ABOUT CHINATRUST COMMERCIAL BANK 
Founded in 1966 and originally known as the China Securities and Investment Corporation, Chinatrust Commercial Bank (CTCB) provides services which include savings deposits, guarantees, foreign exchange,  trusts, credit cards, cash cards, securities, bonds, financial derivatives, purchases of accounts receivables, safe deposits, and electronic banking.  By the end of 2005, CTCB had 111 domestic outlets, 66 overseas outlets and 3,493 domestic ATMs.  The Bank’s deposit balance reached NT$1.24 trillion (1 US$ = 32 New Taiwan $) and total assets have exceeded NTD1.6 trillion, topping the list of private banks in Taiwan.

With about 8 million subscribers of credit card and cash credit, CTCB’s contact center provides 24/7 service with over 600 agents handling approximately 2 million calls per month.

THE CHALLENGE
CTCB’s Customer Service Center was looking for a solution to help them achieve performance goals, such as improving agents’ quality of service regarding MoT (Moment of Truth, i.e. the critical moment during which the way the agent handles a particular statement or question by the customer determines whether or not the call was successfully handled) and VoC (Voice of Customer, i.e. ensuring that agents are attentive to customer needs and deliver information to the backoffice), and improving customer satisfaction and retention. 

In addition to supporting customer inquiries and solving the potential grievances of consumer finance clients, cross-selling is another performance parameter by which agents are measured.  Furthermore, it is the agent’s responsibility to ensure customer retention by providing the highest quality of service.

With approximately 70% of credit card customers calling into CTCB’s contact center on an annual basis, the role of the agent as the front-line interface with customers is critical for its goals of customer care and retention.  CTCB was looking to ensure that agents are following required service procedures and are applying well-honed skills regarding problem solving and communications.

To achieve these goals CTCB was looking for a quality management solution that would help them best understand how well agents are handling calls.  Furthermore, they were looking for an agent coaching solution that would go beyond basic, introductory training, to make sure that critical information on best practices or new campaigns is always accessible, and to tailor such information to the specific skill-set of an individual agent.

THE SOLUTION
CTCB implemented NICE’s customer interactions solutions for contact centers to capture customer interactions and correlate with agents’ screen activity to ensure that all quality and performance parameters are met.

“NICE solution makes ‘measurement’ possible, providing us with a clear understanding of what is really going on in our contact center.  With NICE, CTCB’s Customer Service Center supervisors and managers can now gain a clear picture of how well we are implementing new procedures, how well our employees are following new policies, and whether or not our customers are satisfied with the service they are receiving.”

The NICE solution helped them understand agents’ performance and competence not only from a technical point of view, that is – knowledge of offerings and services, but overall competence delivering the highest quality of service to customers.

Before NICE, supervisors would do cumbersome, manual quality checks, which they found to be limited.   For example, the supervisor would not know whether the agent is on the proper screen, nor could they playback the call later.  
With NICE they have the call readily available to play whenever they want, they can rewind, and correlate to screen activity to see if agents are following the proper script, for example.

This approach leaves little room for doubt, and enables agents to better understand their performance levels.  When agents listen to their calls, they identify the success factors or pitfalls of the interaction on their own.  And correlating quality scores to specific calls has proven to be a very powerful means for agents to understand and improve performance without the need for supervisor intervention. 

“Once an agent is engaged and empowered through the kind of training we can now provide with NICE, quality of service is maximized, resulting in tremendous customer satisfaction improvements.”

The results have been remarkable.  NICE has helped CTCB improve QM productivity, process management and quality of service. For example, in just six months’ time agent performance ratings have improved by 16%.  Customer satisfaction ratings increased from an average rating of 5, on a scale of 1-10, to an average of 7+ at 91% of the time, and 8+ at 80% of the time.