IT Scan

March 5, 2005
Ocwen targets ACCES at contact centers, BPOs

Geetanjali Wadhwa & Pradeep Chakraborty

BANGALORE -- Ocwen Financial Services recently introduced the ACCES (advanced contact center enterprise solutions). ACCES is the first, fully hosted and managed, Cisco based, VoIP contact center solution. It empowers organizations to access the immense benefits of a VoIP-based contact center solution without the expense - or the hassles - of implementing internally. ACCES offers improved contact center performance at approximately 40 percent lower costs. Being a best-of-breed solution, it helps organizations to effectively overcome both business and technical challenges. The first hosted and managed Cisco-based, VoIP customer contact solution for businesses can be implemented rapidly with no capital investment.

ACCES is a fully integrated, entirely network-switched, hosted communications and data processing infrastructure using Cisco's IP communications technology. The third-largest Cisco network-switched VoIP implementation in the world, Ocwen's contact center solution is completely integrated with its customer relations expert (CRE), an artificial intelligence-based automated scripting application.

Dale Pickford, vice president, ACCES, said it was a fully hosted managed service developed by Ocwen. "You can get everything from it to run a call center. There is a service fee per agent. It depends on the feature set used," he added. Ocwen laid its own reporting module over the Cisco-based solution and put intelligent layers above it. It is targeted at BPOs, contact centers and call center type functions.

ACCES runs as an ASP model - without having to install software on the desktop, it is easy to adopt and requires no capital start-up costs. This allows small to large companies the ability to gain cost savings without incurring large capital investments. ACCES will allow clients to add a location and expand services in a matter of days. ACCES, with multiple locations around the globe, operates as a single, virtual customer interaction network with seamless, skill-based call routing 24/7 to the most appropriate agent. Calls are prioritized using 'skills-based/best available' agent distribution. This means that not only are the calls automatically routed to the agent with the correct skills and training to handle the call - including language spoken and subject matter expertise - it also uses the 'follow the sun' approach to offer 24/7/365 service to Ocwen clients by utilizing the best available agents across multiple continents.

This move suggests a sort of paradigm shift for Ocwen. Pickford clarified: "We went from being a pure financial company to becoming a provider of technology solutions. It is not a paradigm shift, but more of the maturing of the company. As we became more and more service oriented, our clients told us they would not mind using products we used in other parts of our own business. So this is more of a shift as per the customer demand."

He added that a shift was also happening, from the TDM networks used by BPOs, etc., to all-IP networks. According to him, most BPOs were moving toward all-IP networks. Noting that VoIP was ACCES's basic communication layer, Pickford further pointed out some companies wanted to do real evaluation of agents in real-time, or wanted to do sampling and QC. ACCES came in handy in such instances. Clients were also becoming more demanding. Disaster recovery was another emerging area. Besides, with ACCES, multiple call centers could also be made to run/look/managed like a single call center.

Pickford added that high-value dollar transactions would move to India in the near future. He said that there were seats worth US $7 billion in the high-value dollar transactions space. "The opportunity for India could be huge," he noted.

Regarding security, he said: "We can provide selective viewing. However, you cannot guarantee security despite the best of measures." According to him, if a client happened to be a bank and its data got compromised, it would have to inform customers. All of Ocwen's application development is done in Bangalore. He said: "It's our IP. The application code is checked in the US." Ocwen has an email filtering system in place as well. Pickford added that as an example, if someone gave out the social security number over the phone, it would be flagged down as inappropriate conversation. Hence, data was always kept logical and secure. Pickford called for some sort of checkboxes to be in place, or perhaps, a best practices norm in the BPO industry. That would provide some sort of a level-playing field.

Ocwen Financial Solutions is a wholly owned subsidiary of Ocwen Financial Corp., a diversified multibillion dollar financial services company, headquartered in West Palm Beach, Florida, and having a presence in Canada, China, Germany, India, Ireland, Japan and Taiwan. It is a global outsourcing and technology solution provider specializing in asset management, financial business process outsourcing (BPO), and customer interaction services. Nine of the 10 largest investment banks trust Ocwen to handle their mortgage loan servicing, and the loan originators that generated 40 percent of all mortgages in the United States use Ocwen technology.

Ocwen decided to explore the immense benefits that India offered as an outsourcing destination in 2001. Ocwen Financial Solutions (OFS) was created to enhance the growth initiatives, domestically and globally. With offices in Bangalore and Mumbai, Ocwen currently works closely with centers in West Palm Beach and Orlando, Florida to complement select key processes and client management. This 'rightsourcing' decision brought it immense benefits. From being a 30-member organization at inception, Ocwen in India has grown to a 2,000-professionals strong institution today.

Ocwen's ACCES features:

• Call recording - solution for long-term storage and retrieval.
• Real-time call monitoring.
• Dialing efficiency package - utilizes outbound contact dialer.
• Real-time contact center management control information.
• Integrated desktop link - allows communication between phone system and computer by fully integrating voice and data applications.
• Artificial intelligence driven, automated scripting - proprietary software utilizing custom intelligence-based scripting.

Contact:
Ocwen Financial Solutions
www.ocwen.com