A Day in the Life of a Telephone Banker

At 6:45 a.m. the horizon is just beginning to shade from black to cobalt blue, and the parking lot of Wachovia Corp.'s telephone call center is filling up with cars.

Susan P. Hubbard, carrying her purse and a book tucked under her arm, enters the two-story building, flashes her badge at a guard sitting in the lobby, and walks down a long corridor to her cubicle, which has just enough room for a swivel chair, an IBM PC, and an AT&T telephone switchboard. She clears away some papers to put down her book.

Ms. Hubbard brings an Ann Rule murder mystery to work, just in case the day yields a spare moment for reading. But that rarely happens. Her eight- hour shifts pass in a blur of telephone calls, as many as 150 a day. And when she isn't talking to customers, she uses her lunch break for personal calls. By the time it's over, at 4 p.m., Ms. Hubbard wants nothing more than to go home and nap for a few hours before spending a quiet evening with her husband and daughter.

Not that Ms. Hubbard minds. The chatty, irrepressibly cheerful woman says she loves her work as a telephone banker. "I almost feel I should pay this place to work here," she says, and seems to mean it.

Ms. Hubbard's enthusiasm is good news for Wachovia because telephone banking represents an increasingly common career in an industry that is frantic to lower its cost structure. Banks everywhere are trying to steer customers away from branches and into less expensive delivery channels, such as ATMs and telephones.

Since Huntington Bancshares and a few other institutions pioneered the concept in the early 1990s, 24-hour call centers have become ubiquitous in banking, allowing customers to check their balances, move funds between accounts, and even apply for loans and credit cards without ever entering a branch.

"I've never met a major bank without a call center," says consultant Hobart Harris, a principal with Ernst & Young's technology services practice.

Since turnover is the biggest problem for any call center, Wachovia does what it can to keep employees motivated. Numerous incentive programs spur performance. Even the arrangement of cubicles has been configured to reduce monotony.

There's no disguising the fact, though, that this is entry level work. Most of the center's 350 employees were hired straight out of college, and many will seek further training to enter other areas of the bank.

Ms. Hubbard herself frequently scans the bulletin board of job postings and has her eye on Wachovia's brokerage department. But in other respects, she stands apart from her peers.

At 51, she is older, for example, and has had a more varied life experience. The Brooklyn, N.Y., native attended but did not graduate from Queens College in New York. Before joining Wachovia four years ago, she worked in medical collections, in retail, and in the purchasing department of a lumber company. She has also been a housewife, raised three children, and worked as a volunteer for the Republican Party.

For Ms. Hubbard, Wachovia On-Call represents a big step up. She is, after all, a banker. "I picture myself as being behind a big rosewood desk in my own office. And I sort of hypnotize myself into thinking the customers see me that way as well."

On a typical day in late January, Ms. Hubbard's work begins at 7:28 a.m. with a buzzing sound and a flashing light on her switchboard. "Wachovia On Call," she says briskly into her headset. "This is Susan Hubbard. How may I help you?"

The call comes from a woman wondering if some checks have cleared. Once Ms. Hubbard has ascertained the woman's account and social security numbers, she keys the information into her PC and watches the account pop up on the screen.

The news is bad. The account has a negative balance of $54.33 and the woman has been assessed $22 for a bounced check. When the customer says she intends to make a deposit to rectify matters, Ms. Hubbard advises her to stop by her local branch and let them know the money is coming.

Ms. Hubbard also tries to sell the woman a savings account that provides overdraft protection for the checking account, but the customer shows no interest.

Ms. Hubbard sighs after she hangs up. "That's kind of the morning customer," she says.

It's a call center fact of life. Up until about 10 a.m., most of the calls have to do with "insufficient funds" and their ramifications. Only in the late morning and early afternoon does Ms. Hubbard get the calls she really likes, from upscale customers with more complicated financial problems.

Ms. Hubbard's favorite term for these morning customers is "clueless." But she says it in a pitying rather than critical fashion, having gone through some financial difficulties of her own during a divorce.

"I don't want to seem like I'm saving the world, but I really feel I help a lot of people straighten out their finances," she says.

Ms. Hubbard's empathic manner emerges during a 7:54 a.m. call from a woman named Pearl. Not only is Pearl's account in the red, but she's been assessed three fees for bounced checks.

"I'm just strung out," Pearl tells Ms. Hubbard in a weary voice as she explains how the people who tried to cash her checks had refused her request to hold off for a couple of days.

"It kind of snowballs, doesn't it?" Ms. Hubbard says gently, and then assures Pearl, "If you straighten all this out, you should be fine. Just don't let it go too long."

Some customers can test Ms. Hubbard's patience to the utmost. An Atlanta man calls at 7:31 a.m. identifying himself as "the old goat who calls quite early." In a suspiciously slurred drawl, the man asks Ms. Hubbard for her name.

"Ah ... " Ms. Hubbard hesitates slightly. "Susan Hubbard, like Old Mother Hubbard ... "

The customer tells her she "sounds sober."

"Sober as a judge," Ms. Hubbard replies brightly, and deftly steers the conversation back to the man's account balance, which turns out to be $18.70. She tries to tell him about Wachovia's CD rates but the man is more interested in whether she's wearing underwear.

Ms. Hubbard firmly shuts off that line of inquiry with, "But back to the CDs ... "

When the rambling conversation is finally concluded, Ms. Hubbard shakes her head at the weirdness. "That's more like a Saturday night call. It's very unusual to get someone like this in the morning."

Ms. Hubbard plows on, fielding 31 more calls before breaking for lunch at 11 a.m. Her energy level unflagging, she maintains a brisk, chatty demeanor throughout and manages to sell a couple of savings accounts and CDs along the way.

Lunch for Ms. Hubbard used to involve a trip to a nearby restaurant with some office mates. But lately she has been eating a sandwich from the office cafeteria at her desk, alone. She uses the time to make personal phone calls, to a friend who's undergoing some personal traumas, and a son who's recovering from surgery in a hospital.

Normally Ms. Hubbard would resume her duties within an hour, but on this day she is called away into a conference room to spend a few hours in a training class where she hears, for the umpteenth time, the correct procedure for selling CDs on the phone.

When she returns to her cubicle, at 3 p.m., Ms. Hubbard encounters some problems. The switchboard doesn't seem to be working. She can tell, from an electronic sign on the wall, that several calls are waiting in the queue, but none are routed to her.

"Why is nothing happening?" she mutters. Minutes pass and Ms. Hubbard, anxious to maintain her productivity, begins to get agitated. "I don't understand why I'm not getting any calls."

A technician is called and Ms. Hubbard is informed that her system has been reconfigured to accept only calls relating to new accounts. She is surprised. She had been expecting to be promoted to this higher grade of service representative any day now, but had not yet been officially notified of the change.

The new account call volume turns out to be much less than that for balance inquiries. It's 3:24 before Roy calls from Atlanta to open a checking account.

"We can open this right over the telephone for you," Ms. Hubbard replies excitedly. Once she has taken down the relevant information, Ms. Hubbard launches into a sales pitch on overdraft protection and Wachovia's Systematic Saver CD, an account that can be started with as little as $200 and then supplemented by automatic, monthly deposits.

"It's my favorite account," she gushes to Roy. And she's not being disingenuous, she has three of them herself.

Roy says he might be interested and will call back. Ms. Hubbard drops the sales talk and switches back to finishing up paperwork on the checking account. Finally she tells Roy she'll send him a signature card and enclose her own business card.

"My name is Hubbard," she says, "like Old Mother Hubbard."

At 3:52 p.m., Ms. Hubbard is ready to head for home. She logs off of her PC and picks up her Ann Rule mystery where she had laid it down nearly nine hours before. Once again, the book has made it through the entire day untouched.

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