Essential Federal Credit Union

RingCentral Contact Center™ Speeds Credit Union's Response Times, Improves Customer Engagement, and Saves Staff Time
Essential Federal Credit Union logo
[With RingCentral Contact Center], we can now also monitor support calls in real-time and help fix issues as they occur. That is helping us speed our response times, improve our overall customer experience, and meet our business objectives.

Catrice Lee

Call Center Manager, Essential Federal
Baton Rouge–based Essential Federal Credit Union prides itself on being a “community credit union,” offering the best and most affordable financial services to everyone in the Greater Baton Rouge community. Whereas many credit unions are open only to members of specific industries, Essential FCU makes its services available to anyone who lives, works, worships, or attends school in the community’s nine parishes.
But having grown to more than 35,000 members in recent years, Essential FCU realized it needed a communications solution with a robust call center and other capabilities to enable its staff to continue providing the consistently outstanding service implicit in the organization’s promise to its community. 
INDUSTRY
Financial Services
HQ
Baton Rouge, LA
YEAR FOUNDED
1972
EMPLOYEES
100-150

Essential’s customer engagement plan: A call center sophisticated enough to serve its growing community.

Essential FCU had already deployed RingEX™ to make its call center reps more available to customers. “Thanks to RingEX, we already had softphone capability for our call center reps, which meant they could take calls from anywhere and not miss important customer inquiries whenever they stepped away from their desks,” explains Catrice Lee, Call Center Manager for Essential FCU. “That allowed us to take a big step toward improving our customer service and employee efficiency, two of our key business objectives.”
“But we still needed a sophisticated call center solution—one with the right monitoring, reporting and analytics tools to help us better allocate resources and further improve our service to customers.”
After investigating several solutions, Essential FCU chose RingCentral Contact Center.

RingEX and Contact Center: Improved operational efficiency leads to better customer service.

“Rolling out RingCentral Contact Center solved so many issues for us,” says Lee. “Before this deployment, we had no visibility into who was picking up calls, how long those calls were taking, or which agents were available for a call—not without literally walking the floor and monitoring the whole team all day.”
The lack of call volume data also made it difficult for Lee and her team to get a sense of the typical peak and quiet times during a given business day. “That meant sometimes we were unnecessarily paying for more staff than we needed to cover our phone lines, and other times we were understaffed, which meant our members waited on hold longer than necessary.”
“With RingCentral Contact Center,” Lee continues, “we can now track dispositions, create our own service level, and additional tracking capabilities with the web email and chat. It also gave us the detailed reporting and analytics to help us measure each agent’s performance, set goals for them, and better forecast call volume to help us become more efficient with resource allocation.”
We now finally have data showing our inbound calls fall sharply at night. That insight alone has allowed us to reallocate resources more efficiently.

Catrice Lee

Call Center Manager, Essential Federal

Better call center analytics and forecasting drives customer service transformation.

Since rolling out RingCentral Contact Center, Essential FCU has seen significant time savings and improvements in operational efficiencies, staff productivity, and, perhaps most important to the community-minded institution, the service it provides to customers.
“Thanks to the detailed reports I can pull and review anytime, we have such great visibility into our call traffic,” says Lee. “For example, we now finally have data showing our inbound calls fall sharply at night. That insight alone has allowed us to reallocate resources more efficiently.”
“By integrating RingCentral’s call-monitoring and supervisor solutions with Contact Center,” Lee continues, “we can now also monitor support calls in real-time and help fix issues as they occur. That is helping us speed our response times, improve our overall customer experience, and meet our business objectives.”