The Insurance Call Center: The Center for MCI and Customer Centricity Published: 15 December 2011 Industry Research G00227363 Analyst(s): Kimberly Harris-Ferrante The call center, or service center, is growing in importance in promoting interactive and real-time transactions 24/7. Strategies such as strengthening the customer service representatives (CSRs), personalizing customer interactions, and integrating the call center with other channels are essential. Key Findings Strategies in the call center must shift from those aimed at operational efficiency to those centered on meeting customer demands for channel interactions. As the insurance market becomes digital, few assets will drive customer satisfaction and loyalty more than a highly effective call center. The call center must be reinvented to match the emerging role, including as a hub for multichannel interaction (especially those initiating on the Web), responding to social media posts, and providing personalized communication to customers. Recommendations Evaluate current call center operations and strategies against the four fundamental milestones. Identify gaps and determine the effect on the customer experience. Do not overly automate the call center for self-service. Focus on CSR empowerment to provide efficient and personalized interactions with customers instead. Integrate the call center with the portal to enable interactive communications with customers in the form of email, chat, and social media response. Taking local regulatory guidelines into consideration, ensure that all communications are stored and recorded for audit, and content analyzed for performance improvements. Ensure the staffing model and compensation in the call center match the emerging roles and responsibilities that CSRs will be taking. Table of Contents
Analysis...2 Customers Demand a New Call Center Experience...2 Reinventing the Insurance Call Center: Four Fundamental Milestones...3 Phase 1: Deautomation of the Call Center...3 Phase 2: CSR Empowerment...3 Phase 3: Call Center to Web Integration...4 Phase 4: Establishing the Call Center for Social Network Management/Response...5 Recommended Reading...6 Analysis Many life and property and casualty (P&C) insurers operate call centers (aka customer service centers), both through direct companies and through intermediaries. However, the ability of the call center to handle incoming calls and deliver optimal customer value is being increasingly questioned. Throughout the years, insurers have thought of the call center as a cost center, and, therefore, attempted to reduce the cost to operate a call center through operational and technological improvement. Call centers have only recently been considered a central component in meeting business objectives around improving customer satisfaction and loyalty; however, many operational challenges continue to exist. Low-wage staff with high turnover, for example, continues to plague the industry. The insurance market is becoming more digitized, with more movement to electronic channels, and there is increased demand for insurers to be customer-centric. This research highlights the evolving model of the insurance call center and the technologies required to support the new model. Customers Demand a New Call Center Experience In the past, call center investments were internally driven insurance companies strategizing about how to position the call center in the channel mix. Many companies launched initiatives around lowering the cost of the call center, moving phone calls out of the center to the Web via self-service, and implementing self-service automation in the call center. These initiatives focused less on improving customer service and more on reaching operational goals, such as lower costs. The main driver today for the center's evolution is external shifting customer demands for improved and convenient transactions. Today's and tomorrow's insurance consumer has radically different channel demands than those customers of the past, who accepted less-than-optimal channel selection and interaction. Top consumer trends driving call center evolution include: Social media participation to communicate with insurers about products/services, including claims issues and catastrophe alerts Interactive websites to chat with company representatives versus calling the toll free phone number, as well as offering cobrowsing capabilities Page 2 of 7 Gartner, Inc. G00227363
Multichannel interaction, including cross-channel transactions (e.g., starting a quote for a new policy online and then calling the call center to finalize the transaction) On-demand interaction through the channel when the customer demands it, 24 hours a day, seven days a week Personalized communication expecting the insurance company to know who they are and the products that they have with the company Much of this evolution is driven by the influence of other, more advanced industries which have improved the customer experience beyond the levels that are offered by the insurance industry. As a result, pressure of improving the call center experience is increasing for P&C and life insurers. Making sufficient investments in improving the technical platforms within the center, improving call center processes, and aligning staff to be more customer-centric is essential. Insurance call centers whether run internally or outsourced to a BPO provider must transform. Reinventing the Insurance Call Center: Four Fundamental Milestones There are four key milestones that insurers must accomplish during the next few years in order to match the call center to customer interaction requirements. Each are independent, yet ordered according to the logical sequence of evolution based upon today's call center operating model. Phase 1: Deautomation of the Call Center During the past few years, insurers have overly automated the call center. Attempts to maximize self-service options in the call center often made it increasingly difficult for inbound callers to reach CSRs, which led to frustration among customers. In many cases, the insurer failed to realize the value of the call center from a consumer point of view. For consumers, the call center represents a means for a live, personalized, real-time interaction to answer questions or get valuable information related to their insurance policies, as well as a way to interact with a live representative during the sales engagement. The value, in short, is the interactive, live and real-time elements offered. This is key to driving improvements in customer loyalty, closure rates on new quotes, and customer satisfaction. Therefore, insurers should look to deautomate the call center to provide fast, reliable, and convenient interactive experiences for customers. Offering inbound customers options to get to a live representative faster is essential in meeting consumer demands. Furthermore, technologies that identify individuals by the inbound telephone number to provide quick retrieval of customer records are essential in building the required processes. The key is reducing the time to get to a live person for inbound callers and ensuring that the CSR has identifier information at the point of answering. This will help insurers accurately and efficiently address customer issues. Phase 2: CSR Empowerment Once the call is passed on to the CSR, it is critical that the CSR have the training, information and systems required to address the customer's issues in a timely manner. Today, many CSRs operate in a complicated, difficult-to-maneuver IT landscape that includes multiple legacy systems requiring Gartner, Inc. G00227363 Page 3 of 7
training and scripting. CSRs often do not have FAQ information in an easy-to-find fashion, which means that they have to contact experts to answer difficult questions. This means handing off the caller to another CSR or having to call the customer back once the information is located. All of this introduces delays and drives down the quality of the customer experience. CSRs play an important role in delivering positive customer interactions, and therefore in driving both retention and revenue. They should be empowered to perform this job better than they are today. Investments in new tools and technologies to guide the CSR through his or her job are essential. This includes: A knowledge management, searchable system to help answer customer questions. Insurance consumers are becoming more educated about insurance products and companies, as they increasingly use the Internet to perform background research before making an insurance decision. They may acquire basic information comparing products/companies online before calling the call center. Often times, their questions may be more complex than those in the past, requiring more in-depth skills in the call center in order to answer them. This, combined with scripting technology, will assist in filling knowledge gaps. Today, CSRs are generalists and not product experts. Most CSRs lack the experience to answer the level of complex questions that may arise. To help overcome this issue, insurers should have a knowledge library with a search engine where CSRs can quickly search for information, as well as add content as questions emerge to share among other CSRs. This will help augment the skills of less-experienced CSRs and provide an information database that is shared among all sales/servicing personnel. A unified desktop where all back-office systems are integrated into a single view for the CSR. This allows the CSR to have a single process to access all core business systems (e.g., policy, claims and billing systems), regardless of whether they are Web based or green screen. This will allow the CSR to have a lower learning curve on the systems and be more efficient in customer-facing transactions due to less time required to access customer information. Customer communications management (CCM) systems to support on-demand correspondence and outbound communications. Many Tier 1 and Tier 2 insurers are seeking new methods to create, manage and deliver customer communications through both print and electronic channels. A CCM system allows for centralized content creation to ensure regulatory compliance (e.g., key content for a policy inquiry versus a claims correspondence), but it also allows the CSR to add personalized notes based upon the conversation. This can be delivered via email, SMS or to the portal, or sent to a print engine for batch printing (depending on the company's strategy and the type of correspondence). The use of CCM will help insurers support immediate distribution of appropriately personalized correspondence and documents, while minimizing the risk of noncompliance. Phase 3: Call Center to Web Integration Most insurance websites fail to deliver the interactive capabilities required of insurance consumers. Today, few sites provide the ability for online visitors to communicate with the insurer in real time. One way of accomplishing this is to launch chat via the site and have CSRs be the first level of response to inbound messages both IMs and emails. Four steps are required: Page 4 of 7 Gartner, Inc. G00227363
Routing of all emails and IMs to the call center. Having representatives with appropriate training and skills. Different skills will be required for Web CSRs than phone CSRs, and in many cases a specialized unit in the call center may need to be responsible for website response. Tracking, storage and analysis of logs. All communications per regulatory guidelines should be stored and tracked. Unstructured data analysis can be used to identify processes that could be improved on the website, FAQs, and other issues that could be resolved through process improvements. Integration of video capabilities. Increasingly, customers will want live video interaction with company representatives to discuss products and services (for more information, see "Predicts 2012: Cloud Computing, Social Media and Mobile Technologies Will Disrupt Insurers"). Having call centers equipped with video capabilities (including Skype or other Internet communications tools) will be essential in promoting live interaction with customers. Phase 4: Establishing the Call Center for Social Network Management/Response As consumers increasingly use social media as a communication channel, insurers need a real-time social media response team. Social media content will come in 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Each line of business will have to determine the immediacy of the interaction and expectations of customers in receiving a reply. For example, P&C insurers offering property coverage will find customers expect fast replies during a catastrophic event, whereas life insurers have less-urgent demands. For both product lines, assess the impact of social media on customer interactions, including the role of the call center as the first line of defense in responding. Core decisions should include: Automated notifications of content that reference the company name. Alerts should be set up for postings that contain the company name, and sent to the designated call center social media response team. Triage for those needing immediate responses versus those that are to be ignored or where no response is needed is required. Responding to social media posts. The call center should be responsible for posting answers to questions on social media sites in response to basic contact questions, customer complaints, billing inquiries and other administrative tasks. Initial point of contact may happen via the site, but then will need to be moved offline, in many cases to a private environment. Training is needed for the designated call center team responsible for social media replies on policies/procedures around social media response. Catastrophe response. P&C firms should determine the appropriate process for catastrophic response for social media postings. Escalation policies for when to involve senior claims teams are required. Storage, tracking and analysis of content. All communications about individual policies or contracts (including policy changes or sales questions about coverage, etc.) must be stored for regulatory compliance in most geographies. It is imperative that this process is followed and Gartner, Inc. G00227363 Page 5 of 7
records retention policies are updated to address social media interactions that occur within the call center. Recommended Reading Some documents may not be available as part of your current Gartner subscription. "The Unknown Impact and Opportunities of Social Media in Personal Lines P&C Insurance" "The Growing Need to Improve Customer Communications in Insurance" "The Business Impact of Social Computing: Real-World Results in Life Insurance" Page 6 of 7 Gartner, Inc. G00227363
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