Archive for July, 2011

Mortgage servicers get help with SPOC implementation

by Brian Moore on July 19, 2011 in 2011, Brian Moore, Mortgage, Varolii News with No comments

Over the past four months, mortgage servicers have been inundated by a wave of new guidelines and mandates that threaten to overwhelm their already stressed default servicing operations. Chief among these is the requirement to establish a single point of contact or SPOC for any borrower seeking to prevent loss of their home through one of many foreclosure prevention options.

With record numbers of loans in default, servicers have struggled to handle such borrower requests for assistance. In fact, one of the most frequent borrower complaints concerns their inability to get consistent, accurate information about modifying their mortgage from the variety of representatives they might speak with at their servicer. It is these complaints that have led to the SPOC requirement.

The FDIC, one of the multitude of agencies with oversight of the mortgage industry, said this as they announced their SPOC mandate:

“Having a single point of contact will not prevent all foreclosures, but it will reduce the numbers of avoidable foreclosures, as well as operational risks, associated with foreclosure processes that violate the servicers’ legal obligations.”

While establishing a single point of contact may lessen borrower frustration, it will cause a major disruption for servicers. Moving from a pooled agent contact center operation to one where the borrower speaks with one and only one representative every time they call would require servicers to quintuple their headcount. Even if enough experienced representatives could be found or new ones trained (difficult given the aggressive timelines mandated by the regulators), the costs of SPOC are almost unbearably high.

That's why Varolii has developed a comprehensive SPOC Mortgage Servicing Solution to automate most of the communications required to help move a borrower through a foreclosure prevention process while simultaneously providing them with easy, timely access to their SPOC. We estimate this will reduce demand for new headcount by 15% and could save the servicing industry $100 million per year.

Just as important, it will improve the borrower experience by proactively communicating status, next steps and any actions required on their part as they move through an unfamiliar and undoubtedly worrisome process.

Medical Therapy Should Include Treatment Adherence

by Mary Cook on July 19, 2011 in 2011, Mary Cook with 2 Comments

Being ill is hard. In order for a patient to feel better, he or she must follow the treatment suggested by his or her physician. This willingness to cooperate ensures that the patient is healthier, experiences a higher quality of life, has greater symptomatic relief, and requires less interventional care from unscheduled ER visits and nursing assistance.

What Does Effective Adherence Management Involve?

Effective adherence management involves educating and engaging the patient. By making them an active participant in the therapy process, physicians can help their patients improve their health as well as clinical outcomes. Although this may appear to be an easy task, it is not due to the sheer number of patients requiring care.

Sadly, it is difficult for healthcare providers to administer effective adherence management because they are either:

a) forced to scale back to efficiently deal with current workloads

b) hire additional care support specialists to meet needs, or

c) find a more effective way to generate reports than surveys administered by care support specialists or sent through the mail.

How Does It Benefit Organizations?

Improved and demonstrable patient adherence ensures better care and lower medical cost. Unnecessary hospitalizations, ER visits, nursing home admissions, and excess consumption of interventional treatments become fewer and less expensive.  This is good news for both patient and physician.

Enrollment and Maintenance, an Effective Approach

Engaging plan participants involves three steps. This is an effective way to promote compliance. Here they are:

  1. Awareness of programs - Patients should know that wellness and disease management programs exist. Without this knowledge, they are not able to take part of treatments.
  2. Enrollment of patients and members - Patients or members can be enrolled quickly and without the hassle of long forms or impatient call center employees.  This opens up the arena for questioning. Patients are at ease and can obtain the information that they are looking for.
  3. Ongoing engagement - Once the patient or member is engaged and adherent, the physician will want to keep them this way. They will want to continue to take an interest in their health and the maintenance of it.

Why Patients Fail to Take Their Prescribed Medications

Although it can be a variety of factors, here are a few of the reasons why patients state they do not take their prescribed medications:

patients medication1 Medical Therapy Should Include Treatment Adherence

  • Forgetfulness (30 percent)
  • Other priorities (16 percent)
  • Decision to omit doses (11 percent)
  • Lack of information (9 percent)
  • Emotional factors (7 percent)
  • No reason (27 percent)

Based on these answers, the four common areas to improve adherence include patient education, revised dosing schedules, increased hours when the clinic is open along with shorter waiting times, and improved communications between physicians and patients.

Three Secondary but Crucial Criteria

Three secondary but crucial criteria include:

  • Multi-lingual capabilities - Being able to effectively communication in a number of different languages is beneficial.
  • Multi-channel capabilities - Different channels such as cell phones, emails, and text messages improve communication because it appeals to other people.
  • Decisioning capabilities - Intervention strategy can be catered to the patient's needs as well as actual patient response data.

Treatment adherence results when patients and physicians feel comfortable in one another's presence. This allows them to forge a relationship that is built on trust. Once diagnosed with an illness, patients should be given the information that they need to maintain a healthier and happier lifestyle. Part of this education should include a lesson about how important treatments are and how adherence can improve the quality of their lives.

Varolii automates the patient outreach process, using any communication device, and personalizes messages that allow the patient to respond and take action. Our personalized messages to patients and members help efficiently monitor progress and manage care, effectively triage for intervention, and optimize care support resources. Keep in mind that the primary focus of all these efforts towards automating the engagement process are driving towards the goal of healthier patients, superior clinical outcomes, improved economic outcomes and better HEDIS scores. If you would like to learn more about of progressive engagement products, please visit our healthcare solutions.

You can also read the full whitepaper about Communications Therapy Improving Treatment Adherence.

Call Centers and Personality Mapping

by Mary Cook on July 14, 2011 in 2011, Call Centers, Mary Cook with 2 Comments

personality mapping1 Call Centers and Personality Mapping

One of the keys to success in delivering great customer service in the call center is matching a customer to the right agent. This is why skill based routing was born. In today’s digital world companies realize they can no longer take the approach of treating every customer the same. They want to provide personalized service to each customer as much as possible in an effort to build customer loyalty. There is much to say about the rapport between a customer and an agent. There is that something “special” that occurs during a conversation that goes beyond traditionally trained soft skills, and it has to do with personality types “clicking”. This chemistry is what many organizations are looking to utilize in an attempt to enhance their customer experience.

So how can companies match customers to agents based on skill as well as personality? Not surprisingly, it is all about the data. You need to have access to detailed data on your customers including their personality traits, which can then be used to route calls to the correct agent. Think of it as another layer of customer information that includes details about behaviors, habits, and traits, and details that go beyond just demographical information, preferred method of contact, or last item purchased. These personality details are then used to match a customer with the most suitable agent through enhanced intelligent call routing.

Personality mapping is facilitated by technology that matches your customers to your agents based on personality. It uses information that you understand about your customers and your call center agents and matches people who are more likely to have an optimal result. What an “optimal result” means to your organization should be determined while building your business requirements when you are considering personality routing. For example, an optimal result for a call center could be increased revenues. If this is the case, customers would be routed to agents who are more likely to get sales.

Optimally aligning agent and caller personalities can make a difference in your call center performance. In your call center, you most likely have a group of agents who always do well, another group that is in the middle, and another group that performs below standards. As customer service professionals, we know agents matters in transactions. If a customer calls and speaks to an agent and has a poor contact outcome, if they had arrived at a different agent, the call may have resulted differently.

I do recommend personality mapping be used in call centers with 100 agents or more. As a general rule bigger is better than smaller when executing personality mapping. More agents create more transactions and it is transactions that develop your model faster. If you have a hundred agents dispositioning 10 calls an hour, then you have thousands of transactions in a day and your system will learn faster.

Personality mapping puts the right people together. You can use personality mapping in an effort to increase the buying opportunity, reduce miscommunications, reduce callbacks, and improve levels of customer and agent satisfaction. And nothing pleases me more knowing that when my retired father who hates call center (yes, really…) reaches out to his providers there is the potential that he may get routed to an agent who fears no difficult customer and can speak “cranky” with ease…

You can pay me now...

by Brian Moore on July 7, 2011 in 2011, Banks/Finance, Brian Moore with 1 Comment

Because, trust me, it’s really not worth it to pay me later, at least as far as your credit score is concerned.

The personal finance management service Mint.com posted a very interesting study estimating the impact paying off four different financial obligations would have on a consumer’s FICO credit score. Starting with a below average score of 630, FICO’s own scoring tool projected the following:

A) Paying off a $250,000 mortgage would raise the consumer’s score from 630 to 635.

B) Paying off a $35,000 auto loan would also push the score up to 635.

C) Paying off a $5,000 credit card gets a much bigger bump, from 630 to 665.

D) Paying off a $1,000 bad debt in collections would actually lower the score from 630 to 595.

Bottom line: once you are in collections, it’s too late to avoid a hit to your credit score and paying off the bad debt can actually hurt. So the lesson for the consumer is to keep your accounts up to date.

But what’s the lesson for the creditor?

Creditors should educate their customers on the importance of on-time payment.

The education should start with the opening of the account, or shortly thereafter with a Welcome Call before the first bill is due. This is an opportunity to clearly communicate the account’s payment terms and the creditor’s credit reporting policy.  Options for enrolling in e-billing and automatic debit should also be presented, both of which are proven strategies for reducing delinquencies while lowering creditor costs.

If an account does go past due, the customer needs to know they are putting their credit score at risk before their account is reported as past due.  And to offer a little carrot along with that stick, they also need to be told that promptly curing the delinquency can help them maintain their credit standing.

However, if you are not reporting active account status to one or more of the major credit bureaus, then you can’t leverage this tool for driving customers to do what’s best for them and most profitable for you. Consider adding full file credit reporting to your customer management strategies. If you do so, you are likely to see a reduction in delinquency and bad debt as was the case for Nicor Gas when they began full file reporting in 1998. You can get the full story, along with similar experiences at DTE and Verizon in this compelling report by the Political & Economic Research Council.

Closing Thoughts

Varolii has over ten years of experience helping our creditor clients deliver information to their customers in ways that drive them to take profitable action. Our Message Masters design digital communications using voice, SMS and email channels that educate and persuade customers in a manner consistent with our client’s policies. But if credit reporting is not one of those policies, it can’t be used as an inducement to shape customer behavior.

And as illustrated in Mint.com’s credit scoring experiment, in that case, everybody pays more than they should.

The Evolution of Collections Technology

by Brian Moore on July 1, 2011 in 2011, Brian Moore, Varolii News with 1 Comment

One of the few advantages of getting older (or just plain old as my son's remind me) is it allows you to look back over a longer time frame to observe how things have changed, especially when the changes are gradual rather than abrupt.

I shared the following slide with the members of the Telecommunications Risk Management Association (TRMA) at their conference in San Francisco this week. It illustrates some of the major changes in the technology of collections over the 30 years I've been in the industry, and the impact they have had on the productivity and size of collections operations.

trma collections results1 The Evolution of Collections Technology

Do you think I am overstating the impact by suggesting that collections operations today are over ten times more productive (and thus less than one-tenth the size) than they were 30 years ago?

In some companies, perhaps.

But here are two factoids that support my assertion:

  • Account to collector ratios (ACR) in 1980 were measured in the low hundreds. Now they are more typically in the low thousands. TRMA’s own benchmarking data shows the ACR in their industry has increased 33% in just the last six months!
  • I have met with three large issuers of consumer credit in the past month who have no collectors at all! Sure, they outsource some of their customer contact to a third party servicer, but they are also heavy users of self-service automation that dramatically reduces their need for human agents. And their losses are lower than their industry averages, perhaps because management attention is more focused on optimizing their strategies and tactics rather than hiring, training and retaining FTE.

I started my career as a collector in 1980, tearing off my daily printout of delinquent accounts, pulling my history cards, then “smiling and dialing”. After a few years of this drudgery and then managing the same, I decided to spend the rest of my career driving technology and productivity into the process, the last 10 years with Varolii. I’m proud of the progress we’ve made together in driving collections efficiency, and we’re working hard to make this decade the most productive ever.

Have a happy Independence Day and raise a toast to American ingenuity!