. This improves agent productivity, call center management, and ensures prompt call handling response time.

AccountNow eliminated acquisition, maintenance and upgrade costs while lowering its total cost of ownership and increasing its return on investment. It also obtained the ability to add features quickly and painlessly.

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