The Insurance Contact Center Transformation: The Business Value for Improved Customer Service

Transcription

1 The Insurance Contact Center Transformation: The Business Value for Improved Customer Service

2 Table of Contents Overview... 3 Key Business Drivers... 3 What are the resulting industry trends based upon the mentioned business drivers?... 4 What is Interactive Intelligence doing to address these key areas?... 6 Growth Trend... 7 ECM Governance Trend Enhance Transformation Trend Copyright 2013 Interactive Intelligence, Inc. All rights reserved. Brand and product names referred to in this document are the trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective companies. Interactive Intelligence, Inc Interactive Way Indianapolis, IN Telephone/Fax (317) Rev. 03/13, version 1 Interactive Intelligence, Inc. 2 The Insurance Contact Center Transformation

3 Overview As leaders in the contact center industry who work closely with insurers, Interactive Intelligence has seen contact centers evolve through various stages: a sub-optimized (or inefficient) center; an optimized (or efficient) center; an operational asset (or optimized) center; and an Intelligent Contact Center, a term used by Yankee Group in which optimized effectiveness and value are achieved in the contact center by making use of tactical and strategic content information. What s driving the transformation? Across the industry, senior leadership teams realize that the contact center is a critical component in their overall corporate strategy to set expectations for their company s brand, image, sales, and word of mouth marketing. These expectations shape the customer experience when they engage with your company. The measurement of the customer experience is no longer limited to comparisons with other insurers. Your customers now compare their experience to that of their most recent interaction, which may have been with a bank or credit union, retailer, public utility, etc. It is clear that other industries are impacting your customers expectations, and this shift is driving, in part, the transformation that we re seeing in the industry today. Insurers realize they do not frequently engage with some of their customers, but when they do, insurers want to provide them the best customer experience at the least cost. And so, as insurers strive toward the end-goal of having an Intelligent Contact Center, they are challenged with addressing such initiatives as Doing the Right Things, Building Loyalty and Being Effective which are all part of the Voice of the Customer (VOC) programs with Driving Revenue, Doing Things Right, and Being Efficient which are all part of the Voice of the Business (VOB) programs. In this challenging industry, insurers are definitely feeling the rub to balance the VOC = VOB equation. Let s take a look at the factors that have an impact on the equation, such as the key business drivers, industry trends, and the technology used to implement them. Key Business Drivers What are the key business drivers we re hearing from our insurance customers? 1. Increase revenue. Insurers are focusing on growth, which is driving insurers to gain a better understanding of their customers needs, and which will ultimately improve retention and drive sales. Insurers are looking to their contact center to help drive revenue through upselling and cross-selling efforts. 2. Improve efficiencies within the contact center and across the enterprise. Insurers are constantly looking for ways to improve operational efficiencies, and some low-hanging fruit can be found by introducing process automation. Processes that are candidates for automation include those that are highly manual, repetitive, touch multiple departments, are customer facing, engage with external vendors, require responses to be tracked, have regulatory requirements with process controls, and inflict some level of pain within the company. Interactive Intelligence, Inc. 3 The Insurance Contact Center Transformation

4 3. Improve the customer experience. The easier it is for the policyholders, agents, brokers, and partners to do business with an insurer, the better the customer experience. While insurers have various customer experience goals that focus on such things as customer effort and customer loyalty, the underlying message across any program geared towards improving the customer experience is to provide strategic customer service for every interaction that occurs. What are the resulting industry trends based upon the mentioned business drivers? 1. Growth. As insurers strive to achieve top-line revenue targets, most are turning to their customers to gain a competitive advantage. Acting on their customers needs and improving upon the customer experience will help drive sales through customer loyalty. The gauges to determine if you are influencing customer loyalty is to determine whether your customers are willing to consider you for another purchase, their reluctance to switch to a competitor, and their likelihood to recommend your products and services. The contact center can support your corporate customer loyalty initiatives with programs for incident prevention, word-of-mouth, and cross-selling and upselling. Measurement on the outcome of these programs is performed through customer surveys and, ultimately, attainment of your growth targets. One key ingredient in a successful customer loyalty program is to focus on the customer interaction and the ability to influence the customer s perception of whether value is received during the exchange. The interaction will also provide additional background and historical information about the customer and can be used to upsell or cross-sell to them. To be successful in the sales effort, the licensed agent needs to offer the right product at the right price at the right time, and the content presented and captured during the interaction will assist them in that effort. As insurers look to capture additional interaction data for loyalty programs and other marketing activity, you can start to understand why Big Data is a hot topic, especially with the challenges associated with assimilating data from your internal and external systems (e.g., census data, social media, etc.). As part of your growth strategy, it is important to understand your customers needs, but how difficult is it to get that big picture when the data is deployed across multiple platforms? Insurers are looking to expand their business intelligence capabilities, but for those who have deployed point solutions, the challenges surrounding Big Data get even bigger. How valuable is it to have an all-in-one platform that captures cradle-to-grave interaction data in a single repository, which can then be used in conjunction with your marketing demographic data and other data sources? Just ask your Business Intelligence team. Interactive Intelligence, Inc. 4 The Insurance Contact Center Transformation

5 Customer retention strategies typically include an in-depth look at the customer experience. We have noticed that insurers are discovering the need to provide their customers with the tools and applications to engage in the manner they prefer. Specific attention is on, what is being defined as, the New User, who is more mobile and more social than ever before. The result? Enhance customer service and self-service by providing an environment that enables customers to engage with the insurer in a frictionless way. Regardless of the channel the customer uses (e.g., phone, chat, , text, video, fax, social media, mobile), the customer experience should be consistent across all channels. From a CSR perspective, the same frictionless experience should occur, regardless of the channel used by the customer. So if the CSR receives a screen-pop on an opt-out call that came from a self-service IVR, then the same screen pop should occur when the CSR answers an interaction that comes from your mobile-based application. As part of the customer experience discussion, let s not neglect to measure the actual customer effort that is involved, where the primary focus is to: ensure that no repeat interactions occur for the same issue; and eliminate transfers from within the contact center once the interaction is answered. Customer effort is important to incorporate into the insurer s self-service strategy, so customers who initially engage in self-service will not need to transfer into the contact center to resolve their interaction. 2. ECM Governance. Insurers are looking to provide remote employees, agents, brokers, TPAs, and policyholders with access to various content. However, insurers have increasing concerns as that information is made available through mobile applications and wireless devices. As insurers offer more channels for their customers to engage, and as they provide enhanced self-service applications, the sharing of content in a secure manner is a top priority. According to AIIM International, Enterprise Content Management (ECM) refers to the strategies, methods and tools used to capture, manage, store, preserve, and deliver content related to organizational processes. ECM covers the management of information of various media types, such as paper documents, s, faxes, recordings, etc. ECM has many components, but at the core is Document/Content Management. Document/Content Management provides insurers the opportunity to improve their overall efficiency by providing the most current information to those who request it, and more importantly, those who are authorized to use it. Moreover, a content management solution helps insurers make strides towards the Intelligent Contact Center status, since the contact center will have access to strategic content information to formulate the complete picture necessary to enhance the customer experience and reduce the customer effort. Interactive Intelligence, Inc. 5 The Insurance Contact Center Transformation

6 3. Enhance Transformation. As contact centers evolve into Intelligent Contact Centers, their focus shifts to more effective and efficient customer communications. This requires involvement not only from the contact center, but also from the entire enterprise. To meet this objective, insurers are looking for innovative tools and applications to help them improve their business operations through process automation in key areas such as customer onboarding, claims, and underwriting. Individuals involved in these key areas talk to customers, collect information, and make decisions, and process automation can provide a structured way to help these factors work together more efficiently and effectively. Automating processes using a communications-based technology (versus a communicationsenabled technology) allows for processes to be identified, prioritized, and intelligently routed to properly-skilled individuals. Unlike business process tools that keep data silo ed, process automation tools can interface to your applications and access information to automate processes in conjunction with your existing business process platforms, core systems (policy admin, underwriting, claims, billing), CRM packages, and databases. Since the contact center is customer-facing, it is critical for CSRs and supervisors to have the necessary tools to initiate, monitor, escalate, and/or track a process. What is Interactive Intelligence doing to address these key areas? As an insurer, you re challenged with balancing your VOC initiatives with your VOB initiatives, which is commonly accomplished through a methodology that includes gathering business requirements, performing a gap analysis, prioritizing requirements, developing a business case, and ultimately developing a roadmap. As part of this exercise, you may come to the conclusion that not all feedback from customers can be acted upon. However, when you have the proper tools and applications, as well as access to an all-encompassing data repository as provided with Customer Interaction Center (CIC), the balancing act becomes a whole lot easier and less costly to implement. Let s take a look at how Interactive Intelligence can partner with you to address the recent trends we ve noticed in the insurance industry. Interactive Intelligence, Inc. 6 The Insurance Contact Center Transformation

7 Growth Trend To drive revenue growth, insurers are focusing on the ease of doing business in order to maintain their customers loyalty. Loyal customers do in fact spend more, defect less and recommend your products and services to others. There are a number of applications that Interaction Intelligence offers that should be considered to improve customer loyalty and the customer experience. Some of them include: Incident prevention Interaction Dialer o Word of mouth Send an outbound notification to the claimant to provide payment information regarding their claim. Interaction Process Automation o Initiate a work request process to request the Billing department to provide a statement to a policyholder. o If a customer has not signed the Claims Release form by the target date, initiate a work request process for the Adjuster. CIC/ACD o If a claimant makes a negative post regarding their claim s process, the post can be captured from the social media monitoring platform and deliver it to the ACD engine to route to appropriate individuals who are skilled to respond to posts as well as blogs on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and other social networks. o Establish a social media listening station to stay current with opinions from policyholders, agents and brokers. By immediately engaging the appropriate department within your organization, you can further support your business drivers by acting on positive as well as negative sentiment. Cross-sell/upsell Interaction Recorder /Interaction Analyzer / (integrated) CRM o Create best practices by identifying your top-performing licensed agents who cross-sell your products, and record the dialogue to identify key words and phrases. Use speech analytics to identify whether your licensed agents are using the preferred keywords and phrases. o Use CRM screen-pop capabilities to identify products and services purchased by the policyholder. Interactive Intelligence, Inc. 7 The Insurance Contact Center Transformation

8 Voice of the Customer Interaction Analyzer o Use speech analytics to capture keywords and phrases (e.g. Claim process takes too long ) that identify customer pain points o Note that Interaction Analyzer goes beyond only tagging voice calls, and actually extends to the IVR, so the customer experience using your IVR can be captured as well. If your callers are commenting about having to search for their policy or claim number because they don t know it, you ll capture that information so your IVR can be redesigned to improve the customer experience. o Incorporate First Contact Resolution and First Person Resolution to measure the customer experience and customer effort. o Use real-time keyword and phrase matching to potentially reduce the need for transcription costs that your centers might currently incur. Interaction Feedback o o Offer post-call surveys to callers to gauge the claimant s experience of the claim process. (Future releases of Interaction Feedback will provide support for web and mobile channels.) Incorporate the Interaction Feedback solution into ACD routing. This way, individuals who have previously provided poor survey results can be routed with the highest priority to the mostskilled CSR when they next interact with your contact center. Interactive Intelligence, Inc. 8 The Insurance Contact Center Transformation

9 Enhanced self-service Web self-service o Web self-service enables insurers to return the best answer with the inclusion of predefined, inquiry-related content in every response Mobile applications o Interaction Mobilizer with CIC leverages the CIC ACD to allow your customers to obtain service from their mobile device. Interaction Mobilizer allows you to directly link your customers mobile app experience with your contact center by supplying mobile context information (e.g. who customers are and what they are doing) to your CSRs when your customers choose to interact. With a claim s application built using Interaction Mobilizer, the claimant can visually look at your IVR and provide all the necessary information to submit a claim directly from the mobile app. If the claimant has questions and needs to speak to a CSR, the claim information captured during the IVR will be presented to the CSR when the dialogue begins. o Types of interactions that an Interaction Mobilizer powered app can initiate include: Callback Queues a request for a CSR to call the user back immediately or at a time selected by the mobile app user. The Interaction Mobilizer-powered app can display an expected wait time for the callback if requested. Once submitted, the callback request can be routed by CIC s ACD using the mobile app user s context information (e.g. they are a Gold customer). When a CSR is assigned the callback by the ACD, the mobile app user s context information is presented so that the CSR can be prepared, and the mobile app user can even be shown the name and picture of the agent who will be calling, if desired. Click-to-Call Allows the customer to call into the contact center with context and without using the IVR. When the call arrives in queue, the mobile app user s context information is married-up with the call to be used for routing as appropriate, for presentation to the CSR, and/or for application screen pop. Text Chat Allows the customer to initiate a text chat with a CSR in the contact center. The mobile app user s context information can be used for routing the chat and then can be presented to the CSR in their chat interface. Interactive Intelligence, Inc. 9 The Insurance Contact Center Transformation

10 Video call Mobile apps present the most compelling reason that contact centers have seen for building out infrastructure for video routing and interaction. A video call leverages the standard smartphone s capabilities to present and send video and audio while using the contact center s ACD routing ability to connect the mobile app user with the appropriate CSR. Again, the CSR is presented with the mobile app user s context information when the video interaction is presented. *Note certain Interaction Mobilizer capabilities referenced here are targeted in a future CIC release. Interactive Intelligence, Inc. 10 The Insurance Contact Center Transformation

11 Big Data With the notion of the Intelligent Contact Center capturing tactical and strategic information, some may cringe and say Big Data is getting too big. But envisioning the idea that all interaction data that occurs within the contact center and the enterprise is captured within a single repository (e.g. CIC), insurers can get a holistic view of their customers in terms of such things as new customer demands, demographic trends, and preferred channels with which to communicate. Vital information is captured in all of the various applications supported under CIC, which includes: ACD for routing information; IVR for self-service applications; Interaction Tracker for interaction management; Interaction Feedback for survey data; Interaction Analyzer for the customer experience; Interaction Recorder for quality assurance; Interaction Dialer for campaign management; Interaction Optimizer for workforce management; and Interaction Process Automation for process workflow. While Interactive Intelligence does not have a Business Intelligence solution, the interaction data that is captured in the CIC data repository is a critical piece of the Big Data data model. It includes data that can address questions like: Who last engaged with the customer? How was their last experience with us? What media channel did they use? And how often were they transferred? ECM Governance Trend As all insurers know, the issues surrounding content management is access and cost. Very often the content is spread across multiple systems, so gaining access to content can be difficult and costly. When access is available to the user, the user is required to move from view to view to get the information that is needed. We, at Interactive Intelligence, are looking to provide the following with our content management solution: Ability to store-and-retrieve or link to a wide variety of content Complete annotation capabilities for all document types Ability to maintain multiple versions of content: unalterable read-only versions of documents, native and annotated versions Basic document workflow with simple routing, reminders, and queues to organize and manage work tasks Easy-to-use facilities for backup, recovery, and archival of content items Easy storage in the cloud, especially Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service High-volume document intake Handling of streaming media (e.g. audio and video file) as well as documents Interactive Intelligence, Inc. 11 The Insurance Contact Center Transformation

12 Why pursue Interaction Content Manager (ICM) from Interactive Intelligence? ICM should be considered due to the following: Content resides on the same platform as the communications platform, which will allow such things as: o Screen pop of related content based upon an incoming interaction o Viewable content that includes their associated interaction history (e.g., call recordings, chat history, , and fax) o Viewable content that can drive process automation with Interaction Process Automation. This capability allows an associated work flow to be launched when content is received. o Expanded IVR self-service to provide for retrieval and delivery of documentation. The ability to make content intelligent : o Define classes of documents where a class can have attributes and behaviors (restrictions). This capability prevents a user from doing such things as dragging a document into the incorrect folder (e.g., Contract into Complain folder). o Along with access permissions, these business rules enable improved security, so only authorized users can make authorized requests for content Enhance Transformation Trend Interactive Intelligence has been providing contact center automation capabilities by identifying, prioritizing, and routing interaction objects (e.g., calls, s, text chats, etc.) using an intelligent, skills-based, presence-aware ACD, which includes monitoring and tracking capabilities. In a natural extension of this functionality, we introduced the first all-in-one communications-based process automation (CBPA) solution called Interaction Process Automation (IPA). IPA takes those same proven intelligent ACD routing technologies and applies them to any work center within an insurer. IPA offers an efficient, cost-effective way to model a business process, extend it to individuals involved in that process, and track it throughout its life cycle. At Interactive Intelligence, we are looking to provide the following with our Process Automation solution: Prioritize, route, escalate and track work throughout any process. Automates processes by integrating to your enterprise applications that include core systems, CRM packages, databases and other back-end business systems. Route work items to employees but also to external parties such as customers, partners, and vendors. Interactive Intelligence, Inc. 12 The Insurance Contact Center Transformation

13 Why pursue Interaction Process Automation from Interactive Intelligence? IPA should be considered when looking to transform your business (onboarding, claims processing, underwriting, etc.) based upon the following capabilities: IPA uses contact center-style queuing and routing for the accurate and flexible prioritization and distribution of process work. An example would be a completed, online insurance application initiating processes to retrieve credit scores, motor vehicle records, and necessary underwriting reports, and delivering the information to the best-available underwriters as a single work item. Enterprise presence management becomes process presence, whereas individuals indicate their availability for a work assignment, which, when assigned, improves the overall processing time. Automated escalation functionality ensures that service level objectives are met. Recording becomes an essential part of compliance for business processes. Real-time monitoring provides management visibility into every step of the work process. End-to-end reporting delivers the ability to manage and measure each process. The CSR can be enabled with the necessary tools to have visibility into the overall process in the event the applicant calls the contact center. VoIP provides complete location-independence, enabling employees to participate in businesses processes from anywhere in the world. For example, a remote adjuster can receive a notification on their mobile device and be able to respond accordingly to the routed work item. Interactive Intelligence, Inc. 13 The Insurance Contact Center Transformation

14 While the intent of this document is to briefly touch on how the CIC platform from Interactive Intelligence can address the business drivers and current trends in the insurance industry, it is difficult to document every capability that exists within our applications. Following is a list of key CIC insurance use-cases that may pique your interest: Ease communications between internal employees, departments, remoteoffices, field adjusters, agents, and third-parties Allow adjusters to be in contact whether in the office or in the field via real-time presence management and one number Find-me/Follow-me Assign and track insured interactions based on the analysis of previous and current interactions Route applications faster and more accurately based on skills, workload, and availability of underwriting personnel Route interactions directly to a CSR if no claims have been submitted or are outstanding; if a claim has been submitted, the IVR would be presented to provide a status updated based upon their DNIS or claim number Provide self-service capabilities to agents, insureds, and claimants to verify coverage information, determine outstanding premium balances, or check the status of a claim Use IPA to pull data from Policy Admin system to retrieve insured policy and coverage information Additional information can be captured and forwarded to the claims system Route work item to an Adjuster and attach a recording Attach additional information (e.g., policy report, photos, etc.) that is associated with a claim Route escalations to a supervisor Deliver outbound notification to provide claimant with status update Provide immediate access to policy and claim information associated content, insured calls, recorded statements, s, chats, etc. For additional information, please contact your Interactive Intelligence Territory Manager or certified Interactive Intelligence Partner reseller. References: Improve Agility in Contact Centers with SOA, Yankee Group, January 2006 Top 5 Considerations for Automating Key Business Processes, Interactive Intelligence, July 2009 Customer Experience And Loyalty: A Closer Look, Forester, March 2009 A New Approach To Business Process Automation, Interactive Intelligence, November 2008 Interactive Intelligence, Inc. 14 The Insurance Contact Center Transformation

15 Deliberately Innovative All-in-One Communications for Business. Interactive Intelligence Group Inc. is a global provider of unified business communications solutions for contact center automation, enterprise IP telephony, and business process automation. The company s standards-based all-in-one communications software suite was designed to eliminate the cost and complexity of multi-point systems. Founded in 1994 and backed by more than 5,000 customers worldwide, Interactive Intelligence is an experienced leader in delivering customer value through its on-premise or cloud-based Communications as a Service (CaaS) solutions, both of which include software, hardware, consulting, support, education and implementation. At Interactive Intelligence, it s what we do. Interactive Intelligence, Inc. 15 The Insurance Contact Center Transformation