The author of a study finding dramatic improvement in customer satisfaction with insurance industry contact centers, said insurers have done well because few carrier call centers are offshore.

"The highest-scoring industries [in the study] also have the lowest level of offshoring," remarked Sheri Teodoru, chief executive officer of the customer service consulting firm CFI Group North America, based in Ann Arbor, Mich.

Her report--"Contact Center Satisfaction Index 2008: How Contact Center Customer Satisfaction Impacts the Bottom Line"--found that, among eight industry sectors rated on a 100-point scale, the score for insurance went up over 10 percent from 2007 to 2008, rising from 68 to 75.

The scores for the different industries were:

Hotels, 78; multi-channel retail, 76; insurance, 75; cell-phone service, 72; banking, 75; government, 70; personal computers, 69; and cable and satellite TV, 66.

In the portion of its survey of satisfaction dealing with customer service representatives, CFI found that insurance CSRs gained 4 percent this year, rising to 80--second only to retail, which scored 81.

CSRs were rated according to courteousness, speaking understandably, knowledge, interest in helping customers, and effectiveness in handling their issues.

CFI said that for insurance customers surveyed, only 4 percent believed that the contact center they called was located offshore--the lowest of any industry besides the government.

Ms. Teodoru said she did not know if only 4 percent of insurance operations were offshore. The study, she explained, is all about customer perception.

Locating operations in foreign locations is "not a smart idea, unless you consider the consequence of lost customers...It hasn't worked well for a lot of industries," she said.

Insurance companies, according to Ms. Teodoru, have an opportunity to further improve their scores by giving customers the opportunity to do more self-service via the Web.

If items that are easy to deal with can be farmed out to the Internet, CSRs can better focus on the really hard questions, she explained.

As it is, Ms. Teodoru said, insurance call center operations have been doing "a fantastic job of right-channeling" and picking up added responsibilities as claims staffs have been downsized.

Among other findings by CFI:

o 17 percent of insurance customers who called a contact center did not have their issue resolved.

o Customers with unresolved issues are four times more likely to defect.

o Customer satisfaction is significantly lower for customers with unresolved issues versus those whose issues were resolved (44 vs. 83).

o The survey found satisfaction for all industries was almost 70 percent for onshore locations and slightly better than 50 percent for offshore.

o Eighty-five percent of issues were resolved when the representative was rated easy to understand, versus 64 percent for those found difficult to understand.

o Customers were more likely to talk about a bad call center experience than a good one--71 percent versus 48 percent.

CFI said its research was done with online surveys of more than 22,000 participants who had been in touch with a contact center within the previous month.

Special Reports /

Insurers Succeed With Call Centers In U.S., Survey Finds

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