call center technology presented itself,
the Insurance.com IT team began focusing on how to use business intelligence
(BI) to bolster customer service levels.
The group then created a punch list of
elements they felt necessary to accomplish those goals.
Continuous monitoring and feedback were high on the list, says Noerr.
“In any contact system (sales center),
call volume will be dynamic. We knew it
was difficult to optimize the agent
workflows or agent utilization, so by
putting a system in place that lets us
monitor various heterogeneous data
streams concurrently, we’ve been able to
optimize agent utilization.”
The end result, Noerr adds, is that
instead of peaks and valleys, we’ve level-set the agent workflow.
SETTING THE DIAL
A long-time Cognos (now IBM
Cognos) client, Insurance.com had
always embraced business intelligence
(BI), reports Craig Bedell, director of
Global Performance Management
Insurance Services at IBM Cognos, and
had been using the Cognos 8 platform
to obtain and process routine business
information. What came next meant
changes to hardware and software.
A little more than a year ago, IBM
Cognos NOW! was loaded into an appliance (a piece of hardware dealing with
real-time data), reports Bedell. The BI
solution is designed to deliver operational dashboards to continuously monitor key performance indicators (KPIs)
and operational metrics from disparate
data sources.
Tightly integrated with IBM Cognos
8 BI, the new system provides up-to-date, actionable intelligence for rapid,
fact-based decision-making, especially
key for Insurance.com’s line operations,
Bedell adds.
“They use that appliance for two
purposes,” he says. “They’ve hooked it
into their infrastructure to follow the
quoting process, page activity relative to
their Web site and load times. They also
use it to review and monitor errors that
come from not just their system, but
from any of the 15 companies for
which they provide services.”
The software times the various feeds
coming in from quoting engines for
VIN validation, etc., and the system
holds set tolerances to create an alert
that feeds information to a cube.
Traditional business intelligence acts
on that information.
Noerr explains that there are a variety of data feeds (from CRM, telephony systems, interviews, etc.) that can
trigger an agent to take a call. Some of
those feeds the insurer has control
over; for example, how long an agent
sits idle before the call center manager
pushes them a lead, or if, for some reason, they were not able to finish the
quote and have been requested to call
the lead back.
DIAL IT UP
“Our managers will get alerts in real
time, notifying them that certain agents
are either overloaded or underutilized,
so we will contact them through the
Cognos appliance, telling them to up or
down the dial,” Noerr says. “When we
see volume getting lower, instead of
waiting 60 seconds, we will start turning the dial down to 45 seconds, so we
continue to dial that down ... if volume
picks up, it automatically ups the time to
90 seconds, and so on.”
Future plans call for a Web service to
be created to automate this functionality. For now, however, Insurance.com is
capitalizing on an intelligent “pacing”
of lead flow in real time. Noerr says the
system has helped maximize the impact
of their online marketing campaigns
(responding to a local TV ad or banner
campaign, for example) and streamline
agent utilization to keep costs in check.
“All along, we’ve wanted to be more
proactive in the data center,” says Noerr,
“and we are on the right track. When we
have volume online, and we know what
percentage of inbound calls end up in
our sales center, we can staff up. We can
change the phone load of an agent. If we
know there will be a spike in call volume in California, for example, and our
agents are in “chat” mode, we can
change that to “inbound.”
Although privately held and therefore, unwilling to reveal revenue figures,
Insurance.com’s Noerr confirms that
both soft and hard returns on the system
have been positive. One such return is in
cost savings.
“With 15 different variables currently going into the agent utilization metric, we are continuing to turn the dials
up and down based on tolerance,” he
says. “This has already helped us reduce
costs.”
Another return helps Insurance.com
retain its competitive advantage, as
external business partners obtain real-time alerts on issues such as degradation
or errors from the insurer that affect the
agent’s ability to obtain information and
close the sale. INN
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