Contact Sports

Call centers are a well-established segment of an insurance carriers customer service program, but many insurers have been slow to incorporate a true e-mail function that transforms a call center into a contact center. A new study by research and consulting firm Celent Communications, Multi-Channel Contact Centers in Insurance, finds carriers have not immediately recognized what is needed to expand those customer service offerings.

Insurers understand what it means to respond to a call inquiry, says Matt Josefowicz, a senior analyst for Celent and author of the study. When e-mail was thrown into the mix, a lot of companies started off treating it like it was a separate animal. He explains an e-mail message often was printed out, placed in someones in-box, and then it wound its way through the intra-office mail system until the right person got his or her hands on it.

There are several best practices for carriers to follow in setting up an efficient contact center, says Josefowicz: You need to use a forms-based system to capture sufficient information without being onerous. Use an internal routing and tracking system similar to the way calls are routed and tracked to make sure nothing falls through the cracks. The over-arching best practice is to apply the same management discipline to e-mail that is applied to calls.

The consequence of ignoring e-mail alternatives is many insurers have created customer dissatisfaction among some of their best customers. E-mail is something knowledge workers use everyday at work, and its something theyd like to use to conduct their personal financial business or personal customer service business, says Josefowicz. These are affluent, savvy customersthe customers you wantand you are giving them worse service than you would if they picked up the phone and called you.

Some carriers offer their customers an e-mail address such as info@company, Josefowicz adds, but such a generic mailbox is not likely to route the message by subject matter, nor will enough information be collected from the customer to establish once-and-done interaction. A better practice is to use a Web form that requires customers to fill out sufficient information to address the issuemaking sure customers enter their policy information and what particular area this question happens to be aboutjust the same way you would on a phone tree, he says.

There are insurers that would rather not bother with electronic communication, so they offer lengthy Web forms. Thats a deliberate strategy to discourage e-mail, says Josefowicz. We advise asking for just enough information to make sure the query gets routed to the right person and that it contains enough information to resolve the issue.

In terms of cost, insurers apparently dont realize much savings in handling electronic communications instead of telephonic. Most carriers say the cost is about equivalent, says Josefowicz. But insurers cant afford to avoid it simply because it doesnt offer immediate benefit to the bottom line. Theres a tremendous customer demand for e-mail, and its coming from your most important customers, says Josefowicz. So its not so much a cost-savings issue but a meeting-customer-demand issue.

Demand for e-mail contact will continue to rise, Josefowicz believes. Within the next few years, 16 percent of all customer interactions will be through e-mail. ROBERT REGIS HYLE