UTICA — In December, Michael W. Brunner, Central New York market president for Bank of America, shared with local partners, clients, and friends the bank’s decision to expand its services at the Horatio Street customer contact center and boost the employment to handle the growing national volume of calls.

“There are approximately 600 employees at the Horatio Street center,” Brunner says during an interview at his Syracuse office. “Bank of America is transferring 250 of the current positions in research and adjustments and in legal-order processing to bank locations in Atlanta and Newark, Delaware. Offsetting these transfers, the bank is adding 400 new positions [in Utica] to augment our phone-contact and chat personnel. The net increase in personnel will total 150. The transfers will be completed by the end of July, and the new hires will join the center throughout 2016, bringing total employment at the center to approximately 750 by year-end.

Bank of America’s growing mobile-banking customer base is compelling the moves.

“To give you just one idea of the volume of activity driving this decision,” says Brunner, “the bank is adding 5,500 mobile customers daily, and in the third quarter [of last year] it processed 20 million checks from mobile customers. This center alone handles 75,000 [incoming] calls a week.” The contact center, which is one of several nationwide, operates Mondays through Fridays from 7 a.m. to 10 p.m. and on weekends from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. Eastern time.

The Bank of America contact center is located in a 164,000-square-foot, one-story structure situated on 60 acres. The facility originally opened in 1971 as the Horatio Mall, a shopping center with a W.T. Grant store as the anchor tenant. By 1976, it had failed as a retail operation, and converted to a high-tech center with Cogar Corporation manufacturing computer products. International Computers Ltd. subsequently acquired the business and began to wind down its operations in 1985. In 1987, Norstar Bank created an operations center on the site, before it was acquired by Fleet Bank, which in turn was acquired by Bank of America.

Recent growth
Brunner points with pride to the growth of the Horatio Street site since 2012. “Just in the last three years, this center has doubled in size, and now it’s going to grow another 25 percent this year. This is a testament to our ability to hire employees in the Utica area and to their work ethic. We have a very strong base from which to hire, and our new hires bring to their jobs a desire to learn. With the growing number of products offered by the bank and their complexity, it’s critical that the employees are knowledgeable about our offerings. The Utica contact center has had strong performance from the existing team and remains one of the top-performing centers for the bank,” he says.

Brunner explains that “[c]ustomer inquiries into the center range from customers making payments to asking specific questions about their accounts. Many of the new [employee] roles will be focused on the chat component, which will make it easier for customers who need assistance while searching online. The center not only provides information, but in the long run, it also supports our sales and marketing activities. With all of the banking channels available to our customers, access to a live person is still essential. In short, the contact center, which is critical to our retail-delivery process, serves as an important channel for quickly finding information, resources, and expertise.” 

Today’s customer contact centers are striving to change the public’s perception of the old call center. Many think of Lily Tomlin’s character “Ernestine,” the chatty, condescending telephone operator who showed little sympathy for her customers. Ernestine sat at her switchboard taking calls, except when she was busy talking to her boyfriend, and frequently responded to callers with barbed remarks. Customers are frustrated by some banks running their call centers like cost centers, where time-and-motion studies encourage operators to provide the least amount of service to satisfy the customer. This translates into minimizing the number and duration of calls. Others are put off by the lack of employee product knowledge or incomprehensible speech.

“Retaining customer loyalty means winning the battle of the customer experience, and that only happens when the focus is customer-centric,” opines Brunner. “Our operators are trained to take whatever time is necessary to resolve customers’ questions.” 

Retail-banking research by Gallup, Inc. supports the idea that contact-center employees successfully drive sales when they focus on the customers’ needs and not on the bank’s. According to Gallup, the key conversational drivers are the employee’s knowledge of the bank’s products and services, asking the right questions to identify customer needs, clearly explaining the overall benefits of doing business with the bank, understanding the customer’s financial goals, providing solutions that aligned with the needs, and expressing sincere interest in improving a customer’s financial position.

Brunner 
In addition to his title as market president, Brunner is also a senior VP, global commercial banking senior relationship manager. He is responsible for the more than 800 employees in Onondaga and Oneida counties where Bank of America operates 12 bank branches, the contact center, and two Merrill Lynch offices. As a senior relationship manager, Brunner is responsible for managing middle-market relationships in the region and coordinating business-development activities. As he likes to say, “Our commercial region extends between the falls — Seneca Falls and Little Falls.” Worldwide, Bank of America (NYSE: BAC), the number two U.S. bank as measured by assets, serves about 44 million consumers and 3 million small businesses in 4,700 retail financial centers. The Charlotte, North Carolina–based banking company operates in all 50 states, the District of Columbia, the U.S. Virgin Islands, Puerto Rico, and in 35 countries. 

Community activities
Brunner leads a team focused on community involvement and engagement, including overseeing philanthropic grants. 

“Bank of America has instituted a nationwide initiative to focus on the communities we serve,” declares Brunner. “In the Central New York region, we are focused on three areas designed to help the community: housing, hunger, and creating jobs.”

Brunner explains. “The bank has partnered nationally with Habitat for Humanity, launching a multi-city build which takes place simultaneously in 36 communities within a period of one week. It’s a $6 million commitment to local [Habitat] affiliates to help revitalize their communities. In Syracuse, the bank gave a $20,000 grant to sponsor Habitat for Humanity’s ‘veteran build.’ We are also proud that a number of employees volunteered to build walls during the week.”

Brunner next notes Bank of America’s efforts to allay hunger. “Nationally, the bank sponsors an enterprise initiative we call ‘Give a Meal,’ ” adds the market president. “This supports a national effort called Feeding America. Locally, the bank has channeled its charitable giving to the Food Bank of Central New York, and our volunteers have pitched in to help and to offer support to the board of directors.”

Bank of America is also focused on eradicating financial illiteracy. To this end, the bank has teamed up with the Khan Academy, a leader in online learning, to produce a program called ‘Better Money Habits.’ 

“The website — BetterMoneyHabits.com — is a free service that allows anyone to understand finances,” Brunner stresses. “The goal is to teach the underlying principles of personal finance, which then puts an individual in the position to ask the right questions. Bank of America and Khan launched the website [in 2013], and to date we have received thousands of ideas and suggestions. This keeps us connected to the consumer and small-business people.” 

The bank’s focus on financial literacy stems from a Bank of America/Harris Interactive poll taken in 2013, which identified that 69 percent of U.S. adults cite money as a “top stressor,” 32 percent recognize a lack of financial knowledge has led to making poor financial decisions, and 43 percent feel they have missed out on good financial opportunities.

In 2015, the Bank of America Charitable Foundation provided $303,607 in grants and matching gifts to the Syracuse/Utica market. The bank’s Central New York employees logged more than 7,000 volunteer-hours in 2015.