Drop in AHT
Increase in CSAT Scores
In Cost Savings
High-performing insurance companies know that their contact centers are a key to success. Skilled contact center agents are required to make good first impressions, quickly and accurately answering questions or solving customers’ problems. But in the fast-changing insurance market, it can be tough for agents to keep up with the latest information and efficiently address callers’ needs.
For that reason, this multinational property and casualty insurance company is constantly evaluating its technology and seeking innovative ways to raise the level of customer service even higher. Within weeks of deploying Balto’s Real-Time Guidance technology, they were able to see measurable results in customer service, new agent onboarding, quality assurance, and overall contact center operations.
The Company
This multinational insurance holding company offers specialty property and casualty insurance products, including workers’ compensation, business owner’s policy (BOP), general liability, and extended service and warranty coverage.
They strive to deliver an exceptional service experience for its customers, responding to inquiries quickly and accurately while maintaining the highest levels of professionalism.
Balto has vastly improved our call center performance, driving greater consistency, while enabling us to customize responses that best address our different customers’ needs and provide answers with efficiency and accuracy.
– Director of Contact Center Operations, Leading Insurance Company
The Opportunity
As the first point of contact and the go-to source of information for customers, the company’s agents are critical to their success. For that reason, they are constantly evaluating its technology and seeking innovative ways to raise the level of customer service even higher.
We saw an opportunity to improve efficiency even more and make our agents’ lives easier by consolidating and digitizing all of the resources they may need to reference to help our customers.
– Director of Contact Center Operations, Leading Insurance Provider
The company had already undertaken initiatives to upgrade its IVR and introduce chatbots to help route callers quickly and accurately.
They also provided their agents with a significant amount of training material and documentation to ensure they had the information they needed to serve customers.
But the company wanted to make these resources even more easily accessible so agents could answer callers’ questions faster.
The company had already undertaken initiatives to upgrade its IVR and introduce chatbots to help route callers quickly and accurately. They also provided their agents with a significant amount of training material and documentation to ensure they had the information they needed to serve customers. But the company wanted to make these resources even more easily accessible so agents could answer callers’ questions faster.
They also wanted to drive even more consistency in how calls were handled to ensure agents were making the most of every interaction they had with callers. One particular focus was reminding callers to take a post-call survey, since fewer than 1% of customers participated in post-call surveys, which left valuable opportunities for customer feedback and training improvements untapped.
The Solution: Real-Time Guidance
This insurance provider turned to Balto to capitalize on changes that would further optimize interactions with customers. Balto’s AI-powered Real-Time Guidance solution opened possibilities for even greater consistency and agility across all aspects of call center operations: from new agent onboarding and adapting training resources, to delivering a top-notch customer experience by enabling agents to have the right answers at their fingertips.
Deployed in early 2020, Balto helped them instill more uniformity in agent interactions with customers by:
Even with 30 years of customer service call center experience, the past year of working from home has been one of the biggest challenges.
With Balto’s Real-Time Guidance, I have gained more knowledge and confidence in myself. When my day is over, I feel relaxed and grateful that I was able to meet customers’ needs.
– Call Center Agent
- Creating multiple playbooks customized to address questions agents may get across their offerings.
- Providing clear scripting that matches key phrases during the course of calls and gives agents the ability to put their own spin on conversations to build rapport with customers and avoid sounding robotic.
- Powering dynamic pop-ups and reminders that give agents easy access to relevant information.
These capabilities instill greater confidence in agents, and lower the risk of putting callers on hold to search for answers or seek help from managers. The checklist also helps agents remember to ask customers to complete a post-call survey, giving the company valuable information and actionable insights.
Agents are not the only beneficiaries of the Balto solution. Managers rely on real-time reporting to easily identify call trends, such as cancellations or waiving of fees, incorrect answers and weak language. These types of insights allow managers to quickly adapt agents’ ongoing training and coaching.
Though it was deploying Balto at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, the solution became even more valuable as agents were forced to work from home. They was able to easily push information out to their remote workers, since managers no longer had the luxury of talking to them in person or hosting meetings to go over updates. Balto also enabled a new approach to training, supporting all-virtual training with a self-study curriculum.
The Results
The company saw almost immediate results from its implementation of Balto. “The improvement in customer satisfaction knocked our socks off,” the Director of Contact Center Operations said, noting that its CSAT scores increased from an already-strong 75% before Balto to 94%. One of the factors leading to this improvement is shorter, more effective calls. Average handle time dropped by 50 seconds per call because agents could be more efficient finding the information they needed. This reduction also enabled agents to take an average of four additional calls each day.
Helpful checklists and scripting Balto delivered in the course of calls also ensured that agents asked customers to take the post-call survey on every call. These simple reminders led to a significant jump in survey completion, from 1% prior to Balto to 8% currently.
Having information at their fingertips during the course of a call allowed the company to be more confident in onboarding, cutting the average time by one-third – from six weeks to four weeks – and shortening nesting periods from one week to just three days.
