Strategic Financial Solutions Improves Productivity by 20% Using Allego Conversation Intelligence

Situation: Outdated Technology

Strategic Financial Solutions is an award-winning financial services firm that is dedicated to helping people burdened with debt. They leverage a highly consultative approach to understand the needs of their clients, creating personalized debt relief programs. Since the company was founded, they have resolved more than $1 billion in debt and fund loans for over 100,000 clients across the United States.

Challenge: Identify Call Topics and Align with Sales Process

Strategic Financial Solutions’ current call recording system was not suited to the demands of today’s sales teams and could not help the sales enablement team identify obstacles or opportunities. The team was not able to home in on individual skill gaps, objections, or roadblocks in order to keep deals in progress on track.

Because the company operates in a heavily compliant environment, the Quality Assurance team must monitor as many sales calls as possible. The lack of call targeting was wasting hundreds of hours of QA time.

“We had a system in place where we could hear calls and do live coaching, but we didn’t have intelligence behind it—the ability to identify topics and keywords that matched our sales process,” said Rhonda Rockwell, Director of Sales, Strategic Financial Solutions.

Managing 14,000 Client Enrollees Efficiently

On the customer side, Allego has made it easier for Hutton and Nitschke to manage not only the creation of learning content, but also its distribution to client groups in dozens of different organizations.

“When we work with our clients, we don’t have a nicely put-together list of who is going to be in each group,” said Hutton. “A client might have a group of 100 people, and we don’t know any of them. All we know is that they have 100 people who need access to courses A, B, and C.”

Allego built a self-provisioning learner enrollment front end to solve this problem. Now, Corporate Visions simply creates an enrollment key and assigns that key to the relevant courses. All clients need to do is to send an email. Users can go right to the page, and have all the courses they need.

“This feature enables us to efficiently manage 14,000 enrollees. Because Allego was able to do this for us, we were able to move all our clients to a single platform, saving time for our internal teams, who have to deploy this every single day,” said Nitschke. “If you serve a large number of users and you know some of the groups, but not all, I would absolutely ask your customer success team how you could use this Allego feature.”

Solution: Integrate Insight into Practice Using Allego Conversation Intelligence

Strategic Financial Solutions implemented Allego Conversation Intelligence to identify obstacles and exploit opportunities unique to the sales and quality assurance teams. Rockwell is using the tool for both training and coaching.

For the sales organization, Rockwell and her team began by codifying the sales process and outlining every milestone containing roadblocks to a sale. “We were able to integrate all of the calls coming in from our call system,” she said.

Today, managers can go to a specific point in a call or listen to an entire call and give feedback. Using topics and keywords, Strategic Financial Solutions’ sales leaders have reporting on the Allego platform that shows which stage of the sale each rep is at. From there, they can focus on specific parts of a call to learn how the rep built rapport, overcame objections, and transitioned to the offer, for example. The team also developed a scorecard that was a quantitative way to track if reps are actually improving with their skillset.

“One of the most beneficial factors of this program is you can tailor it and use it how you would like,” said Rockwell.

Next, Rockwell integrated all the data from Allego Conversation Intelligence into the company’s gamification system. This is a system that sales managers use on a daily basis to monitor KPIs, see how many deals were closed, and what lead conversion is. They also downloaded the percentage of time each rep was talking compared with the client for greater insight.

The platform also improved objection handling. Rockwell’s team identified the most common objections and asked reps to submit their best call overcoming each objection. They chose the top four or five recordings and created a central repository.

“We now have on-demand ability for reps struggling with an objection to immediately locate four or five ways to overcome it,” said Rockwell.

For the Quality Assurance team, the goal was increased efficiency. The QA team tries to monitor as many of the 15,000 daily calls that the sales force makes as possible. But 65% of those calls last less than one minute. Those are non-relevant calls where a connection is not made.

“Our QA team used to have to fish through 15,000 calls, download them, attempt to listen, realize that it wasn’t a relevant call, and then go back and download more calls,” said Rockwell.

When the team switched to Allego Conversation Intelligence, all the calls transferred over. They were already downloaded and QA was able to filter out any call less than one minute, any call less than three minutes, and focus on grading relevant calls. This produced immediate savings of one to two hours for every single QA agent.

“This was amazing for us. We decided to reinvest that time into coaching and observing more calls,” said Rockwell. “Our managers come in each morning and listen to QA-flagged calls. They can coach and we’re able to correct behavior in real time rather than waiting days like it used to take.”

Coaching takes place within 24 hours. In the past, QA would have to wait anywhere from three days to a week to learn if coaching had taken place, and in the meantime they stopped listening to that rep’s queue because they wanted to give time for coaching.

“We’re now evaluating our calls within a 24-hour period because the coaching is taking place in real time,” said Rockwell.

Results: Rising Lead Conversions and Productivity

In the 15 months since Strategic Financial Solutions implemented Allego Conversation Intelligence, positive results have poured in. The company saw an increase in lead conversions of nearly five percent during a one-year period, from 15.2% to 16%.

After integrating Conversation Intelligence into onboarding, the company saw the average time to graduation drop from 90 days to 75 days. “We had a 15% savings on the onboarding experience and getting our employees up to speed and ready to go to market,” said Rockwell.

Meanwhile, thanks to Conversation Intelligence, the company’s quality assurance team immediately improved its daily productivity by 20%, and the customer service team achieved a compliance score of 98% during its first quarter of using the platform.