If you have a credit card, there’s a good chance that it is from Chase. Chase
Card Services is the division of JP Morgan Chase that specializes in credit cards,
offering an array of credit card products such as the Chase Rewards Platinum
Visa Card. As one of the largest 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 the Chase’s 6,000 call
center agents worldwide at the company’s 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 percent 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. In 2006, Chase
Card Services attempted to accomplish this by improving first-call to customer
service without requiring additional calls.
The problem was that the company’s record keeping did not give an accurate
account of current rates of first-call resolution. Chase had previously tried
tracking first-call resolution rates by having agents log the content and results of
each call they received. But this track was time-consuming and was not
standardized, since agents tended to record results subjectively and not in a
uniform 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 underwent multiple changes over a short span, prompting repeat calls.
To improve call center efficiency, Chase contracted with Enkata Technologies to
implement a performance and talent management system.
The system monitors and tags each call with the topic and length of the call as
well as the length of time the agent that handled the call has been working. It
doesn’t require agents to perform any action to acquire this information; it tracks
calls automatically by keeping track of the keyboard strokes of each agent.