How Chase Chased Down Costs

In 2006, in the midst of a companywide quest to improve efficiency, JPMorgan Chase & Co.'s card unit was grappling with an old problem: improving first-call resolution at its call center.

Chase Card Services receives more than 80 million customer calls a year. Reducing that number by even 1% would save millions of dollars in annual costs and improve customer service.

But to up the rate at which it met caller needs during the initial call, the business unit needed better and more accurate data -- about repeat calls, frequency of transfers, and the like -- than it was then able to provide.

In 1998 the Wilmington, Del., unit had tried to track first-call resolution by having customer service representatives log the topic and results of every call they took. The time-consuming task created discrepancies in data, since it relied on judgment calls by agents. Because the integrity of the data wasn't 100%, Chase Card Services stopped tracking it.

Two years ago executives decided to try again. "We know a key driver in customer satisfaction is first-call customer resolution. We needed to find a tool or develop one ourselves to systemically track first-call resolution," said Deborah F. Walden, the executive vice president of customer care at Chase Card Services.

Executives looked at five products in April 2006, and they considered designing their own.

At the end of July 2006, Chase Card Services agreed to use a performance and talent management system from Enkata Technologies Inc. of San Mateo, Calif., that monitors and tags every call according to a variety of factors, including the topic, the length of the call, and the tenure of the agent who handles it. The system reports the types of calls and agents with the highest repeat call rates, and it makes available recordings that managers can use for coaching and employee evaluation.

Implementation started that August. After about 14 weeks of building the system and testing the data, it was ready for a test run at Chase Card Services' facility in Orlando. A couple of months later the unit rolled the system out to its 10 other call centers in the United States, Canada, and India.

Chase Card Services officials said they selected Enkata's system because it is not dependent on the unit's servers and other resources and could be implemented within 14 weeks, as well as for the way Enkata did business. "It was really the expertise they brought to the table and the personal involvement of their leadership team," Ms. Walden said. "It wasn't going to be the sales team that sold it and then [made] a complete hand-off."

She said it gave her confidence that "even their contract is such that you can cancel at any time."

Perhaps most importantly, Chase Card Services executives said they liked the fact that, unlike most other first-call resolution systems, Enkata's does not require any action on the part of customer service representatives, nor does it rely on customer surveys or voice or keyword recognition. Instead, the system automatically tracks calls according to the keyboard actions of the agents, eliminating the subjectivity that had derailed the unit's initial attempt at tracking resolution rates.

"We take all judgment out by systemically capturing the information," said Elaine Weeks-Trueblood, the unit's director of business operations.

As soon as the agent clicks on the area of the account that a customer is calling about, the Enkata system systematically identifies the call reason. Proprietary algorithms then match the reason and caller IDs within a period of time predetermined for each type of call.

"We monitor the activity of the agent during the time the call takes place, so we know what the purpose of the call was," said David A. Stamm, Enkata president and chief executive officer. "The call reason is a very critical factor. A card activation call, for example, would be relatively quick. A disputed fee call could take a lot longer. A key piece of technology we have determines what the purpose is of the call."

To compare agents' performance on different types of conversations, bankers need to determine the purpose of each call, but that can be particularly difficult if the customer has multiple reasons for calling, he said.

In those cases, "we split out each reason into a potential sequence," Mr. Stamm said. "The sequences can become quite complicated and convoluted. Enkata separates all of them out, so you can see the individual reasons. The benefit to the bank is they can determine the root cause, which in many cases is an improperly trained agent."

The system is designed to help managers detect systemic problems that spark repeat calls. Once calls from one topic are pooled and reviewed, supervisors might discover, for example, that some agents are telling customers it takes three to five business days for funds to be credited to an account, while other agents are saying it takes five days. Customers who were told three to five days may call on the third and fourth day to check the status of their funds.

For a call to be considered to be a repeat, the same account holder must be calling for the same reason within a specified time frame.

"There is a set of call activity that is in a never-never land for some time as you have to wait long enough to know if a customer [will] call back," Mr. Stamm said.

Different call reasons are assigned different time frames. For example, a bank could consider a card activation call resolved if the customer that does not call back within five days, but disputed fee calls might not be considered resolved until the customer receives the next statement.

Enkata gives Chase Card Services weekly reports compiling a multitude of factors, such as call type and length, to deduce an agent's resolution and repeat call rates, handling times, and other performance measures. Supervisors use the reports, along with the recordings, for training.

The analytical aspect of the reports is critical, industry analysts say. "Harnessing the intelligence provided by these analytical solutions will allow banks to improve customer satisfaction, which leads to customer retention, which contributes to long-term relationship growth," said Jacob Jegher, a senior analyst in the banking group at Celent LLC in Montreal. "The question is: To what level of detail are banks looking