Case Study: Created a world-class Direct Bank
Challenge: How does a bank provide everything a branch does in terms of sales, loans and account openings in a call center environment?
Action: Started with 30 telebankers and equipped them with extensive telephony technology plus branch platform systems.
Results:
- Rapid growth to over 100 telebankers, brokers and insurance agents generating over $500 million in loans per year while opening thousands of accounts and other sales.
- In 1997, the direct bank was voted international Call Center of the Year in Finance & Banking Magazine.
Excerpt from USBanker, "Call Centers: The New Realities of Staffing", October 1999
"We have direct bankers who make six figures, and the average is about $50,000 a year," says Robert Ellis, senior vice president and delivery channels manager. (He runs all of Hibernia's non-branch delivery.) The regular direct bankers—split into four teams: business banking, consumer, in-bound and retention—sell 110 products and undergo six weeks of training to learn the ropes; Ellis is looking to hire product specialists, such as stockbrokers and insurance agents, in the near future.
His hiring requirements are stringent: The interview process includes a 60-question take-home test that asks detailed questions about the bank that candidates cannot answer without some digging. The object is to see how much initiative they have. " A third of them never return when they see that test," he says.
Ellis started Hibernia's sales center in Baton Rouge with 30 employees in 1996. By the end of 1998 it had grown to 56, and now has about 67 people on the phone making sales calls and handling incoming sales inquiries. He says the operation generates at least 20% of the bank's consumer and small business loan applications, producing tens of millions of dollars in revenue each year.
