Mortgage Company Gets New Talk Show

The Melville, N.Y.-based residential mortgage lender supports its online division, MortgageSelect.com, with three call centers,one in Melville, another in Kingston, N.Y., and the third in Laguna Hills, Calif.

Before the company turned to solution provider Comforce for some guidance, all incoming calls were manually routed by operators to the appropriate agents.

But as American Home's online business grew, the company began searching for a more sophisticated call center solution, said Paul Knag, executive vice president.

The call centers used traditional, stand-alone PBX phone systems that offered no automated reporting, Knag said. "Through enormous effort, we did a lot of manual reporting, tracking and call answering," he said.

Last year, American Home turned to communications networking vendor Alcatel and the Information Technology division of Comforce, a staffing, consulting and outsourcing solution provider based in Woodbury, N.Y.

"They needed to step into the 21st century and get a system that would give their call centers IVR [interactive voice response and could be networked easily," said Ernie Bailey, director of engineering and project management at Comforce.

The solution provider implemented a $700,000 call center solution that included an Alcatel OmniPCX 4400 IP-PBX in each call center and Alcatel's Contact Center communications software suite, including CCIVR, a module that supports speech-based menu prompts for call routing, Bailey said.

Implementation began last October, and staggered rollouts to each call center were completed in April, Bailey said.

Added Steve Simon, manager of call center operations at American Home: "[The solution can be easily expanded for future growth. It can grow with us."

Comforce connected the systems across American Home's existing frame relay network and integrated Alcatel's IVR system with the mortgage company's Microsoft SQL customer database. Using a caller's account information or telephone number, the system automatically routes incoming calls to the agent the customer previously talked to, regardless of that agent's location. Through menu prompts, the system routes new callers to appropriate agents.

Alcatel's automated call routing features enabled American Home to reduce the number of its operators to eight from 14, Knag said. In addition, the mortgage company is now better able to spread calls across time zones and balance the volume of calls distributed to its centers, he said.

Calls to American Home's toll-free numbers, for example, can be routed to the company's East Coast centers in the morning and gradually shifted to its California center later in the day, Knag said.

Calls transferred among agents are routed over the IP network, saving on long-distance charges, Bailey said, adding that the new system has also improved the efficiency of American Home's call center agents.

And since the Alcatel system measures and reports the volume and duration of calls, the mortgage company can more easily track its agents' performance now, he said.

"We knew certain agents were putting forth greater effort [than others, but now we can quantify it, which helps us manage our staff," Knag said. "It allows us to evaluate agent performance, business relationship performance, performance by call center and performance as a whole."

Comforce is now integrating e-mail and live chat so that Web site visitors can have direct access to American Home's call center agents, and that should reduce the number of duplicate sales leads, Knag said.

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