Case Study: HarborOne

Aspect Software implements a new contact centre system at HarborOne to provide seamless customer service.

The Business Challenge

HarborOne Credit Union is the largest state chartered community credit union in New England and one of the top 100 in the USA. The credit union serves the financial needs of consumer and business banking customers through a network of 14 full-service branches and a mortgage office.

HarborOne had a vision for its organisation: leverage unified communications and collaboration (UC&C) technologies, along with a sound strategy, to deliver the best service to customers and grow the credit union’s business.

For three years, HarborOne had been laying the groundwork to bring its vision to life. It upgraded and expanded its internal network capabilities, replaced its decade-old Nortel telephone system, and made the strategic decision to add the foundational elements of UC&C from Microsoft, including SharePoint and Lync (then known as Office Communications Server) as the organisation’s voice over internet protocol (VoIP) and voice/web conferencing system integrated with presence.

The final piece of the puzzle was the contact centre, which had been relying on a basic ACD/PBX system to manage all incoming call activity. HarborOne needed a system that offered ease of use and manageability, extensive yet simple reporting options, call monitoring and recording, as well as skills-based routing and the ability to track calls through to resolution. This solution would also have to leverage the virtualisation infrastructure HarborOne had built and the Microsoft Lync platform.

“We may have been relatively small, but we had a big vision, the desire to offer a robust experience to our customers, and for our contact centre to serve the enterprise as well,” said Wayne F. Dunn, senior vice president and chief technology officer of HarborOne. “We wanted to utilise presence and instant messaging – maybe even customer-facing video at some point – so we knew we needed a future-proof platform that could take us there. And that’s how we found Aspect.”

The Solution

HarborOne chose Aspect’s Seamless Customer Service unified communications (UC) application for the contact centre powered by Aspect Unified IP, which unites inbound routing and voice portal capabilities. Leveraging these along with Ask an Expert, Unified Agent Desktop, and real-time reporting, Seamless Customer Service coordinates self-service with live agent assistance to create a consistent experience across channels, providing a powerful solution for the credit union’s customer service and collections operations.

The credit union needed agents to be able to easily access enterprise experts using presence and IM while being sensitive to the fact that those employees are not call centre agents themselves. In order to achieve that, HarborOne chose to be an early adopter of Aspect’s version 7.0 of Aspect Unified IP.

Seamless Customer Service, integrated with Microsoft Lync, enables HarborOne agents to reach out to experts across the enterprise – be that a brand manager or an executive – to gain assistance with more complex interactions. Agents can determine the best expert for their scenario based on subject matter, time of day, day of week or how many calls a given expert had already handled. The contact centre is responsible for answering questions and servicing customers in all areas, however, where additional knowledge or skills are required, engaging expertise from outside the contact centre is now easy, and encouraged.

“One of the most compelling things about Aspect, aside from Seamless Customer Service meeting the needs we had defined, was the company’s breadth of experience with Microsoft technologies and how their own leading contact centre applications could work on top of that,” said Dunn. “That is what really enabled us to bring our vision of a connected enterprise to reality.”

Prior to working with Aspect, if an agent had handed a customer off to speak with another individual in the business, that was the end of measuring, tracking or reporting on the interaction. Now, HarborOne is able to track each interaction – with or without an expert involved – from inception to completion and can see more data than ever before with the system’s in depth reporting capabilities.

With Aspect’s next-generation Unified Agent Desktop, agents can access IM, presence information and collaboration capabilities, in addition to their contact centre functions. Fully integrated unified communications capabilities also enable agents to handle non-contact centre calls as needed through Microsoft Lync and the same unified desktop. And the agent toolbar enables agents to see their own performance statistics, to transfer a call to another agent after checking availability using presence, and to customise real-time reports with the information they require, even down to the way they look.

Results

HarborOne has already saved nearly $150,000 a year by replacing its legacy data lines with SIP trunking and another nearly $100,000 a year on travel costs by using Microsoft Lync and Aspect for video and web conferencing capabilities. The credit union has reduced its missed calls rate by 2-3 percent. And now, HarborOne has complete contact centre redundancy in place, thanks to the virtualisation of its environment.

The advanced reporting and analytics capabilities of the Aspect solution have provided HarborOne with much greater insight into the efficiency of their operations. Actionable information delivered through the reporting function has helped the organisation to plan agent staffing more effectively and improve management oversight to respond to real-time fluctuations in call volume.

Looking Ahead

The next portion of HarborOne’s expansion will include automating some of its less complex interactions with speech recognition and IVR to free up agent resources to focus on higher revenue generating activities. HarborOne plans to replace its annual in-person security training exercise, which requires all employees to travel, with web conferencing using Aspect and Lync. The credit union also envisions growing its contact centre to address needs around residential and consumer lending, and adding workforce management capabilities to optimise staffing and resource allocation.