Countrywide Financial: Ensuring Operational Excellence

"Confirmit has enhanced our ability to bring the voice of our customer into the business. We can now quickly monitor how well we are meeting customer needs, which is critical for the competitive, ever-changing mortgage market."
- Lyle Kan, EVP Customer Experience Marketing Group at Countrywide Financial

Executive Summary

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Countrywide engaged Confirmit to improve their survey delivery processes.

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Confirmit Connectors™ triggered email invitations upon closure of call center cases.

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Confirmit Alerts™ drove specific comments to regional operations managers for follow up.

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Transition from paper surveys to online surveys reduced report turnaround time from 3 months to 2 weeks.

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Significant reduction in survey deployment costs.

Founded on the idea that all Americans should be able to achieve the "American Dream" of homeownership, Countrywide® strives to ensure that best in class service is provided to customers. Three years ago, Countrywide senior level management was challenged by its President and CEO, Stan Kurland, to develop a support system to help business units achieve high levels of customer satisfaction, strengthen their customer relationships and continue to foster and promote a customer centric culture.

In 2003, the Corporate Marketing and Communications Department and the Performance Management Group jointly launched the PACE initiative, Proudly Achieving Customer Expectations. Their mission was to articulate the voice of the customer, and to leverage this information to win, retain, and maximize relationships of value. PACE was developed with the understanding that businesses gain competitive advantages in three ways: through operational excellence, product innovation, and customer loyalty created through customer satisfaction.

The company began to improve customer satisfaction by working to understand the Countrywide customer experience. By identifying key touch points for both customers and business associates, key activities to monitor and measure were developed. These touch points spanned from the customer's preliminary research about Countrywide to completing an application and through speaking to Countrywide call center staff.

Initially, all Countrywide consumers who applied for mortgages, whether funded or withdrawn, were surveyed via a paper-based mail survey. While paper-based mail surveys are common in the financial services industry, they can be inefficient. It can take a tremendous amount of time to collect data and create reports, typically 2-3 months after the start of a study, creating results which may be out of sync with current internal operational metrics. With potentially outdated results, there is a risk the results might be irrelevant to the current business environment. Additionally, paper-based mail surveys can be expensive, costing $10 - $15 per survey.

Countrywide decided to make use of the efficiencies of an online survey channel because "We wanted to integrate the survey into our business processes so that we could get feedback from our customers as soon as possible after speaking to one of our representatives," said Lyle Kan, EVP Customer Experience Marketing Group. "This ensured that we would catch them when the interaction with us was fresh in their mind."

Other goals included reducing the time to deliver reports to the business and reducing costs, which were achieved by using a web-based application instead of printed forms requiring production schedules and costs. Countrywide can readily change the number of surveys sent, the content and produce easily deliverable electronic reports, all for a fraction of previous costs.

Move To Online Interaction
Countrywide selected Confirmit to help the company deliver the voice of the customer to its business units. The company now deploys 20-30 online surveys programs per month. It expects to survey approximately three-million people during 2005, 70% of those online.

One application that has delivered an improvement in survey efficiency regards Countrywide's wholesale business channel, which funds loans through independent brokers. Using Confirmit Connectors™ a survey is automatically delivered to brokers within a day of speaking to the Client Support Center, thus providing timely responses regarding satisfaction with interactions between brokers and Countrywide representatives.

Countrywide also sends a weekly survey to brokers regarding their most recently funded loan. In the event a broker chooses a low overall satisfaction score, an email alert generated using Confirmit Alerts™ is sent to the regional operations manager containing detailed loan information and the broker's contact information for follow-up. To further enhance the alert program, a link has been added to the alert so the regional operations managers can record their follow-up and have it appended to the survey response in the database. The survey results and any follow up are communicated in reports to senior management to complete the recovery process.

"Going on-line has been extremely beneficial," says Kan. "We have reduced the turnaround time for report delivery from three months to two weeks, while reducing costs by 85%. Most importantly, using the data collected in the broker surveys, the division launched a process improvement program that has significantly increased customer satisfaction scores. This has been instrumental in our ability to improve our broker business partner relationships."

Customer Ease, Timely Access
Maggie Bright, VP of the PACE team says, "Confirmit is a scalable solution which provides timely feedback while eliminating some of the burden for those completing the survey. By handling question logic, Confirmit can tailor a survey to the respondent, therefore reducing the amount of time to complete the survey and increasing the overall response rate.

"Our use of Confirmit has now expanded beyond external customers to our own employees. We understand the link between employee satisfaction and customer satisfaction. Confirmit allows us the ability to quickly gain candid feedback on how we can improve the work environment for our employees."

Stephanie Sinclair Hayden of the PACE team says, "Because our customer base is diverse we needed an online tool that allowed our customers to take surveys in a variety of languages. Confirmit helps accommodate this need by providing surveys in several languages helping to ensure that a language barrier does not impede customers' ability to provide feedback on our performance."

"You can't manage what you don't measure," Kan concludes. "We believe that there is a strong correlation between customer satisfaction and future business volume, so it's critical for us to measure satisfaction levels and to understand the drivers of satisfaction. Confirmit allows us to gather data quickly and with a much higher ROI compared to other delivery methods."

Countrywide Financial Corporation and its subsidiaries are not affiliated with Confirmit and are not responsible for the products or services provided by Confirmit.

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