Utah Retirement Systems invests in productivity, better customer service.

Customer service and productivity improved dramatically at Utah Retirement Systems in Salt Lake City.

A new telephone switching system, a Rolm 9751 Model 10, includes Phone-Mail, the latest voice messaging system and automatic call distribution, to serve participants calling for information on their retirement accounts.

Says Todd Neilson, telecomm manager for the $4.5 billion employee benefit fund, "Today, our 170,000 members are getting much better service and the productivity gains have been truly impressive."

The new system, installed in July 1990, replaced an NEC key system. With the new system:

* All calls are answered within 10 seconds.

* Monthly costs for phone line service have been slashed to $800 a month, one-third the previous level.

* Calls processed have jumped from about 200 a day to more than 1100.

PhoneMail allows members to request Deferred Compensation money withdrawals, transfer funds, check interest rates and fund balances, and request financial and insurance forms by choosing from a call processing menu of eight transactions. The service can be accessed from any touchtone phone.

Current interest rates and daily stock prices also are handled by the system through three 800 numbers which provide prerecorded information.

Callers have the option of speaking directly to an agent at any time. These calls are processed by ACD.

"Now, all our calls are getiing in," says Neilson, "and our ACD groups are operating at a productivity level of 90% to 95% with calls averaging 20 seconds."

To his surprise, Neilson found that the jump in daily calls from an average of 200 to more than 1100 calls was not due to increased demand, but rather to calls that were previously blocked from the system.

The new system includes more lines than the previous key system.

Utah Retirement Systems is among the first users to install Release 5.0, Rolm's latest release of PhoneMail.

It offers several new features which are also speeding communications for employees as well as improving their productivity.

The features include Outcalling, which places calls to a designated phone or pager when a new message has arrived; Future Message Delivery, which enables users to record a message for delivery in the future; and Urgent Message Delivery, which allows a caller to designate a message as top priority.

With Outcalling, employees who are out of the office--such as maintenance people and managers who are making benefits presentations--can be alerted to emergencies via messages placed in their pagers and designated numbers telling them when a message has been received.

An example of the Future Message Delivery feature is an innovative application designed by Neilson called the "training line."

Employees call a PhoneMail box where they can hear a prerecorded message giving them the dates and times of upcoming computer or telephone training classes. They can also register for classes by leaving a voice message.

An employee who picks up the messages can record a message and have it delivered to class attendees the day before the class as a reminder.

Another use is information boxes that update members on retirement bills pending in the state legislature.

"Our objective was to provide better public service," states Neilson. "With this system, that's exactly what we got.

"It has increased productivity for all users plus it enhanced our ability to communicate across the board."