DES MOINES, Iowa — Wells Fargo Preferred Capital announced it has increased the revolving credit facility for Westlake Financial Services from $240 million and one year to $365 million and three years.

Wells Fargo Preferred Capital is the lead agent and holds $250 million of the revolving facility.

"This facility expands the Wells Fargo relationship with Westlake Financial Services," noted Tom Murphy, president of Wells Fargo Preferred Capital.

"We continue to demonstrate our commitment to growing auto finance credit by issuing expanded credit facilities to industry leaders such as Westlake Financial Services. Westlake is highly regarded for providing world-class service to its customers, dealers and partners," he added.

Meanwhile, Ian Anderson, president of Westlake, said, "The increase and maturity extension of our credit facility with our banking partners, led by Wells Fargo Preferred Capital, continues to be a significant part of our stability and growth. This allows further expansion of our product lines to meet the needs of our dealers and their customers."

For more on Wells Fargo Preferred Capital, visit www.wfpreferredcapital.com.

Westlake Upgrades to Aspect Unified IP Contact Center Platform

In other Westlake news, the company announced an upgrade of its contact center with Aspect Unified IP 6.6 Enhanced, a standards-based platform that is designed to unite traditional customer contact capabilities with the power of software.

Westlake is deploying Blended Interaction, an application that runs on the Aspect Unified IP platform and combines inbound automatic call distributor, outbound dialing and voice portal capabilities.

The deployment is scheduled to go live before the end of August after a thorough testing and implementation phase, officials highlighted. 

Aspect Unified IP offers several technology feature enhancements which can help to increase Westlake's efficiency and lower operating costs.

In addition to handling advanced intelligent inbound routing and outbound dialing, the Aspect Unified IP product platform enables Westlake to communicate with customers via Web chat, e-mail, text message or through rich self-service voice applications. 

Westlake's deployment of the Blended application includes work force management capabilities from the Performance Edge platform product, along with the capabilities of Aspect Unified IP.

The addition of the work force management capabilities is designed to help Westlake to easily collect and analyze real-time and historical call data to generate forecasts, schedule agents based on skill sets and load patterns, conduct call and trend analysis, as well as analyze other information to improve organizational performance. 

Timo Saarela, vice president of servicing for Westlake, pointed out that the new software from Aspect will allow for more channels of communication with customers and gives Westlake the flexibility of implementing a wider range of strategies. 

"We may decide that for early, low-risk accounts, we don't need to call them and simply send them a text message reminder," Saarela said. "We are able to do that with Aspect Unified IP.

He went on to say, "With our currently deployed version of Aspect Unified IP, we have been able to reduce our headcount and full-time employee (FTE) cost by over 20 percent, while simultaneously growing our portfolio size over 40 percent. The upgrade to the Aspect Unified IP platform will help bring us to the next level of efficiency, which will allow us to continue growing without increasing our actual FTE or headcount cost."

Andy Bezaitis, senior vice president of product management at Aspect, added, "Westlake Financial Services is creating a winning contact center strategy with its deployment of the Blended Interaction application, which enables the organization to leverage new channels of communication and provide an even richer customer experience. Westlake clearly recognizes the agent efficiencies, improved collections results and enhanced customer service that can be achieved with this new deployment and is poised to deliver meaningful results."