Customer Relationship Management Helps Chase Card Services Manage Customer Calls Essays

Customer Relationship Management Helps Chase Card Services Manage Customer Calls Essays Customer Relationship Management Helps Chase Card Services Manage Customer Calls Essay Customer Relationship Management Helps Chase Card Services Manage Customer Calls Essay If you have a credit card, theres a good chance that it is from Chase. Chase Card Services is the division of JP Morgan Chase which specializes in credit cards, offering a vast array of credit card products such as the Chase Rewards Platinum Visa card. As one of the [argest credit card issuers in the United States, the company fields a correspondingly large amount of calls from people seeking customer service for their credit card accounts.Each of Chases 6,000 call center agents worldwide at the companys 11 call centers fields field up to 120 calls per day. The company handles slightly less than 200 million calls each year from a customer base of 100 million. Even a small reduction of 1% to the amount of calls received results in savings of millions of dollars and improved customer service for Chase. Achieving such a reduction is easier said than done, however. Li. 2006, Chase Card Services attempted to accom- plish this by improving first-call resolution. Fi rst-call esolution is when a call center agent is able to resolve a customers issues during the initial call to customer service without requiring additional calls. The problem was that the companys record keeping did not give an accurate account of current rates of first-call resolution. Chase had previously tried tracking first-call resolution rates oy having agents log the content and results of each call they received. But this task was time- consuming and was not standardized, since agents :ended to record results subjectively and not in a iniform way.Company policies for some customer requests were also far from ideal for increasing First-call resolution. For example, agents were only able to process balance transfers for customers calling from their homes, and the fee structure inderwent multiple changes over a short span, prompting repeat calls. Po improve call center efficiency, Chase contracted with Enkata technologies to implement a oerformance and talent management syste m. The system monitors and tags each call with the :opic and length of the call as well as the length of time the agent that handled the call has been orking. It doesnt require agents to perform any lotion to acquire this information; it tracks calls automatically by keeping track of the keyboard strokes of each agent. As soon as an agent clicks on the feature of the account that the customer is calling about, the Enkata system automatically identifies the reason for the call. Proprietery algorithms match the reason and caller identification to the amount of time predetermined for each type of call. The system then monitors discrepancies in call time, depending on the reason for the call. For xample, a call from a customer requiring card activation should be a quick call, so the system will pinpoint card activation calls that take longer than normal, or fee dispute calls that are shorter than normal. But sometimes customers have multiple reasons for calling, which would have been ve ry difficult to track prior to the implementation of Enkatas system. Now Enkata separates each individ- ual reason for calling and organizes them into a sequence, so that a call with multiple issues to resolve is analyzed using the appropriate time frame.By separating and organizing reasons for calling into distinct categories, Chase is able to determine criteria for declaring particular calls resolved For example, a card activation call will be considered resolved after only a few days without a follow-up call, but a disputed fee call wont be considered resolved until the customer received another statement without any complaints. This method gives Chase much more accurate data on first-call resolution, a feat which is regarded as very difficult and impressive in the industry. Enkata compiles this data and distributes it toChase Card Services in the form of weekly reports on call type and length, call handling times, repeat call rates, and other performance measures that allow both agents and supervisors to monitor their performance. The system also connects reports with call recordings to assist managers in coaching and evaluating their agents. When the system was still being implemented, Enkata used historical call data gathered prior to the implementation to create initial reports. Chase Card Services executives considered this initial upload of data to be the most time- consuming part of the implementation.Once the implementation was complete, the company hoped that improvements in the interpretation and management of this information would lead to improvements in agent pertbrmance, customer satisfaction, and customer retention. The results speak for themselves. Chase Card Services improved its first-call resolution rate to 91%, an increase of 3%, in its first year after the imple- mentation of the Enkata system. That represented a total savings of $8 million. Approximately $2. 5 mil- Lion of that total savings was a direct result of the average call time decreasing by two seconds.The company hopes to reach its goal of 95% within the next few years. A perfect rate of 100% first-call resolution is not feasible because some additional calls after the first are acceptable under certain circumstances, such as a customer remembering a charge that he or she had initially disputed. CASE STUDY QUESTIONS 1. What functions of customer relationship manage- ment systems are illustrated in this case? 3. Why is the call center so important for Chase Card Services? How could Chases call centers help it improve relationships with customers? . Describe the problem at Chase call centers. What management, organization, or technology factors contributed to the problem?3. How did using Enkata improve operational perfor- mance and decision making? Give examples. E. What management, organization, or technology factors would have to be considered in implement- ing the Enkata solution? Within three months time, 30% of agents that had scored below the accept able rate for first-call resolution improved to an acceptable rate. And although the number of active customer accounts grew by 5. % in the six months after implementation of the system, call volume decreased 8. 3% over that same span. Encouraged by these successes, Chase Card Services is now looking to expand the capabilities of the system to classify calls into even more cate- gories, and to link their collected data to marketing programs to foster cross-selling and upselling. Sources: Marshall Lager, Credit Where Due, Customer Relationship Management, April 2008; Michele Heller, How Chase Got Control of Call-Center Expenses, American Banker, February 26, 2008.