Case Study: Freedom Mortgage

CUSTOMER PROFILE

THE SOLUTION

Evangelizing a Performance-based Approach

Today, Freedom Mortgage’s leadership has a vision where NICE solutions work jointly with their CRM solution. NICE will be the “brains” behind how they staff, which campaigns get staffed, and the single source of truth related to performance.

To help get there, Gallo gathered details from every area of the business, including their executives and business channel leaders: what were their challenges, what reports were they looking at today, what gaps existed?

He then collaborated with VRS to understand best practices, how other NICE customers were seeing the most success, and how Freedom Mortgage could best apply NICE solutions to optimize and automate.

VRS supported strategy building by providing demos, coaching best practices and identifying additional areas that could be optimized and automated. Beyond strategy, VRS delivered the how behind achieving these goals, with change management and communication plans as well as training and training materials review.

Phased Approach to Drive Improvements

Freedom Mortgage chose to pursue an aggressive launch schedule, going live with WFM in three months. Not long after, they rolled out NPM, first to their Operations teams (back office and phone agents) and a small group of sales leaders and, a month later, to additional leaders and Sales.

The phased rollout worked out well for Freedom Mortgage for three reasons:

1. They wanted a lot of customizations but could begin with out-of-the-box features right away—particularly key for ‘phone-only’ agents.
2. They anticipated some would be ecstatic for the new solutions and some resistant to change. This approach created “I want that” envies when other groups saw the performance data, productivity improvement and cost savings.
3. The phased approach also aligned with VRS recommendations and program design: first, establish comfort with the solution, grow adoption and then focus on optimization.

THE RESULTS

Steel-thread View of Productivity & Performance

One of Freedom Mortgage’s biggest challenges was data. Gallo explains, “Everyone had different reports from different systems, resulting in metric inconsistencies. My team was charged with investigating what data was real. Now, everyone will be looking at the same data, and our executives have a top-to-bottom, steel-thread view of every agent’s performance.”

The speed of impact is also notable. For example, Freedom Mortgage saw an 11% increase in overall productivity for the initial launch group within three months. This reduced ‘turn time’ in their process by 24 hours.

Across the larger organization, Freedom Mortgage has significantly reduced costs by identifying latent capacity for the Operations group and moving to a blended agent model for other groups.

“Ultimately,” says Gallo, “we’re moving in a direction where productivity factors into our performance and quality review processes. Our VRS business consultant is helping us develop the right coaching— what our standard routines, meeting cadences and messaging should be when meeting with agents to discuss performance metrics.”

Centralized Data & Dashboard

Freedom Mortgage significantly reduced the number of reports by consolidating the most meaningful data into automated, self-service, drill-down dashboards within NPM. Using custom data integrations, the system pulls WFM phone metrics, adherence, forecasting and scheduling data, and off-phone desktop activity for a complete view of agent performance. VRS guided the creation of new activity codes within WFM to capture these NPM off-phone data points. This enabled one cohesive view of performance from the two systems.

The results are significant:

• Report Consolidation: 30+ manual Sales and Operations reports to 10 automated dashboards.
• Automated Schedule Exceptions: From 100s of emails a day to trigger manual adjustments to one-automated self-service report.
• Sales Activity: Saved 45 minutes per day by automating this sales report to a selfservice dashboard that provides visibility into performance trends.
• Productivity to Goal: Can now immediately identify agents using best practices vs. those to target for coaching.

As a result of implementing best practices and automation, adherence for phone agents is up 3%, and they’ve maintained 90% adherence overall since launch. On schedule exceptions alone, initial cost savings are approximately $150k annually.

Targeted Improvements

“We’re at the point now,” Gallo says, “where we can target the metrics we want to improve.” Freedom Mortgage’s ROI will continue to grow as they apply these insights to additional channels.

The company has optimized its capacity planning with powerful insights into the right roles to maintain and those less beneficial to their sales and operational performance metrics. This data-backed evidence guided a 46% reduction in non-additive roles for one group and the reallocation of many additional FTE to roles that contribute greater value to the company.

Based on their success, Freedom Mortgage is considering expansion to CXone and will further leverage NICE Value Realization Services as they expand and optimize with NICE.