excerpt from Management public information on Q3 data: Please note, operational support is the key area of staff maintenance and reduction. This is question and answer and is available from: seekingalpha.com
Christopher J. Allen - Evercore Partners Inc., Research Division
Got it, got it, got it. And then, earlier you talked about maintaining extra levels of support until the improvement in terms of the calls into the tech center and things like that from your FAs. I mean, have you seen progress on that front since the integration was closed? Can you give us kind of -- an update there in terms of how it's progressed, maybe on a monthly basis, broadly speaking? And given the current pace, what the time frame you're looking at?
Paul Christopher Reilly - Chief Executive Officer, Director and Member of Special Committee
Yes. I would say, first, it's been very good. The first was the conversion, which scared us to death. I mean, and it would scare anyone to death, even if you think it's going well. But the day after the conversion, everything was -- every account was in balance, which amazed us. Call centers were very elevated, even though we had people in the branches at that point, we don't now, actually helping them. Those call volumes came down in a matter of days, which we were actually surprised. And for a lot of those were basic, "How do I open this? How do I do that?" We're into more of the sophisticated using is, "How do I do this planning thing? And how do I get this -- how do I generate this kind of report? How do I -- I've got this issue and kind of account, who do I talk to?" People that have been here, know all of that, and they know who to go to and talk to. The people who are new at Morgan Keegan, the people they used to call in Memphis are -- the systems are new to them, too. So if the questions are fairly complex, they need to get help. That is working its way through, but it's going to take some time. So we'll have some nominal cost reductions even in this quarter as we've looked at kind of some structural changes in the operational support. But my guess is that's going to stay elevated through the first half of next year, as we just want to make sure the support levels are there. And we're just -- we're going to be slow to reduce support unless those levels are down and -- the questions that we get now are pretty sophisticated, and we just got to get people used to the systems and get our new support people, who are very good, used to our systems, too.