Background. For a banking institution founded nearly 170 years ago, The Provident Bank of New Jersey is already modern in its approach to customer service. Its corporate slogan, “Hassle-free banking for busy people®,” summarizes its philosophy of removing obstacles and ensuring fast, accurate, and professional customer encounters.

The Provident Bank’s commitment to service excellence has made it a leader among financial institutions in the central New Jersey market. Yet, in 2005, the bank felt it could do even better, especially with regard to inbound customer calls. Much of its technology infrastructure was notably modern, particularly the core banking applications from Fidelity National Information Services. However, the call center software system offered limited opportunities for improvement or flexibility. This issue needed to be resolved, as the bank's call center handles over 175,000 customer interactions per month. In 2005, Provident turned to Echopass, a top provider of hosted, on-demand contact center solutions. The always on Echopass service has now been in place for Provident over three years, providing a number of benefits that simultaneously improve agent effectiveness and customer service.

Need for Professional Response. “The goal of most contact centers is to be as efficient as possible by giving agents the tools they need and reducing the number of key strokes needed to satisfy the call — thus improving the overall call handling time. For us as a bank, basic security questions are required at the onset of the call, but the agents still had to navigate through several screens to validate the information provided by the customer. We needed to handle calls more efficiently,” states Jack Novielli, senior vice president of The Provident Bank and founder and chair of the Fidelity Charter Users Group.

Another need for Provident was a more powerful routing capability so that calls were sent to the agent with the best skills to handle the customer's request. While The Provident Bank's old Interactive Voice Response (IVR) technology was first-rate, its inflexible hardware-based call center didn't have the routing capability to direct callers to the best skilled agent or department. On occasion, customers were greeted by agents who didn't have the right expertise or experience, raising the likelihood that issues wouldn't be resolved on the first call.

“We try to focus on a positive customer experience by answering the majority of the requests on the first call,” Novielli notes. “Our contact center handles 175,000 customer contacts every month — each of which should be a positive experience. Echopass has continued to help us cost-effectively reach our industry-leading excellence goals.”

Becoming Flexible with Echopass. “Using on-demand services makes sense for customers who need a call center because the software as a service (SaaS) model maximizes flexibility while eliminating the upfront risk,” says Vincent Deschamps, chief executive officer of Echopass Corporation. “With our service, the customer pays monthly for the services used based on the number of agents. This can be easily increased or decreased to fit business needs. Within the financial services industry where Echopass has numerous clients, we provide integrations to a wide

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