Managing the Bank of Tomorrow

The people at the Bank of Montreal know a thing or two about putting leading-edge data and telecommunications technologies to work for their clients.

As Canada's first bank, the Bank of Montreal is a diversified financial services institution with average assets of $196 billion and ranks as one of the ten largest banks in North America. The bank and its allied institutions operate in Canada, the United States and Mexico, offering state-of-the-art information and banking to companies and clients across the continent.

Bank of Montreal offers customers a full range of financial services, including traditional branch-based banking, business and commercial banking services and a full line of professional investment services. The bank's World Wide Web site offers extensive online information and services. In keeping with its commitment to leading edge technologies, the Bank of Montreal also recently introduced MBANX, North America's first-ever virtual banking unit.

The Bank of Montreal is known for innovation. So when the bank set out to improve the efficiency and responsiveness of its call center network, it called on Richardson, Texas-based IEX Corporation.
The Challenge of Growth
"A key objective of our call center operations is to give our customers more convenient access to the bank's services," said Bank of Montreal's Dwight Henderson, project manager-implementation, call center support. "The bank has experienced tremendous growth, so our challenge was to maintain and improve customer satisfaction while controlling the cost of call center operations."

The bank operates full-service call center operations in Montreal, Toronto, Calgary and Vancouver, Canada. The bank's call center activities have grown dramatically in recent years, with call volumes growing 82 percent from 1995 to 1996, and increasing 111 percent from 1996 to 1997. The number of call center customer service representatives has also grown, up 29 percent in 1995 to 1996 and increasing 58 percent from 1996 to 1997.

Bank of Montreal's call centers provide a broad spectrum of traditional telephone-based banking and financial services to its customers. Utilizing Nortel Meridian Automatic Call Distribution (ACD) technology, call centers field incoming calls from existing customers, new business inquiries and the bank's newly-launched MBANX venture.

MBANX is North America's first truly "virtual bank" and gives clients access to a comprehensive selection of financial services via the telephone, fax, Automatic Teller Machines, Personal Computers and the Internet. Clients are free to interact with MBANX through these electronic media or by visiting any of the Bank of Montreal's 1,100 branches.

In years past, the bank used manual methods and Erlang C formulas to compile and calculate call center workforce requirements. But as Bank of Montreal added new business units, more customers and advanced new financial services, it quickly became apparent that a more flexible and capable workforce management system was needed.

"These traditional methods work fine if you have 25 or 30 customer service agents," Henderson said. "But if you are running a distributed network of call centers and need to generate twice-hourly updates to ensure optimum staffing efficiency, you need a far more powerful system."

To keep Bank of Montreal on the cutting-edge of the financial services industry, call center managers selected and installed TotalView Workforce Management from IEX Corporation.
Call Center of the Future
Bank officials knew they needed a workforce management system that would support a networked ACD configuration that routed calls from various centers on a first-available basis. After a review of available technologies, management concluded that TotalView's client/server architecture and potent analysis and reporting capabilities would satisfy this need.

IEX's TotalView provides a powerful and flexible call center workforce management solution. The system delivers comprehensive management tools for forecasting, scheduling, administration, analysis, intraday adjustments and communications networking. With TotalView, an organization has all the information needed to forecast and schedule the optimum staffing level for both short- and long-term requirements.

TotalView accepts data from all major ACDs and can import and utilize existing historical information. The system's Windows-based graphical user interface (GUI) makes it simple to learn and easy to use. Managers can review data at every level, from the activity of an individual agent to the performance of selected groups or an entire distributed call center network. TotalView is based on a UNIX server with Windows-based clients and supports Ethernet, Token Ring and TCP/IP technologies.

TotalView is especially well suited to organizations such as the Bank of Montreal, which must coordinate the operations of multiple call centers in many different geographical locations. The client/server architecture allows managers to view all network activities as a single unit and to instantly project changes made at one site to all affected call center locations.
A Wealth of Information
According to Henderson, TotalView enables bank call center managers to gather and analyze information from the entire telecommunications operation and to ensure that each of the four call centers maintains optimum "full time employee" staffing levels. TotalView also allows managers to formulate "what if?" analysis for both intraday and long-range planning.

Henderson says TotalView gives the Bank of Montreal a powerful new set of business tools, and he credits IEX with providing an outstanding level of technical and user support. With TotalView, the bank can now undertake a comprehensive planning process that matches workforce requirements with the need for maximum customer support.

At the Bank of Montreal, TotalView's unique capabilities paid quick and measurable dividends.
"The bottom line," said Henderson, "is that TotalView gives us a wealth of information we never had before."