National City Mortgage is a mortgage and origination servicing company. The challenge facing the company was how to improve its agents’ performance.
National City Mortgage selected a solution that combined Avaya Call Management System (CMS) and Predictive Dialing System (PDS) with VPI’s Activ! Intelligence and Activ! Coaching solutions. VPI (Voice Print International, Inc.) a Gold-level member in the Avaya DeveloperConnection program, is a provider of integrated interaction recording and workforce optimization solutions for enterprises, trading floors, government agencies, and first responders.


A Business Challenge 
The challenge was how to improve agent performance, which was measured by several indicators, including talk time, quality of service, collections results and after call processing time. 

Prior to adopting VPI’s Activ! Intelligence and Activ! Coaching solutions, National City Mortgage was only able to give agents feedback on their stats the next day or at month-end, using traditional reporting methods. This methodology was failing because it put the stats “out of sight, out of mind.” There were no immediate consequences for failure to perform and no immediate benefits to superior performance. 

National City Mortgage considered alternative solutions, including reader boards a pre-packaged solution included with their dialer (vlterm equivalent). Reader boards deliver queue information that is immediate, but they cannot display individual agent performance. Some vlterm equivalents display call information, but only from the dialer. This was not a full solution for National City Mortgage, as they have a blended environment managing both inbound and outbound calls. The company needed a solution that would blend its data together into a unified database.


Key Capabilities of the Solution 
The solution included Avaya CMS and Avaya PDS combined with VPI’s Activ! Coaching and Activ! Intelligence solutions.


Avaya CMS provides the information and management tools customers need to monitor and analyze the performance of their contact center operations, showing where improvements are needed and where to take fast effective action.


Avaya PDS allows agents to reach more customers, quicker and more profitably through the use of Automated Technology and Applications for Outbound Dialing Solutions.


VPI’s Activ! Intelligence is an enterprise solution for collecting and presenting call center performance metrics. It distributes real-time information to agents and managers using dashboards, scorecards and consolidated reports, and also displays performance metrics against set standards or overall call center results.


VPI’s Activ! Coaching, when integrated with Activ! Intelligence, automatically intervenes when agents are under-performing. The means to trigger training based on agent results provides an unprecedented level of coaching automation.

Seamless Transition to a New System
The transition to the new system went smoothly, with milestones completed easily and on time. VPI worked closely with National City Mortgage’s IT staff to resolve internal issues; these were overcome quickly with minimum impact to the business. 

Once National City Mortgage decided to purchase Activ! Intelligence and Activ! Coaching, VPI worked with their call center operations personnel to define the dashboard and reporting deliverables. VPI designed the dashboard based on this input. 

Avaya provided VPI with product knowledge, technical resources, support and a testing environment so that VPI applications could be compliance tested. Avaya also provided application notes to ensure interoperability of the solution components. 

VPI worked with National City Mortgage’s IT and telecom staff to install the software and the connectivity to the Avaya systems.  The dashboard allowed National City Mortgage to set thresholds for performance and receive immediate feedback. As the thresholds were met, not met or exceeded, the stats on the screen changed color. This immediate feedback positively reinforced good behaviors and negatively reinforced the less productive ones. National City Mortgage can now make further modifications or create entirely new dashboards in-house without the need to involve its IT department or VPI. 

Activ! Intelligence produces canned reports available through a standard Web browser, which can be pulled by any time period required (daily, weekly, monthly, previous month). These reports start at the global level and allowed National City Mortgage to drill down to the individual job, queue or agent level. All reports are accessed with a simple point and click, requiring little to no learning curve to run them.

Activ! Coaching allows for the creation and distribution of key materials such as refresher courses, regulatory information and weekly quizzes. Activ! Coaching let National City Mortgage track which agents had taken the training courses and quizzes or read various documentation, and kept records for auditing purposes. Activ! Coaching allowed National City Mortgage to deliver content to individuals, teams or departments  via a rules-based engine, which can be customized in-house within the application. 

Other capabilities include integrated inbound and outbound statistics on the same dashboard and a large in-depth database for long-term trending.


Product Benefits
The solution enables agents to receive their specific call stats in real time, delivered directly to their desktops. By having up-to-the-minute statistics, agents can improve their performance, see immediate results and consistently exceed their monthly goals. Managers view consolidated real-time and historical reports of their call center operations so that they can proactively adjust campaigns and make better business decisions, as well as focus on revenue generating activities.


Specific Benefits Included: 
• Decreased agent talk time
• For supervisors and managers, access to data that they did not have before, using a simple point and click interface
• Increased internal response times to data requests, with less reliance on IT department
• Better control and tracking of agent education (training is an important component to the mortgage industry, as companies get rated based on the number of training hours their agents receive)
• Increased employee morale (employees could see and better control their own stats/performance measures, meet or exceed their performance goals, and receive increased incentive payouts)
• Flexibility and ease of customization
• Small desktop footprint
• Consistent reinforcement of behavior


Other Benefits Included:
• Improvement in outbound talk time
• Increase in blended calls per hour
• Improvement in average speed to answer
• Improvement in inbound abandonment
• Sizeable dollar savings in first year