Outbound Call Center Featured Article

UK's Apex Credit Management on Awards Shortlist: With Help From Noble and Nexidia

By Brendan B. Read
Senior Contributing Editor

Nominees for the Oscars can rest with the awards handed out last Sunday. Those nominated for the United Kingdom’s contact center equivalent, the Contact Centre Innovation Awards 2011 have to wait until April 12 at the Customer Contact Planning 2011 at Birmingham, England to find out whether they have won.

The Professional Planning Forum, an independent industry body that promotes contact center planning and resourcing and sponsor of the event and the award has released the names of 20 nominees. And among those making the august list is Apex (News - Alert) Credit Management, a leading debt management company: thanks to collections and compliance monitoring achievements aided by deploying Noble System’s contact center platform and Nexidia’s speech analytics solutions.

The Noble Systems’ (News - Alert) Contact Center Suite includes predictive dialing, inbound and outbound IVR, e-mail and SMS, and call recording. It records 100 percent calls and fully integrates with and extracts rich customer metadata from Apex’s debt collection system to manage collections campaigns that improve collector productivity and boost revenues collected. The Nexidia (News - Alert) tool documents “right party contacts” and analyzes the detail on each call to extract detailed customer information.

These solutions replaced manual dialing and an individual case ownership system that the firm says “hampered productivity and company growth potential.”

“Noble and Nexidia have been excellent partners,” reports Steve Mound, Apex chief operating officer. “The product ‘does what it says on the tin’. It is now fully embedded as part of our total solution to the market. We believe we are setting new standards in dealing with people with financial difficulties. I believe this level of compliance and consumer engagement can only help our industry to demonstrate how serious we are about treating customers fairly.”

Apex also implemented an SAS debt management system to control contact strategies based on data segmentation techniques. Data is analyzed in the SAS (News - Alert) system and each account is then strategized appropriately to increase efficiency and reduce costs.

The results, reports Apex, have been positive and strong especially in the face of a tough economy. Conversion rates increased by 15 percent and cash collected per agent per hour jumped by 30 percent. Customer complaint calls that previously took up to two weeks to extract all relevant customer calls can now be pulled together in about 10 minutes. Detailed analyses of all calls are delivered to the team manager’s desktops each morning, dramatically reducing the hours they spend searching for relevant calls to audit.

Approximately 30 hours/month of team leaders’ time has been saved and is being reinvested in 50 percent more coaching: which is far more targeted. The 100 percent call recordings ensure fair performance reviews. Audit scores have jumped by 20 percent-30 percent.

The Noble/Nexidia solution has also reduced contact center agent churn. The pilot team has lowest attrition rate in the company and all agents hit bonus during the pilot.

“This integrated solution is enabling us to understand in detail what is happening in the customer/agent interactions – a vital information life-blood for any organization,” says Apex, in seeking the award. “It has enabled us to release team leaders’ time and provide targeted coaching and mentoring for all our front-line staff. It has allowed us to build a sense of worth and improve agent productivity and compliance. It has allowed us to generate far more effective results (cash collected) from those customers we manage to reach. It has also improved our standing and reputation with our existing and new clients, a lot of whom are large blue chip financial organizations.”