Call Centers - Banking

MITEM software has been selected by many financial institutions to enhance, extend and integrate the legacy systems that run call center environments. Many of these customers, who were looking to preserve their investments in legacy systems, selected MITEM over standard CRM packages because their systems already held the exact functionality they needed, but required improvements to the end-user workflow.

Case-in-Point: Norwest Mortgage

Summary: A wholly owned subsidiary of Norwest Corporation, Norwest Mortgage, Inc. (NMI) is America's largest mortgage originator and servicer with a portfolio in excess of $100 billion. Norwest has long recognized the value of customer service and continues to set the standard for growth and customer excellence. Business operations span multiple loan origination and servicing call centers across the USA. NMI are the single largest subscriber to ALLTEL Information Services, the nations largest mortgage service bureau. The Mortgage Service Package (MSP) from ALLTEL services several hundred mortgage organizations and enjoys a 45% market share in the industry.

Norwest's business goal was to substantially grow their mortgage portfolio by acquiring competitive operations at a rapid pace and quickly consolidating them into NMI operations. Because many of the competitive operations used the same mortgage service bureau as Norwest, customers of different mortgage servicing organizations had been assigned the same loan number. Norwest needed a solution which could resolve duplicate loan numbers so they could provide complete customer service support to any customer from any call center. In addition, they wanted to impose consistent practices for all 140 CSRs across the 7 regional service centers while substantially improving the quality and efficiency of their customer service operations.

Project Goals

• Reduce call handling time (AHT) by 25%
• Reduce call-back time
• Reduce CSR errors
• Support ANY mortgage from ANY center
• Reduce system training time
• Consistent business practices across centers
• Increase overall quality of customer service
• Rapid implementation

Solution

After evaluating over 25 different software technologies Norwest selected MitemView to communicate data from the mainframe to the new graphical user interface (GUI).

The Norwest project was being managed by CAP Gemini. Mr. Bob Hardister, Senior Project Manager for CAP Gemini stated, "We assembled a team to research technologies that would meet their specific needs." Because of cost restraints and a tight schedule, Norwest decided to keep the existing mainframe functionality and centralized architecture while implementing a new Windows based front-end to optimize the CSRs workflow process. "The new system would effectively wrap around the service bureau's existing mainframe system" said Hardister.

Results

The new environment enables NMI to enjoy continued portfolio growth, with increased process efficiencies, and assured mortgage servicing quality. The business work flow is now embedded into the system, resulting in reduced training time and increased operator accuracy. The results of the first phase have increased CSR productivity by over 25%, eliminating 1 minute from the average call handling time (AHT).