One of the largest financial institutions in South America recently underwent a restructuring process aimed at reducing costs and optimizing quality. High among the financial company’s objectives was making sure its customers’ service needs were met immediately and effectively.

We were brought in to help improve the bank’s contact center interactions, with the primary objective revolving around the improvement of first contact resolution and quality, both of which are extremely important factors in determining customer satisfaction. The client chose us because of our proven success at driving business results, our end-to-end capabilities and experience within the banking sector, and our holistic perspective of customer engagement.

The first step was to focus on improvements among contact center operations and staff, including associates, supervisors, and analysts. Training was required to help associates become experts in the bank’s different lines of business so they could effectively and efficiently reply to customers’ questions and resolve their issues the first time. Success also required routing customers to the right associate and streamlining processes to make them more efficient.

Initially, the team started with a small operation dealing with personal credit, insurance, and back office support. Within the first eight months, the need for customers to call back decreased by 10 percent. Encouraged by this success, the team expanded the partnership to other areas of the business, and built a new site with 1,300 additional full-time employees. The bank’s training team collaborated with ours to prepare the new hires during an intensive 25-day course. New hires completed training able to effectively represent the bank’s products, support clients, route calls, and escalate where necessary.

Cognizant that one of the pain points of contact centers is employee churn, our Human Capital division made a concerted effort to hire the right people. We worked with the client to develop employee profiles. We also collaborated on a competitive compensation package to attract and retain higher quality associates and supervisors, as well as mitigate attrition risks and build long-term strength. The collaboration has been extremely successful and the new contact center is near capacity.