MoneyGram Gets Lean and Saves Green with NICE inContact: A CRM Service Elite Customer Case Study

Money transfer and payment services provider MoneyGram is based in Dallas, but its operations are global. The company has 11 contact centers around the world, staffed by 300 agents who are direct employees and 1,300 agents working for outsourcers contracted by MoneyGram. These contact centers field more than 13 million calls annually.

THE CHALLENGE

But servicing a global customer base involves the knotty issue of delivering a consistent experience across that clientele. Managing that kind of volume is itself no easy task, and that’s before you consider another factor: The many languages needed to serve such a wide audience make things even more complicated.

“We’re a global company, so from a call center perspective we have a lot of challenges with language,” conceded Doug Klees, head of global customer care at MoneyGram, in CRM’s March issue.

To handle those language requirements, the company had more than 30 interactive voice response (IVR) applications, no two of which sounded the same, and the contact center staff could interact with customers in 30 languages. But the demand could easily increase to more than 50 languages when IVR interactions were factored into the mix.

Application and equipment reliability represented another hurdle. “A few years ago, the application was down for a couple days at one of our busiest times, and that was one of the reasons we wanted to start looking at other alternatives,” Klees said.

THE SOLUTION

To tackle these issues of consistency and reliability, MoneyGram sought a solution that would be able to fully integrate with its many systems, eventually settling on CXone from NICE inContact.

NICE inContact’s CXone solution stood out because it is cloud-based, scalable, and integrated, according to Klees. “We were looking to move a lot of our applications to the cloud versus having a premises-based solution or even a hosted solution like we had. We were also looking for someone that could scale to our size,” he says. “[Furthermore], we were really looking for something that was integrated and gave us the ability to have one platform that all the reps could go on and was fairly easy to use.”

Among the many applications in the CXone cloud-based platform, MoneyGram is taking advantage of CXone Interactive Voice Response, CXone Agent for Salesforce, InView Performance Management for CXone, Engage Quality Management, and even post-call surveys and workforce management.

With CXone, MoneyGram now has a single reporting platform to accommodate both reps and executives. It has also consolidated four quality management systems into one and cut the number of IVR applications from 30 to three.

“The old solution had been in place for a number of years. Over time, we had built out a various amount of different applications within the IVR,” Klees told CRM.

The patchwork nature of the old system was clunky and confusing for both employees and customers. “When you called in, you could get different treatment. We had different voices; we’d go from male to female. It didn’t sound great, and it [required] a lot of maintenance. There were a lot of things to keep track of,” Klees says.

Under CXone, the three IVR applications serve separate constituencies. One application takes general calls; the second fields calls from customers at one of MoneyGram’s 350,000 brick-and-mortar storefronts in more than 200 countries around the world; and the third handles calls from online customers.

These changes have heightened efficiency: MoneyGram has seen a 30 percent reduction in average call handling time and a 5 percent drop in transfers. “The system is making intelligent routing decisions and getting them out to the right people, which reduces transfers,” Klees noted. “It also gives the reps information on the calls that they weren’t getting previously so they can reduce their handle time.”

As an added benefit, the CXone interface is so user-friendly that agents’ productivity has also increased. And even with all of the additional functionality, MoneyGram’s overall costs have decreased. 

Real Results

• The number of quality management applications has gone from four to one.
• The number of IVR applications has dropped from 30 to three.
• The average call handling time has decreased 30 percent.
• Call transfers have been cut by 5 percent.