Industry Strategy Guide

North America Region

Customer Service
Strategies for
the Insurance Industry
Customer Service Strategies for the Insurance Industry

Table of Contents

3 Introduction
4 The Key Challenges Facing the Insurance Industry
Industry Maturation and Price Competition Impede Growth
Insurance Companies are Dissatisfied with the Results of Their
Cross-Selling/Up-Selling Efforts
Keeping Costs Down is Difficult
10 The Strategic Role of the Contact Center in Insurance
Strategy 1: Facilitate Integrated and Consistent Cross-Channel Interactions
Strategy 2: Offer an Inviting “Customer Front Door”
Strategy 3: Get Customers Off the Phone and Onto the Web
Strategy 4: Handle Calls More Intelligently
Strategy 5: Give Agents the Information They Need to Do Their Jobs
Strategy 6: Initiate Proactive Contact
Strategy 7: Make More Effective Use of Customer Data and Segmentation
Strategy 8: Optimize Business Process Execution
Strategy 9: Create a Winning Team Effort with Contact Center Virtualization
Strategy 10: Boost Agent Productivity through Interaction Blending
17 The Genesys Dynamic Contact Center
19 Case Study
21 Conclusion
22 About Genesys
Customer Service Strategies for the Insurance Industry 3 of 22

Introduction
The mature insurance industry — comprised of accident and health insurance, property
and casualty insurance, and life insurance and annuities — is faced with slow growth and
consolidation. Price competition is accelerating as customers turn to Internet data aggregators
to shop for the best deal on many types of insurance. In addition, while the insurance business
and the needs of policy holders and distributors are rapidly changing, many insurance companies
can’t keep up because they are unable to differentiate their business, reach customers likely to
respond to new sales opportunities or make the most of their valued staff. Insurers that define
and implement solutions to these challenges are those that will successfully compete and thrive
into the future.

This paper examines the strategic role of the contact center in the insurance industry,
and how it can deliver the increased revenues and cost savings that will drive profitability
and shareholder value. It also introduces ten essential strategies you can use to realize this
potential by improving the customer experience, leveraging cross-sell and up-sell opportunities
and promoting agent productivity and satisfaction:

• Facilitate Integrated and Consistent Cross-Channel Interactions

• Offer an Inviting “Customer Front Door”

• Get Customers Off the Phone and Onto the Web

• Handle Calls More Intelligently

• Give Agents the Information They Need to Do Their Jobs

• Initiate Proactive Contact

• Make More Effective Use of Customer Data and Segmentation

• Optimize Business Process Execution

• Create a Winning Team Effort with Contact Center Virtualization

• Boost Agent Productivity through Interaction Blending

This paper further explains how the Genesys Dynamic Contact Center provides integrated
communication technologies to optimize customer traffic, internal resources and business
outcomes for today’s changing conditions. It concludes with a real-world customer case
study that illustrates how BlueCross BlueShield of Tennessee has used Genesys solutions
to make its contact center vision a reality.
Customer Service Strategies for the Insurance Industry 4 of 22

The Key Challenges Facing the Insurance Industry

Industry Maturation and Price Competition Impede Growth
Data from Highline and the National Association of Insurance Commissioners show total
U.S. insurance premiums totaled $955.6 billion in 2005, down 0.1% from $956.9 billion in
2004. In fact, according to the National Association of Insurance Commissioners, growth
in the mature life/health and property/casualty markets has been slow for the past decade,
except for the year 2000 when life insurance benefited as a result of the shift from public
to private pension provisions.

A Decade of Slow Growth in Life/Health and Property/Casualty Insurance

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Source: National Association of Insurance Commissioners (NAIC) Annual Statement Database, via Highline Data, LLC.

In light of slow industry growth, larger insurance companies have pursued merger and
acquisitions to grow market share and to achieve economies of scale. The Insurance
Information Institute reports that the transaction The Capgemini World Insurance Report
value of insurance-related mergers and acquisi-
published in 2007 reveals that 31% of
tions totaled $32.7 billion in 2005, up from
non-life insurance customers have changed
$14.2 billion in 2004. While there are still 5,000
companies providing insurance coverage, even
providers in the last five years. Consumers
after all of the merger and acquisition activity, are going on the Internet to compare prices,
just 50 of them have captured more than 60% assisted by the growing popularity of data
market share, and this concentration is even aggregators that present insurance products as
higher in certain product segments. undifferentiated commodities sorted by price.
Customer Service Strategies for the Insurance Industry 5 of 22

The Capgemini World Insurance Report published in 2007 reveals that 31% of non-life
insurance customers have changed providers in the last five years. This customer churn
is often driven by consumers who aggressively shop for the best price, particularly for
non-life insurance products. In fact, downward pressure on profit margins will continue
apace as more and more consumers surf the Internet to compare prices, assisted by the
growing popularity of data aggregators that present insurance products from carriers
as undifferentiated commodities sorted by price.

Reasons for Customer Turnover in Insurance

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Source: Capgemini Analysis, 2006

But, just because price matters the most doesn’t mean that service matters little. A study by
the Claes Fornell International Group, an employee and customer satisfaction consultant,
showed that nearly 61% of insurance customers who have had a bad contact center experience
will consider switching companies, and 26% said they will definitely switch companies because
of a bad call center experience. And, the 2007 Genesys USA Consumer Survey further
highlights the high stakes of customer service. In this survey, 48% of U.S. consumers said
that customer service has the biggest impact on their loyalty to a company, and 44% said
that a poor call center experience was the sole reason they stopped doing business
with a company.

Although customer service is clearly very important for winning new customers and
retaining existing ones, insurance companies struggle to achieve acceptable customer
satisfaction levels in their call centers. In fact, according to Claes Fornell, only call centers
for personal computers rank lower than insurance companies in customer satisfaction.
Customer Service Strategies for the Insurance Industry 6 of 22

Satisfaction with Insurance Call Centers is Low Compared to Other Industries

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Source: Claes Fornell International

Not only are insurance companies failing to provide adequate overall contact center
customer satisfaction, many carriers are having trouble meeting the needs of specific
constituents — most notably agents and brokers who are among the most important
sources of new business. For example, an insurance industry survey on customer service
differentiation conducted by FileNet, an IBM company, shows that while more than half
of insurance carriers identified current policy holders as the primary audience for their
customer service efforts, only 20% identified agents and brokers.

According to a McKinsey & Company survey, ease of doing business and personalized
service are the most important factors influencing agents when choosing which carriers
to work with. The McKinsey & Company analysis also shows that the insurance industry’s
one-size-fits-all model for servicing agents isn’t working. Larger agencies may demand
service level agreements and require dedicated service teams, while midsize agencies may
need local service, and smaller agencies (who are expensive to service) may need
centralized call centers and self-service tools.
Customer Service Strategies for the Insurance Industry 7 of 22

Insurance Companies are Dissatisfied with the Results

of Their Cross-Selling/Up-Selling Efforts
In response to slow industry growth, many insurance companies are trying to grow
organically by cross-selling and up-selling more products. Opportunities abound as
mergers and acquisitions have broadened offerings across accident and health insurance,
property and casualty insurance, life insurance and annuities. The Gramm-Leach-Billey
Act in the United States has opened the doors for banks and insurance companies to
combine their businesses to create economies of scale and enter new markets. And legis-
lation, such as the passage of the Pension Protection Act in 2006, has removed constraints
for bundling life, annuities and long-term care products. A study by
According to Capgemini, 71% Axis Consulting revealed that 99% of insurance advisors feel that
of customers never or rarely (only it’s important, or even critical, to cross-sell effectively, however only
once per year) interact with their 46% consider themselves successful at it.
principal distributor. Consumers are
increasingly using the Web to research Lack of customer interaction is one of many factors that limit selling
products and prices, but insurance opportunities in the insurance industry. According to Capgemini, an
companies have a massive challenge astonishing 71% of customers never or rarely (only once per year)
aligning their back-end policy writing interact with their principal distributor, which is in stark contrast
engines to their Web-based consumer to customers in the banking industry, who interact with their banks
facing applications. more than 200 times a year.

Consumers are increasingly bypassing distributors and using the Web to research products
and prices. Celent, an international financial services strategy consulting firm, estimates
that 70% of auto insurance purchases in 2007 will be at least Web influenced (using Web-
based information resources), 30% will be Web initiated (substantial interaction with the
Website) and 10% will be fully purchased online. Celent also estimates that over 20%

Web Influenced, Web Initiated and Online Purchases of Insurance Products Poised for Growth
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U.S. personal auto insurance, individual health insurance and life insurance are all expected to show increases in Web influenced,Web initiated
and 100% online purchases from 2007 to 2011.

Source: Celent Estimates

Customer Service Strategies for the Insurance Industry 8 of 22

of health insurance purchases in 2007 will be Web initiated, and over 50% will be Web
influenced. Even in the more complex life insurance industry, Web initiated purchases are
expected to be 10% and Web influenced sales are expected to be more than 40% in 2007.

While consumers often use the Internet for comparison shopping, very few actually complete
a sale online, a fact that’s generally due to the way most insurance company Websites are
designed. Consumers usually prefer to seek advice before purchasing any type of insurance,
but many Websites don’t facilitate agent interaction. The result is that insurance companies
lose sales because they’re not able to engage the customer during the crucial key points in
the decision making process.

Further, many insurance companies face a massive challenge in aligning their back-end
policy writing engines to their Web-based consumer facing applications. When insurance
consumers complete their Web research and contact the agent to make a purchase, lack of
multi-channel integration means that agents have no knowledge of the customer’s prior
interactions on the Web, making it more difficult to develop personalized sales strategies.

Insurance sales occur mainly by product silos, further limiting cross-sell and up-sell opportunities
and making it difficult to differentiate products. But, to capture the full lifetime value of
the customer, insurance companies should anticipate the needs of the customer as they
move through life stages and strive to understand which channels their customers feel most
comfortable interacting with. Insurance companies will need to pay attention to demographic
trends to identify and target promising opportunities, such as baby boomers who will soon
retire, Generation X and Generation Y consumers who are technically inclined and ethnic
groups who value products and services tailored to their needs.

Keeping Costs Down is Difficult

Insurance companies are trying to keep costs low without negatively impacting customer ser-
vice. This tough task includes employing techniques that minimize contact center costs, such
as decreasing call volume and handling times, and reducing workforce and overhead expenses.

• Call volume is high

In their efforts to reduce call volume, insurance companies are making progress transitioning
customers to the Web, but adoption is still not what it should be.

Claes Fornell International Group reports that 67% of those who use a method other
than the call center, try the Website first. But, this is lower than in other industries
where 80-90% of customers try the Website before using the call center. The customer
service differentiation survey conducted by FileNet revealed that more than half of
insurance companies were only able to handle less than 10% of their inquiries online.
Customer Service Strategies for the Insurance Industry 9 of 22

• Handling times are too long

According to Claes Fornell International data, insurance call centers have lower satisfaction
rates than most other industries because of their below-average ability to resolve customer
issues. The key to decreasing handling times is to ensure that the information the customer
service representative needs to handle calls is always readily available. In many insurance
call centers, however, this isn’t the case and agents have to manually access dozens of screens,
one at a time, causing the call to take longer than it should and sometimes leading to
inadequate resolution. Because of the complexity of claim and membership inquiries, calls
frequently need to be routed to appropriately skilled specialists. This process means that it
can take days, or even weeks, before the customer gets the right answer.

• Workforce costs continue to increase

Because skill requirements for agents in the insurance industry are high, it has been
difficult to reduce workforce costs without negatively impacting service quality. For
instance, health insurance agents must handle a mixture of inbound claim and membership
inquiries from members and providers, such as complex questions about claim status,
billing, membership and benefits, as well as offer policy assistance to agents and brokers.
And, due to the intricacy of insurance offerings and the increase in new product lines,
product specialists are often required to handle calls. This has added a new layer of
complexity, as contact center agents must not only be trained to understand the new
offerings, but also to effectively communicate them to customers and distributors. In the
future, the skills issue in insurance will only get worse as more and more baby boomers
retire. Already, according to ContactBabel, insurance contact centers have an annual
attrition rate of 42%.

Overuse of licensed agents also adds to workforce costs. Insurance companies trying to
reduce the use of expensive licensed agents in the contact center have trouble doing so for
several reasons. First, the rules concerning who needs a license and for what reasons are
constantly changing. Second, licensing is required on a state-by-state basis, so maintaining
the list of who has which license, and determining whether the license is valid, is
cumbersome at best.

• Overhead costs are too high

Processing contact center requests is complex, often requiring information to flow between
systems, between people and between the company and third parties. And, typically, the
workload of agents is a mix of approximately 60% telephone-based assignments and 40%
offline support involving paper-based processes. The offline work is often difficult and
expensive to manage and, from both a routing and a workforce management perspective,
is rarely integrated with telephone activities. The result is two separate silos of work that
make poor use of agent resources.
Customer Service Strategies for the Insurance Industry 10 of 22

With increased merger and acquisition activities in the insurance industry today, the
consolidation of contact centers represents an obvious candidate for cost savings, as does
the increased use of outsourcing. However, insurance customers value personalized service
and prefer to work with a dedicated agent who will take care of all their inquiries. As a
result, many insurance companies may find that outright contact center consolidation will
frustrate and alienate their customers, and that alternative strategies such as contact center
virtualization should be undertaken to reduce overhead costs.

The Strategic Role of the Contact Center in Insurance

As recently as just a few years ago, the contact center in the insurance industry was simply
seen as a way of dealing with customer requests. These operations were usually run as a
so-called ‘cost center,’ and a clear objective for management was to make sure the contact
center was run on a lean budget while still providing acceptable levels of customer service.

Today, however, contact centers are seen as a far more strategic asset. Fundamental customer
service goals that should be delivered by today’s contact center include cross-selling and
up-selling more products and services, and running more cost efficient operations by in-
creasing agent productivity. Further, contact centers are now considered a key instrument
in changing the public’s perception of a company, creating a great customer experience
and executing on the business goals of the company as a whole.

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How can your contact center accomplish these service objectives? Depending on contact
center maturity and business requirements, here are ten possible contact center strategies to
make your goals a reality.
Customer Service Strategies for the Insurance Industry 11 of 22

Strategy 1: Facilitate Integrated and Consistent Cross-Channel Interactions

The first step in ensuring an exceptional customer experience is to offer multi-channel
contact center interactions comprised of phone, fax, e-mail, SMS text messaging, and
perhaps even Web chat, so that prospects and customers can conduct business with you
exactly when and how they like.

Offering superior channel interaction will encourage consumers to use insurance company
Websites instead of, or in addition to, aggregator sites — which will give insurance companies
a greater chance to differentiate their products and services, deliver more personalized
services, improve cross-sell and up-sell rates and lower operating costs.

Providing customers with a seamless experience across all channels ensures that interactions
are as consistent and efficient as possible, which will help to build a solid relationship with
the customer. For relationship selling, agents require a unified view of interactions across
all channels to effectively promote and sell insurance products. In the early promotional
stage, this means ensuring that insurance companies don’t repeat the same offers to customers
at different touch points, such as the call center and the Web. As the customer responds
to the promotion, agents can pick up where the customer left off at each stage in the sales
process, regardless of which channel the customer was using. For example, if a customer
(let’s call her Samantha) had gone online to request a bindable quote, the call center
would be aware of this and take steps to close the deal with her.

Strategy 2: Offer an Inviting “Customer Front Door”

When customers use the call center channel, the Interactive Voice Response (IVR) sys-
tem provides the customer’s first impression of the company. It also serves as a guide to
the insurance company’s services, and determines how well the company can decrease the
volume of calls that agents must handle or reduce handling times. Traditional IVR menus
have frustrated customers with long and confusing menu trees.

Open dialog call steering is emerging as an innovative alternative to traditional IVR

menus. By asking what the customer wants and recognizing key words in natural speech,
and by integrating with business rules and routing strategies, open dialog call steering ap-
plications take intelligent action to ensure the most efficient resolution of the call.

An example:

IVR: “Thank you for contacting Premier Property and Casualty Insurance.
How can we help you?”

Samantha: “I would like to check the status of my insurance claim.”

Customer Service Strategies for the Insurance Industry 12 of 22

If Samantha’s dedicated insurance representative is available, the Customer Front Door

application could send Samantha’s call to that person who might be able to use the
opportunity to explore her needs for additional insurance. Or, the application can execute
a self-service application for immediately processing Samantha’s claim status inquiry.

Strategy 3: Get Customers Off the Phone and Onto the Web
Using Web self-service, members, providers, agents and brokers can interact with the
company whenever they want, not just during weekday contact center service hours.
Not only does Web self-service enhance customer service, it also helps to migrate calls
away from expensive call center agents. Call center agents can dedicate their time to
handling more complex inquiries and concentrating on selling
There are tremendous opportunities activities, rather than responding to routine calls that can be
for self-service in insurance. easily automated.
Members
can view policy coverage, pay bills, The opportunities for self-service in insurance abound for all
make changes to policies, submit claims customer audiences. Members can view policy coverage, pay bills,
make changes to policies, submit claims and check the status of
and check the status of claims progress.
claims progress. In the health insurance business, providers can use
Health insurance providers can
HIPPA compliant online tools to verify benefits or coverage, automate
verify benefits or coverage, automate claims processing, review claims and correct errors. Agents and brokers
claims processing, and review claims can more easily obtain online quotes, proposals and plan designs for
and correct errors. Agents and customers with different profiles and needs. And, they can more
brokers can more easily obtain easily keep track of their own customer accounts rather than having
online quotes, proposals and plan to consult with a call center representative.
designs for customers and can keep
Integrating self-service with agent assistance allows the customer
to interact with an insurance company in a convenient way while
still receiving the same personalized advisory service offered by call centers. As customers
increasingly engage in online research and transactions, they can be offered agent assistance
to make their interactions go more smoothly.

For instance, Samantha goes to an insurance Website and decides to request a quick quote.
As she reads the quote, an online chat window pops up inviting her to speak with an in-
surance specialist. Samantha accepts and is able to immediately ask the outstanding ques-
tions she has after reviewing the online materials and quote.
Customer Service Strategies for the Insurance Industry 13 of 22

Strategy 4: Handle Calls More Intelligently

When taking calls, the number one priority for insurance companies is to make sure
they provide acceptable customer service. Skills-based routing, virtual hold and business
priority routing are three key approaches for meeting service requirements as efficiently
as possible while also making the most of opportunities to drive new revenues.

An IVR system not only identifies customers, but also why they are calling. With this
knowledge, skills-based routing determines where the call should be directed — either
to a self-service application, or to a customer service agent most qualified to efficiently
handle the call based on license certification, selling skills, language skills, product knowl-
edge or the ability to handle a specific type of claim, benefits, billing or sales inquiry.

During times of peak volume, virtual hold technology allows customers to receive a
callback at a convenient time rather than wait on hold. This technique complies with
requirements for call response times and improves customer satisfaction levels without
adding costs for additional resources.

Often, response times are easily met during periods of low call volume and agents have
free time to focus on other activities, such as calling clients to review their current cover-
age and additional needs. Business priority routing uses business rules to prioritize calls
based on customer value, customer segments, available channel resources, hold times
and other factors.

For instance, when Samantha, a health insurance customer, calls during a period of low
demand, she is passed straight through to a contact center agent rather than routed to
the self-service application. The call center agent handling her request then proceeds to
explain the company’s life insurance products to Samantha and how she can save money
by buying both her health and life insurance policies from the same provider. It turns
out that Samantha had already been considering life insurance, and after discovering the
discount she will receive from her insurance provider, she signs on.

Using business priority routing, insurance companies can also match service priorities
with the needs of different types of carriers. Calls from larger agencies can be directed
to dedicated service teams as soon as they are received, while calls from smaller agencies
can be directed to self-service when possible.
Customer Service Strategies for the Insurance Industry 14 of 22

Strategy 5: Give Agents the Information They Need to Do Their Jobs

The integration of back-office system information with everyday contact center activities
helps agents resolve calls more quickly and effectively. As soon as the agent takes the call,
relevant customer information is displayed within a single screen so that agents don’t need
to manually navigate through systems to find the information they are looking for.

Workflow management allows the service representative to efficiently take all necessary
steps to resolve customer issues, reducing the time it takes to get customers the answers
they are looking for. As back-office integration with the call center and workflow
management decreases average handling times and reduces unnecessary repeat contacts
to resolve issues, customer satisfaction becomes higher while the contact center
workload and costs are lowered.

Strategy 6: Initiate Proactive Contact

Because customers don’t interact with the contact center on a frequent basis, insurance
companies should consider initiating proactive contact to stay in touch with the customer.
Insurance companies find that policy renewals increase with frequent communications
leading up to the renewal event, and that the number of products sold per
Insurance companies customer also increases.
find that policy renewals
Whenever an agent or broker opens or renews a large account, using proactive
increase with frequent
contact to send a thank you message can let these important distributors know
communications leading that you appreciate their business. A global survey of 4,300 consumers conducted
up to the renewal event, by Genesys found that 87% of respondents indicated having a more positive
and that the number of opinion of a supplier after receiving a courtesy call to thank them for their
products sold per customer business or to ask about their satisfaction.
also increases. Proactive
contact helps insurance Proactive contact management is also a useful form of automated telemarketing
companies stay in touch to scale the contact center for increased cross-selling and up-selling activities.
with their customers. Insurance companies can further use proactive contact to notify their customers
of new products and services or special promotions.

Strategy 7: Make More Effective Use of Customer Data and Segmentation

Given slow growth in a mature market, some insurance companies are abandoning their
product-centric approaches to selling. Instead, they are maximizing the lifetime value of
customers through cross-selling and up-selling. In this new paradigm, using customer
data and segmentation to anticipate the future needs of individual customers becomes
more import than mass marketing. Going one step further, high-value policy holders
and distributors may interact, when possible, with a life-time advisor who is intimately
familiar with the client’s history and needs. Or, demographic matching is a way to as-
sign the customer to an agent who has a common demographic profile. The result is
Customer Service Strategies for the Insurance Industry 15 of 22

that customers get to interact with agents who will more readily relate to the customer
because they share certain commonalities, such as native language, age range, degree of
technical competence, and so on.

Front-office integration in the contact center helps insurance companies move away
from their siloed views of customer data. To make relationship selling a success, front-
office integration gives agents a 360-degree view of the customer, which
Front-office integration
helps in focusing on lifetime customer profitability. Agents have access to the
with the contact center
right information across all touch points to enable effective interaction with
helps to increase sales.
the customer. In this way, customers may receive advisory assistance and/or
Insurance agents are customized offers based on their current behavior, recent interactions across
able to provide advisory all channels, existing insurance-wide product portfolio, claims records and
assistance and/or detailed knowledge of the customer’s demographics, life stage and
customized offers based on propensity to buy.
the customer’s interactions
across all channels, existing For example, suppose Samantha, a Generation X customer who has no
insurance-wide product insurance products in her portfolio to help her plan for her retirement, calls
portfolio, claims records, to inquire about the status of a health insurance claim. The call is routed to
demographics, life stage a call center agent who is in the same age bracket as Samantha and who is a
and propensity to buy. retirement planning specialist. After updating Samantha about her claim status,
the agent tells her about the importance of early planning for retirement
and describes deferred annuity and life insurance products that will allow her to build tax-
deferred cash values. Samantha is pleased that the contact center agent has taken the time
to understand her personal situation and agrees to purchase these products.

Strategy 8: Optimize Business Process Execution

Insurance interactions usually involve multi-step business processes that may include
multiple contacts with customers, service providers and other third parties. As the com-
munications hub for the company, the contact center can be harnessed to automate and
expedite end-to-end business processes supporting these communications. By directly
integrating a business workflow engine, the contact center becomes an active participant
in driving business efficiency.

For instance, an automotive insurance provider can reduce the time and effort to sign up
new customers, settle claims or collect payments by automating the various external interac-
tions and notifications required to complete these processes. Contact center agents can play
an even broader role in these and other processes through integrated workflow that enables
the routing of back-office tasks as work items to available agents for processing.
Customer Service Strategies for the Insurance Industry 16 of 22

Strategy 9: Create a Winning Team Effort with Contact Center Virtualization

Many insurance companies are moving towards a virtual contact center to allow
geographically dispersed agents to operate as a single, winning team. Regardless of
location, agents can be called upon, as available, to ensure appropriate response levels
and to provide access to needed expertise.

A virtual contact center is vital for load balancing during times of peak demand, and is
essential in the insurance industry where the appropriate resource for each call is not only
highly variable, but is often unavailable in a centralized call center. A virtual contact center
unifies the skills of licensed agents, home-based agents, outsourced agents, mid-and
back-office specialists, field agents and other experts, regardless of their location.

When an agent takes a call and assesses that answering the customer query will require
specialized skills, rather than frustrating the customer by only providing incomplete
information, the agent can quickly locate available experts and seamlessly route the
call to someone who has both the details of the initial conversation and the appropriate
knowledge to satisfactorily complete the interaction. In this way, the customer isn’t forced
to repeat details of the previous conversation, and the company gains the benefit
of a reduction in costs through operating multiple locations as one center.

Here is an illustration: Samantha has just telephoned the call center to ask about her
homeowner’s claim. The contact center agent needs help from an adjuster in order to properly
answer Samantha’s questions.The agent taking the initial call gathers the pertinent information,
and then passes it to an adjuster in the back office for further action. Because of this
seamless interaction, Samantha perceives the contact center experience more positively
than she would have if she’d been forced to make multiple calls to various specialists
to help her with her claim.

Strategy 10: Boost Agent Productivity through Interaction Blending

Insurance companies benefit from optimizing their agents’ time as much as possible.
Call blending allows agents to handle both inbound service calls and outbound sales calls
as call volume and skills permit, while task blending allows agents to offer their assistance
at different interaction channels. For instance, contact center agents can be switched to
answering e-mails or engaging in text chats with customers. Not only does this maximize
agent productivity, but interaction blending also breaks up the potential monotony
of the position.
Customer Service Strategies for the Insurance Industry 17 of 22

The Genesys Dynamic Contact Center

The Genesys Dynamic Contact Center is designed to transform customer service by
automatically optimizing customer traffic, internal resources and business outcomes. While
contact centers can manually adjust to changing patterns, an advanced — or ‘dynamic’ —
contact center has the know-how and technology to make automatic adjustments in
real time. As contact centers become increasingly important channels, insurance companies
can convert themselves to dynamic contact centers to automatically optimize the customer
experience, foster cross-sell and up-sell opportunities and increase agent productivity.

The Genesys Dynamic Contact Center provides key customer service capabilities that
are integrated and orchestrated to fulfill these objectives:

The Genesys Dynamic Contact Center

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• Customer-Centric Routing puts an end to customer frustration by

ensuring each interaction is routed to the ideal resource with the right
information — no matter where that resource is located in your organiza-
tion. This helps you increase first-call resolution rates, meet variable call
volumes with limited resources, increase cross-sell and up-sell rates and
improve agent satisfaction.

• Business Process Routing integrates phone, e-mail and fax with back
office business processes to improve agent productivity and customer service.
Through this integration, contact center resources can be leveraged as part
of workflow processes such as processing a claim, fax, work order or other
interaction. Ultimately, contact center and back-office processes are
streamlined, and agent utilization is improved.
Customer Service Strategies for the Insurance Industry 18 of 22

• Workforce Management and Optimization is central to managing

and optimizing contact center resources. It gives you control over your
operations by allowing you to forecast and schedule agents dynamically
based on traffic volumes and resource availability — across a multi-site,
multi-channel environment.

• Proactive Contact Management provides a personalized customer inter-

action experience by allowing you to send relevant outbound notifications
at any time. It also enables you to create, modify, run and report on voice
and multimedia outbound campaigns for proactive customer contact and
sustained communications.

• Integrated Self-Service provides a holistic caller experience while

reducing handling times and service delivery costs. These capabilities
provide touch-tone or speech-enabled access for conversational exchange
to identify and resolve routine customer requests and transfer more
complex calls to the best skilled agent.

• Internet and Multimedia Integration capabilities allow customers to

interact with you the way they want to, when they want to — through
voice, e-mail, Web chat, Instant Messaging and even video calls.

• Branch, Remote and Expert Integration allow you to extend your

contact center to manage interactions based on business strategies and
objectives. For example, higher-valued clients might be sent to a highly-
skilled resource located within a branch office, rather than being sent to
the general call center.

• The Virtual Contact Center, enabled by voice over IP (VoIP) technology,

allows geographically dispersed contact center agents to operate as a single,
winning team. Regardless of where the contact center agents are located,
they can be called upon, as available, to ensure appropriate response levels
and provide access to needed expertise.

• Real-Time Offer Management helps you capitalize on cross-sell and

up-sell opportunities by providing the capabilities to recommend an offer
to an agent in real time, based on a customer’s background, history and
interaction type.

• Reporting and Analytics allow you to assess your contact center and
customer service activity by providing real-time and historical views on the
performance metrics of contact center objectives and how these metrics
change over time.
Customer Service Strategies for the Insurance Industry 19 of 22

Case Study
Insurance companies throughout the world are benefiting from their Genesys solution.
These include:

• The world’s 5 largest insurance companies

• 3 of the world’s 5 largest life/health (mutual) insurance companies

• 5 of the world’s 5 largest life/health (stock) insurance companies

• 4 of the world’s 10 largest property/casualty insurance companies

“The Genesys solution BlueCross BlueShield of Tennessee (BCBST)

brings all of our other systems is just one of the many companies using Genesys.
together and presents the
information in a unified Chattanooga-based BCBST employs 4,300 people
view. As a result, we’ve and is the state’s leading customer-oriented health
benefit services company. Working closely with local hospitals and medical
saved about 40 seconds per
professionals, BCBST provides innovative insurance and managed care solutions
call — almost double what
to its customers. The company arranges for the payment of more than $16
we expected — and received
billion in health care benefits and helps 2.3 million members to receive care.
a return on investment in just
15 months.” BCBST has hundreds of customer service agents who handle a mixture of
– Hugh Hale inbound claim and membership inquiries from members and providers. People
Director of Technical call in to establish the status of their claim, to find out when their payment is
Services due or to resolve questions associated with their membership and benefits.
BlueCross BlueShield
of Tennessee In dealing with these calls, BCBST must comply with strict Service Level
Agreements that use Member Touchpoints Measures (MTMs) to assess the
company’s performance. In terms of the inbound customer service telephone calls, the
MTM relates to service levels such as call handling accuracy, the speed of answering
and abandoned calls.

The Business Challenge

Against this background of compliance, BCBST was also faced with constantly rising
healthcare costs and fierce competition, and therefore realized that the company would
have to undertake some significant changes to preserve its dominance. As Hugh Hale,
Director of Technical Services, explains, “We needed to control internal expenses and
improve our systems and service levels at the same time. With call volumes going up, our
ability to continue providing a really good service — without adding staff — was a chal-
lenge. We had to do something to increase the productivity of our service agents.”
Customer Service Strategies for the Insurance Industry 20 of 22

The problem of improving customer service while simultaneously reducing costs was
compounded by the fact that BCBST’s multiple call centers had evolved organically.
Over the years, each autonomous unit had applied new technology solutions and
business processes as it saw fit. No attempt had been made to integrate the systems
or to share the knowledge across the whole company.

In addition to this, the previous system led to customer frustration because of the
duplication of effort involved when contacting the company. For example, after entering
their unique ID number at the Interactive Voice Response (IVR), customers would be
routed to an agent in the service group responsible for the geographical region in which
the customer was based. However, the agent handling the call had to again ask for the
ID number in order to access the relevant client data.

As Hale points out, “Our customers are getting more sophisticated and more demanding.
Also, our competitors are upgrading their systems, becoming more productive and improving
their services.” Another issue facing BCBST was how to unite the sites into one virtual
contact center: “We needed to find a way to let our contact centers back each other up and
appear as one, and in doing that, solve the business requirements while integrating every-
thing from a technical perspective.”

To meet the objectives of the business, the contact center had to manage the projected
rise in the volume of calls without increasing costs. The system also had to be scalable
and capable of interfacing with multiple customer touch points, not just the telephone.
Hale expands further: “The longer-term requirements were for Web chat and Web call-back,
plus e-mail management. We looked at all the different ways that customers can access
our service agents and realized that e-mail is quickly becoming a preferred method of
contact. We wanted to give it the same level of priority as a phone call in one universal
queue, so we had to have an intelligent routing mechanism as well.”

The Solution
BCBST selected the Genesys solution which allows the call center managers to view all
customers waiting in the queue, as well as all available agents, so that staff can be assigned
to the areas where the most help is needed. This ability to see what individual agents are
doing, and also to judge the performance of the department as a whole, helps managers
identify training needs and award bonuses.

Even more importantly, BCBST’s customers are happier because they are no longer
required to repeatedly provide their ID number. After entering their ID once at the IVR,
their files travel with the call as it’s transferred through the company. Any agent who
handles that call is fully informed about the customer’s interaction history via a
screen-pop at their desktop.
Customer Service Strategies for the Insurance Industry 21 of 22

For Hale, the Genesys solution was vital to reducing costs: “Call length decreased by
about 15%, so we saved about 40 seconds per call — almost double what we expected
— and received a return on investment in just 15 months.” As a result, BCBST continues
to exceed the requirements set out in its Service Level Agreements, which demand that
80% of calls be answered in 30 seconds or less. In fact, the call center agents achieve that
target more than 95% of the time.

BCBST is currently implementing the Genesys Workforce Management solution. “I

think once we get some of the Genesys e-mail and Web products in our agents’ hands,
our efficiency will increase even further. That is where the future is going to be, and
if we are ready to handle Web inquiries this way, agents are going to be much more
productive from the start,” concludes Hale.

Conclusion
As this Strategy Guide has detailed, the insurance industry currently faces its own unique set
of contact center challenges. Slow growth, consolidation and increasing price competition
mean that customer service is increasingly important for winning new, and retaining
existing, customers. In addition, insurance companies should replace product-centric
approaches to selling and, instead, develop cross-selling and up-selling strategies that maxi-
mize the lifetime value of customers. Further, cost-cutting pressures ought to be balanced
against escalating customer care expectations — a tough task amid increasing call volumes,
manual processes that lack integration with front- and back-office systems, and complex skill
requirements.

To meet these contact center challenges, insurance companies can implement cross-sell
and up-sell strategies based on customer relationships, promote agent productivity and
satisfaction and strive to transform their operations into dynamic contact centers that
ensure an excellent customer experience across channels and increase customer loyalty.
Customer Service Strategies for the Insurance Industry 22 of 22

Genesys Worldwide
Additional Genesys, an Alcatel-Lucent company, is the world’s leading provider of contact center and
Information customer service management software – with more than 4,000 customers in 80 countries.
Genesys software directs more than 100 million interactions every day, dynamically connecting
customers with the right resources – self-service or assisted-service – to fulfill customer
requests, optimize customer care goals and efficiently use agent resources. Genesys helps
organizations drive contact center efficiency, stop customer frustration and accelerate business
innovation.
For more information: visit us on the Web: www.genesyslab.com, or call +1 888 GENESYS
(1-650-466-1100).

Genesys Corporate Americas Europe, Middle East, Africa Asia Pacific

Headquarters Corporate Headquarters EMEA Headquarters APAC Headquarters
Genesys Genesys House Genesys Laboratories
2001 Junipero Serra Blvd. 100 Frimley Business Park Australasia Pty Ltd
Daly City, CA 94014 Frimley Level 17, 124 Walker Street
USA Camberley North Sydney, NSW 2060
Surrey GU16 7SG Australia
+1 650 466 1100
United Kingdom
+1 888 Genesys (436 3797) +61 2 9463 8500
+44 1276 45 7000

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