Success Story
WebEx saves an estimated $4 million per year for Countrywide.
Countrywide Financial is a Forbes and Fortune 500 company that provides financial services all over the world and is the parent company to Countrywide Home Loans. With a nationwide network of offices, the wholesale lending division of Countrywide Home Loans works directly with mortgage brokers to sell and service loans.
The Challenge
The financial professionals who staff each Countrywide office must remain knowledgeable about the company’s many products and processes. Consequently, the division has always invested heavily in employee training. But the process required employees from all over the country to fly to—and stay at—facilities in California, Texas, and Illinois, keeping some employees out of the office for as long as a week. Consequently, the overall costs were very high, especially as the company’s growing training organization tried to keep pace with the needs of the company. Countrywide needed to find a way to deliver more training, and maintain a superior training product, while reducing overall costs.
The Solution
In late 1999, the wholesale lending division discovered that another subsidiary of Countrywide had been working with WebEx and using its Web-based meeting services for training purposes. After some very extensive performance testing, the division was convinced WebEx could provide the solution they needed. The service would make it unnecessary for employees to do so much traveling, allowing training costs to come back down to earth.
The Benefit
The company established a Countrywide-branded WebEx page that enabled both instructors and students to simply log in from any Web browser to engage in a WebEx meeting. This enabled the company to train hundreds of people at any given point in time. Employees never had to leave their branch, so the branch didn’t lose the productivity of the employee, while the employee received better training. Countrywide estimates this process is saving more than 4-million dollars per year. The company now enjoys greater scheduling flexibility, is able to conduct more training classes, and gets more productivity from its training staff. Countrywide training classes now take place via the Web.
Using WebEx has also improved the company’s orientation process. In the past, each branch did their own form of orientation and results were inconsistent. Now new hires meet online over the course of five days for two hours each day to receive a very thorough orientation that covers what the company is all about, how it’s organized, how the division works, what skills are required, what technologies are available, and so on.
The trainers in Countrywide’s wholesale lending division also capitalize on the many interactive features of WebEx to enhance the learning process. Each trainer uses a video cam to introduce themselves at the onset of each session, enabling them to not just share the applications but to constantly involve the people in the class to keep them motivated and engaged. They have the flexibility to use Web tours, the company’s loan origination system, or any application available on the trainer’s local system to enhance the training experience, or even change roles and let other members of the class give lessons on certain portions. And the division’s use of WebEx isn’t limited to prescheduled training classes. Trainers can also use WebEx to create an instant meeting and provide an online demonstration anytime an employee has a question, making it a very effective form of real-time communications.
And finally, relying on WebEx has added an element of flexibility to the lives of those who work in the wholesale lending division, especially some of the trainers. They no longer need to juggle home lives with business travel because learning and training can now happen online.
The Future
Countrywide offers a Web-based service of its own called Countrywide Wholesale Business Channel (CWBC). CWBC is a Website that broker customers can use to originate loans. Because the service is very efficient for both parties, Countrywide is now offering a function called “Site Builder,” which broker customers can use to build their own Website. Countrywide would like to use WebEx to train their employees on the most effective way to sell “Site Builder” and be able to answer broker questions about the service. Countrywide sees it as a way of making a potentially complicated process remarkably simple.
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