Is Customer Access Worth the Trip?
Avoiding Turf Battles
One of the hardest parts of getting people on the same page, as Schuster says, is bringing different business units together—especially since many insurers already have multiple existing call center operations, and attempts to consolidate into a single contact center (where new business, claims and all forms of customer contact are serviced) may turn into a turf battle. ""Getting a single view of the customer is not bleeding edge,"" Schuster continues. ""Having all of the information about the customer, all of his interactions, so a single rep can handle all the customer's requests without transferring the policyholder from representative to representative—that is where you want to be.
""If you can resolve any issue for a customer in a single contact and add other items of value to the customer's experience,"" for example, cross-selling another product, ""that is important,"" Schuster continues.
Zurich's Sousa found upon his arrival at the life insurance company that each business unit had its own contact center and separate strategy. ""The capabilities of the contact centers were based on who was in charge,"" he says. ""If the person was knowledgeable, the capabilities were good. Now we have taken a universal view of the contact center and we want to bring the best to bear across the entire organization.
""However, the most difficult part of my position is integrating the contact centers,"" Sousa adds. ""It's like being secretary general of the UN. Since everyone deals with call centers in everyday life, everyone thinks they know how to run a call center. People tend to dictate solutions to the call center. My job is to help the business determine their business need and then come up with a solution.""
One way to manage expectations and get internal buy-in is to start with a specific customer contact problem, solve it, and then expand the contact center's capabilities to include other business units. For instance, New York-based AXA Financial's Service Delivery Organization is running a relatively small contact center to support its Internet initiative, mainly in the annuity area. Currently, the operation receives approximately 100 calls per day that are mostly technical questions related to the Web, says Susan Brown-Reitz, vice president, services delivery, AXA Financial ($483 billion in assets under management).
But it's not going to stop there. ""The work we are doing in the service call center is a prototype for the level of service f for the life and annuities area,"" says David Wollin, managing director, emerging technology and e-business development, AXA Financial. ""We really want to use this as a model for the company.""
Launched in 2001 with the new Internet portal, the contact center has already shown some good results, boasts Brown-Reitz. ""We are finding that we are able to complete over 85 percent of calls as a one-and-done,"" she says. ""I think we were able to achieve this so rapidly because we started as a greenfield operation, so it has been much easier because we didn't have to break old habits.""
AXA bases its contact center on Siebel's (San Mateo, CA) call center suite of products, which allows AXA to view each interaction from the user's point of view, rather than a product-centric view, according to Brown-Reitz. Complementing the Siebel products is Cisco's (San Jose, CA) Intelligent Contact Management (ICM) solution, a software suite that delivers an integrated set of capabilities that enable AXA to interact with its customers via phone, Web and e-mail. ICM's computer-telephony integration (CTI) capabilities help bring data from many different sources—mainframe, e-mail and imaged documents, etc.—onto the CSR's desktop. Additionally, Livelink, a document repository and search application from OpenText Corp. (Waterloo, ON), ""allows CSRs to search through imaged documents on the desktop,"" Brown-Reitz adds.
In addition to handling the 100 calls per day, the CSRs also handle e-mail inquiries that are managed by Kana Inc.'s (Menlo Park, CA) e-mail management system. ""Kana auto-acknowledges every e-mail we receive and then routes them into 45 different queues, depending on the type of question,"" Brown-Reitz says. ""As we saw our e-mail volume grow we knew we needed a solution to help us manage it. Kana records all of the inquiries in a repository. That way, we can run reports on why customers are e-mailing us, answer their questions and track our answers.""
Call Volumes Growing
And despite the growing use of e-mail and, in some cases, the Internet, contact center call volumes are not going down—in fact, it appears that most volumes are increasing. ""The promise of the Internet and e-mail was they would reduce incoming calls, but in reality, all the technologies have done is increase the number of contacts with the customer,"" Zurich's Sousa says. ""More contact is always a good thing, but people have to realize that e-care will not supplant phone customer care."" For example, Sousa says a 35 percent increase in incoming e-mail does not translate to a decrease in call center volume. ""In most cases, the phone volume remains constant, despite increases in e-mail and Web interaction.""
Akibia's Schuster says the nature of self service will naturally generate more calls as customers have more questions. ""When you offer more options for self service, you see more contacts. As customers get more comfortable"" with self-service options, ""they will need to call less. In the near term, though, companies are not going to see the expected return,"" in terms of reduced contact center operating costs due to fewer calls.
For example, despite Personal Progressive, an Internet offering where customers can buy coverage and make policy changes, Progressive handles 34 million calls annually through the company's six regional call centers. ""We have our contact centers spread over various time zones for better coverage,"" reports Holowach.
Most of the calls that Progressive receives are service related, followed by sales and claims reporting. In fact, even though Holowach says the technology is available to offer claims reporting via the Web, Progressive wants customers to call in claims. ""We want consumers to call us immediately over the telephone so we can get the claims process under way immediately,"" he says.
While Progressive has built up its customer service offerings over time, another way to develop a state-of-the-art contact center is to start from scratch. Before last year, Farmers Insurance Group ($12 billion in total assets, Los Angeles) did not have any call centers. Today, the company has two customer-facing, 500-seat contact centers—one in Kansas City and one in Oklahoma City, for a total of 1,000 seats.
""Before the contact centers, the policyholder had to call an agent to file a loss report,"" or to make a change to a policy, says Vincent Donofrio, director of claims support services, Farmers. ""Starting greenfield is a great way to build a world-class contact center,"" because Farmers was able to pick all of the best technologies without worrying about compatibility with older call center apps, he says. Development took 18 months.
The two contact centers form the hub of Farmers' Customer Restoration Network (CRN). The CRN focuses on completing policyholders' claims as quickly as prudently possible by efficiently accepting the notice of loss in the contact center and then immediately linking the policyholder to Farmers' network of partners, including auto glass shops, body shops, rental car agencies and building suppliers and contractors for homeowners' claims.
Farmers' contact centers are powered by Siebel technology and Genesys (San Francisco) CTI software. Incoming callers are identified by the CTI software, and CSRs enter the notice-of-loss information through the Siebel application. ""Genesys is responsible for the real-time routing of customer interactions and managing call traffic,"" says Dalton Hansen, manager, contact center technologies, Farmers.
Other applications include FileNET's (Costa Mesa, CA) extended enterprise content management and business process management solution, which takes information—including scanned documents—and makes them accessible in an electronic claims file for reference by the CSR and for viewing on the Net by customers who wish to track the status of their claims. Genesys' Workforce Management Package, a component of the CTI suite, helps calculate contact center staffing requirements.
One of the newer technologies at Farmers is a digital recording solution from NICE Systems (New York) that records all calls. ""We use it primarily for training purposes,"" Donofrio says. ""But we have also identified certain claims that have a higher incidence of fraud and we review those calls for red flags,"" or certain verbal indicators that the claim may be fraudulent. For instance, a claim involving a stolen car automatically sends the digital recording for review.
Greg MacSweeney is editorial director of InformationWeek Financial Services, whose brands include Wall Street & Technology, Bank Systems & Technology, Advanced Trading, and Insurance & Technology. View Full Bio
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