1to1 Magazine - November/December 2008 - (Page 14) > PERFORMANCE Employees Are Customers, Too At Farmers Insurance Group, the sales reps rate customer service. c all center agents at Farmers Insurance Group never speak to customers, yet they’re held to a higher standard than many agents who do. That’s because at Farmers’ three contact centers in the United States, more than 6,000 agents field questions from the company’s own insurance reps from across the country. They handle nearly 500,000 calls per month clarifying policy rules, troubleshooting technical issues, and providing expertise to local offices. Debra Lechner, Farmers’ assistant vice president of the customer insight services group, says serving fellow employees instead of dealing with external customers directly can be a blessing and a curse. “Sometimes, since we’re dealing with our own people, they’re more forgiving of the issues our agents are going through,” Lechner says. “Sometimes they’re more in your face because you have more of a familial relationship than you would with customers. There’s definitely a more personal relationship with the people who are calling in, whereas a customer would be at arm’s length.” To properly gauge how well agents are handling calls from insurance representatives, the company randomly surveys callers after interacting with agents and offers managers instant feedback on the agents’ performance. Previously Farmers used an outside company to create the surveys and report the scores, which Lechner says often took weeks to turn around. Now the company uses Confirmit’s solutions to organize, store, and analyze its call center data from the surveys. The survey data tells managers the nature of the caller’s problem, “Our improved response time is the thing the insurance reps say they appreciate the most.” whether it was resolved, and how helpful the agent was, among other things. “Now we can see when questions in a certain area like billing aren’t being answered correctly, and we can have our training team address that immediately,” Lechner says. Since the people calling in relay the information they receive to customers, the most important statistics Farmers looks at are first-call resolution and answer accuracy. In addition, because service agents are quickly trained on issues they struggle with, they can respond to open items with a faster callback. “Our improved response time is the thing the insurance reps say they appreciate the most,” Lechner says. All the information gathered through satisfaction surveys is sent to managers daily in aggregate through dashboards, so they have fresh information about their departments. Supervisors can access the information down to an individual agent or call, and a public portal lets the agents see how everyone is doing. Lechner says the next step is to give managers a daily performance score for every agent. “After that we plan to expand our surveying capabilities to the customer base,” she says. “They don’t call us directly because they go through their branch office, but as a company we want to know about their experience and satisfaction as well.” > Jeremy Nedelka “Is your issue resolved?” > CUSTOMER LOYALTY Helio Gets Proactive About Problem Solving The mobile provider stops customer dissent in its tracks. t he result of unresolved service issues is quite clear: irritated customers, which can translate to a drop in loyalty, and ultimately contributes to negative word of mouth that is likely to travel as fast as Michael Phelps in a 400-meter freestyle relay. Helio, a two-year-old mobile service operator, prides itself on maintaining a loyal customer base, so providing quick resolution to customers’ concerns is a top priority. Dennis Wiekle, vice president of customer care at Helio, says that the company’s customer service providers are trained to provide a positive experience for members (Helio refers to customers as members), but as in any customer care organization, from time to time an agent may deliver an experience that can cause the customer to walk away from the call feeling less than positive. Helio tries to avert potential branding disasters by addressing such incidents right when they happen. After a call, a survey is created using an application from RightNow Technologies and is pushed to the member through the IVR. There are two key parts of the survey that make the process work. One is the question “Is your issue resolved?” The other part asks the member to rate his experience with the customer care agent who supported him. 14 1to1 magazine http://www.1to1media.com/view.aspx?ItemID=29293
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