Disability Insurance Company: Customer Service Call Center Improvement

Summary

Doreen Evans Associates assisted in documenting Call Center processes to help evaluate the best-fit organizational and operational structure after a merger.

Client Company Profile

A mid-size life and disability income insurance company that specializes in products for highly skilled professionals, executives and business owners.

Business Challenge

The Call Center is responsible for satisfying approximately 70,000 internal and external contacts via phone, email and FAX. A merger between two companies presented a factor to be addressed in determining how best to provide service to the customers and to establish the Call Center’s service niche and philosophy. The goals for the Call Center were identified as:

• ability to handle increased service request volume (5% - 15%)
• increase in profitability
• ability to provide exceptional customer service

Call Center management identified a series of processing areas and system support that required improvement attention. These included service request tracking, correspondence processing, illustration processing and agent verification. While management had submitted requests to enhance the existing systems to improve these areas, they recognized that these projects had been thought of as discrete problems rather than being addressed as integral to the business processing of the Call Center as a whole.

Solution

The Call Center engaged the services of DEA to conduct a Business Process Analysis & Improvement study of the core Call Center processes. The goal was to identify areas of opportunity that would improve productivity and ensure continued customer satisfaction with the services. Recommendations for improvements were provided along with benefit analysis and cost justification metrics. Additionally, Call Center best practices and benchmark measurements were evaluated as a means of providing comprehensive information from which the best decisions could be made.

System Architect was used to create Process Flow Maps that describe the service request processing of the Call Center. Processing time and volume metrics were incorporated along with technology used. The maps served as the baseline for describing the As-Is environment. Opportunities were mapped to the process steps where appropriate and recommendations for improved processing of system support were identified. As a result, the Call Center was able to quickly implement short term improvements to cut costs and improve profitability and justify the approval of large, extensive and costly system enhancements.