| As smoke rolled over lower
Manhattan on September 11th and the scale of the tragedy began to take hold,
hundreds of thousands of people were scattered, dazed and unsure of what
would follow. Less than 90 miles away in the Merrill Lynch call center in
New Jersey, the phone lines started spiking, with clients, employees and
family calling concerned about the safety of many Merrill Lynch employees.
Suddenly the call center staff had to assume many new roles, and they met
the challenge. Within hours, the phone traffic of many brokers was
redirected and the New Jersey contact center had become the sole point for
employees and clients to call for information and services for those
displaced by the unforeseen tragedy. Intrigued at how one call center could
accomplish so much in so short a period of time, I went for a visit.
Rising from the suburbs of Central New Jersey is an impressive complex of
Merrill Lynch offices where I met Judy Nelson, first vice president of the
Private Client Relationship Services Group/Merrill Lynch U.S. Private Client
Services. A 20-year veteran with Merrill Lynch, Ms. Nelson is responsible
for managing all of Merrill Lynchs Client Direct channels through a
multisite service strategy. Apart from handling emergencies, on a day-to-day
basis Nelson guides her team in providing services to Merrill Lynch clients
for various products that are serviced through ML Private Client Offices.
Nelson and her staff are also constantly focused on quality as well as
methods to provide value-added information and services in the pursuit of
delivering world-class services to Merrill Lynch clients.
In its contact centers, Merrill Lynchs Web and telephony portals
support over 50 million client contacts annually. Nelsons Private Client
Relationship Services Group provides client and direct field support for all
Private Client domestic retail and corporate-sponsored products and supports
statistical reporting metrics and resource allocation strategies for the
contact center. Specifically, she manages client service provided for retail
product support and internal product support delivered through field
services. To manage the customer interactions that result from this broad
range of product offerings, Merrill Lynch has established contact centers
with more than 900 employees located in Hopewell, New Jersey and
Jacksonville, Florida.
Nelson told me agents at Merrill Lynch go through an extensive initial
training period consisting of a six- to eight-week regimen of computer-based
and classroom training, which at the Hopewell facility takes place in the
new, on-site Center of Excellence. Agents attain the registration necessary
for handling financial transactions, Series Seven and 63 certification. For
the first 90 days of client experience, agents work with a mentor, a fellow
agent to show them the ropes and guide them through product knowledge before
they are able to handle call support on their own. Agents are tested and
certified as they gain experience and work their way to higher levels of
capabilities in a three- to four-year progression through handling the
various levels of client support. Agents are monitored by supervisors, as
well as with third parties, for technical and service attributes through
specific metrics for performance agent compensation is based on
performance results. Merrill Lynch also encourages clients to monitor agents
for quality and follows-up with surveys clients can use to provide feedback
and gauge agent quality and technical expertise. The procedures for quality
are working for both clients and agents, as Nelson reported clients highly
satisfied to the rate in the low 90 percent range among the client base and
that agent turnover is less than 10 percent.
In 2001, Merrill Lynchs Hopewell center received some 18 million calls
(between the total centers, around 50 million calls were handled in 2001).
According to Kevin Mason, director, Financial Relationship Services, they
are able to handle 89 percent of calls through the front-end IVR. Mason said
clients use the speech recognition IVR for account information, market
updates and real-time indexes. Presently they are using a Genesys system for
call routing, and Nuance and Periphonics for speech, but are transitioning
to a speech recognition system by TellMe. Mason stressed that the IVR
interface has three levels of security for accessing ones account, so it
is a very secure method for the clients to quickly gain valuable account
information. For quality and compliance, the Hopewell facility has a
real-time call recording system from NICE Systems.
Agents are provided with a screen pop that allows them to manage
client relationships efficiently by clicking their way through
client-specific data and transactions quite easily. Account information is
transferred with the call and using Merrill Lynchs in-house software
integrated with Siebel, the Web and mainframes, agents can access any
application they need to check balances, make trades, call up historical
records, set reminders for pending items for clients, and more, quite
rapidly.
Merrill Lynch also keeps an active Web presence, handling Web
transactions and more than 250,000 e-mail messages a year. Mason said they
respond to 85 percent of all e-mail within an hour. He said they found it
more effective to have a dedicated team of agents handling e-mail than
having the agents switch between phone and e-mail. Also in place is a
review-and-release system the traders use for complicated trades that allows
them to approve or reject, if need be, as well as route the orders among
agents similar to routing calls. The call center team at Merrill Lynch keeps
an eye on customer satisfaction on the Web as well, conducting monthly
reviews of client issues and suggestions, after which they implement changes
in efforts to improve service.
Joeseph Mrozek, director, department manager, Plan Participant Services,
told me about the activities of his department, which has a staff of 180 in
New Jersey to handle 401K clients. The Plan Participant Services department
segments business based on assets: National Businesses segment clients have
assets of $1 billion plus, Institutional Business clients have assets from
$100 million to $1 billion and Corporate clients have assets that range from
$3 to $100 million. Mrozek explained that Plan Participant Services also
provides payroll and benefits services to their clients. Mrozek explained
that the average tenure for agents is now around two years recently
additional agents were hired, which has reduced the agent turnover overall.
He said they train constantly, for example, they trained extensively to
ensure agents were fluent on the new tax laws that recently came into
effect. Their training came in handy in January, as Mrozek said call volume
doubled that month with clients calling in to see if all of their 401K was
solely in company stock. As an example of the level of quality services
provided in his group, Mrozek mentioned an instance of how a client who was
going to switch to a competitor was retained at Merrill Lynch as a result of
receiving critical information in a timely manner. It was that same quick
response and thorough training that had helped them react to the events of
September 11th and keep the day-to-day business flowing without interruption
for the firm.
Sincerely,
Rich Tehrani
Group Publisher,
Group Editor-in-Chief
rtehrani@tmcnet.com
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