Picture Perfect

DESKTOP DESIGNS

Despite advances in application integration, insurers still struggle to give CSRs a consolidated view of the customer at their desktop, forcing reps to contend with what Walheim calls the "Alt-Tab" front end.

"CSRs still have to work using multiple, on-the-side applications or even look up information in memos or books," he says. "The knowledge-management integration piece continues to be lacking in the insurance industry."

"CSR training is important, but a good CSR desktop is essential technology," Cecchini adds. "With a good desktop, I can put in the customer's ID and the data element required, and the system will bring that information forward to the rep."

Aetna recently deployed an integrated CSR desktop, leveraging what it did in an earlier initiative where the health insurer worked to streamline the experience of callers–typically health plan members or healthcare-provider staff–through its interactive voice response (IVR) system. Replacing a touch-tone IVR with a voice-recognition system and improving its computer telephony integration (CTI) capabilities enabled Aetna to more than double the caller identification rate on the 50 million calls it processes each year. The health insurer also incorporated better call routing into the CTI to direct callers to the most appropriate service reps based on who they are and what service they need.

But those reps still needed to deal with a number of legacy product, billing, and other systems–37 in all. Additionally, these systems had a member-focused view, making it difficult to assemble information when fielding questions from providers, who generate the majority of calls Aetna receives.

"CSRs had to be able to navigate through those systems depending on what questions the customer had, and they had to rely on all kinds of home-grown processes, macros, and even sticky notes to aid in their navigation," explains Mike Gannon, head of contact center delivery for Aetna.

Aetna used what Gannon describes as a "heavily customized" implementation of the PegaWorks workflow management application from Pega-systems as the basis for the "Aetna Strategic Desktop" across its multiple contact centers. The insurer began deploying the system in 2005, and today it is fully deployed to the company's 10,000 service agents.

In addition to consolidating information for CSRs, Aetna's desktop also offers reps separate "member" and "provider" views of information depending upon who the caller is. CTI prepopulates the desktop with caller information.

"One of the other challenges we had before we embarked on this endeavor was we were collecting data in the IVR but not passing that to the CSRs," Gannon says. "Customers had to repeat information. So, we wanted to build the front-line user interface that would take the information from the IVR and push it out to the desktop and present it to the CSR."

The desktop also provides auto-documentation functionality. "Before, reps had to type out complete notes on what the caller asked and what information they were provided. Now, if the CSR quotes a benefit, for example, the CSR simply clicks a checkbox, and that information is tagged to the call and stored in the repository," Gannon says.

Building and deploying the desktop required Aetna to address challenges of people, process, and technology. "From the technology perspective, we did have a number of challenges integrating with back-end systems. We had to build a lot of new services to get at applications and data," Gannon says.

"From the people perspective, there were customer service reps who had been using these legacy applications for some time, so there were behavioral and process changes that required a lot of change management," he adds.

As a result of the Aetna Strategic Desktop, the company has improved service and gained efficiency in its call center. "We've broadened the capability of our CSRs simply by bringing information together in a common format. It also enables us to do a lot of cross training and eliminate the need for 'specialty' CSRs," Gannon says.

"We've seen improvement in call experience also because callers don't have to restate information. And CSRs feel better about the job they're doing, based on feedback we get from them," he asserts.

For Esurance–an Internet-based, direct-writing P&C company–customer service is essential to its marketplace differentiation. The company services all its auto insurance customers through 400 CSRs located in its Sioux Falls service center and in home-based offices.

Previously, CSRs used the same Web-based front end Esurance provided to customers for self-service. "Eighty-five percent of our customers handle their business through the Web system," says Lisa Ward, Esurance's director of customer experience.

However, the insurer took the opportunity of a 2004 .NET-based rebuild of its policy admin system to deploy a revamped CSR desktop. The new desktop added functionality for CSRs, such as direct-faxing capabilities, as well as a streamlined user experience.

"For CSRs, the redesign was geared toward enabling them to access information in a lot fewer clicks," explains Chris Henn, Esurance COO. "We completely redesigned the navigation from a user's perspective to bring the most relevant information to the forefront."

Streamlining the experience for CSRs and keeping bandwidth requirements to a minimum were particularly important for Esurance's contingent of home-based service staff, who make Citrix-based connections to the system and receive customer calls via VoIP. The company began its virtual-office program in 2006 with a test group of just six CSRs, working with that group for a year to ensure the program and supporting technology were working properly.

Esurance began expanding the program in 2007, and today nearly one-quarter of its CSR staff work from home. "We've found people working from home are just as productive, and their quality of work is just as good as in the service center, which are our primary concerns," Henn says. "Additionally, people using the program are very happy with it, which improves morale and reduces turnover."

YOU'RE (NOT) #1!

Although insurers understand and have adopted effective IVR to route callers to the right rep based on what customers need, Jonathan Steiman, analyst in financial services technology at Datamonitor, argues systems for improving service performance should target the pre-CSR customer interaction and prioritize callers based on their relative importance.

"You need to focus your service resources on those customers of high value who are or have the potential to become profitable. Those who have a history of being not as profitable, you don't want to waste resources on them," he says.

In an industry that has struggled with its perception among consumers, this may seem like a strategy that could backfire, but Steiman draws parallels to other industries that have used it with success.

"The airlines need to make sure everyone's seatbelt works, but high-churn customers don't get brought into the airline lounge or upgraded to first class," he says. "An insurer doesn't want to be seen in the marketplace as a ruthless segregator of good and bad customers, and if someone has a policy with you, you need to ensure that customer receives service. But insurers need to do more to move high-value customers to the front of the line through smart call routing."

PEAK PERFORMANCE

Call handling and CSR desktop technologies target improving CSR performance and the delivery of customer service as it happens; analytic platforms are designed to manage it over time. Managing performance continues to be a challenge for companies because it involves juggling a number of different activities, such as scheduling staff, balancing workloads, assessing service quality, and providing targeted training to outlying performers.

For Esurance, it became necessary to replace a spreadsheet-based CSR scheduling system as the company grew. Eventually, the company deployed scheduling software from Blue Pumpkin Software, now owned by Verint.

"We also needed to find an effective way to manage our 24/7 call center schedule," Henn says. "On the service side, utilizing a software program to match staffing levels to demand numbers, which we accurately can project based on our experience, has done wonders for our ability to accommodate schedules and to make sure we have all the shifts filled."

He also credits the system with improving morale–which in turn impacts the quality of customer service–and reducing CSR turnover. "People love to have input into their schedules and the ability to look into when time slots are open and needed. They also can see when they can put in for time off and likely get it," Henn says.

But scheduling software is only one part of performance management. Monitoring performance in real time, looking for service bottlenecks, and assessing quality and productivity over time must all be brought together into different views that are clear and useful for CSRs, call center supervisors, and corporate planners.

"Reporting bridges the pieces, needs to be expertly analyzed, and is the thing that's missing the most in performance management," Walheim says. "The reason performance management reporting is so difficult is it requires input from different systems. For instance, it may require matching and reconciling the reason codes that are in the telephony system with the codes in the policy admin system in order to know whether a situation being experienced is related to a specific transaction or reflects an overall process problem."

"On the technology side, the vast number of integrations that are required creates a mixed data environment. The need to rationalize that data and assess trends over time becomes a challenge," says John McNally, senior manager in Accenture's financial services division.

"The data is dirty among all the tools," adds Walheim. "It's not just that you might not be able to get certain pieces of data, such as the quality score for a call, but might not be able to make sense of it or rely on it."

BlueCross BlueShield of Tennessee (BCBST) currently has a performance management initiative under way. BCBST has a diverse base of callers that includes independent brokers, healthcare providers, plan sponsors, members, and individual policyholders.

Today, the company measures various areas of performance, but that measurement is a combination of a variety of different tools. "Some of our critical employee operational metrics are sourced from people keeping manual spreadsheets and Access databases," says Frank Brooks, chief data architect and director of data management and information delivery at BCBST.

"We also have an incentive-compensation system where we pay our staff based on their performance, but there isn't always a timely link between their performance and when they are shown those numbers. An effective incentive system needs to impact behavior, so we need to improve the turnaround on that information," he adds.

Via its performance management automation project, BCBST targets that improvement. "We want to build a robust database platform, where all the data points feed a single set of tables that drive analytics that are presented as scorecards and dashboards," Brooks says.

"We want to be able to improve performance and give the supervisors and department managers a multilevel view of information, to generate alerts if performance is going outside an accepted range, to use predictive analytics to forecast and prevent bottlenecks, and to deliver this information to a number of devices, including mobile. It's not just customer service, it's the full spectrum of operational performance," he explains.

The architecture of the system being built by BCBST consists of three components: a database layer using IBM's DB2-based InfoSphere Warehouse that offers embedded analytics; a data integration middleware layer, which BCBST still is evaluating; and a presentation layer, which likely will be based on IBM's Cognos Now! Appliance and the Cognos 8 Business Intelligence suite of reporting and score-carding tools. The first release of the system is planned for early 2009.

BCBST knows it will be a challenge to integrate data from disparate systems that come into play in measuring CSR performance–from claims administration systems to call center technologies.

"Source systems have different data formats and different levels of overhead. And some of our production systems–such as our claims systems, which are used by various groups–are very stressed already. We are treading lightly," Brooks says.

Service performance management also requires more timely data extract than is needed for other types of performance management, such as financial analysis. BCBST is evaluating whether its current extract, transform, load (ETL) strategy can handle the task without straining underlying systems.

"Cognos Now! is particularly interesting to us because it's an appliance that attaches through various means to different data sources and operational systems and maintains a persistent data stream, but that insulates those underlying sources from the demands of performance analytics and 'what if' modeling," says Howard Tripp, business consultant at BCBST.

BCBST also will take care to design the performance management system so users are not suddenly overwhelmed with information and suffer paralysis by over-analysis. "You have to provide line-level staff with timely information to impact their performance, but not so much that their performance is negatively impacted," Tripp says.

That user-focused design is important, notes Accenture's McNally. "Companies should understand CSRs need to see only selective pieces of information that are related to their overall performance. If they show too much information to [call center] agents, agents either give up or end up 'gaming' the system in order to impact the incentive model," he claims.

BCBST projects the performance management system will enable the company to improve customer service and reassign knowledgeable performance-auditing staff to revenue-generating roles. "That is actually the really easy ROI," Tripp says. "There also are many impacts that are less tangible–from being able to react quickly without a lag time to improving your competitive position through performance optimization."

In addition to solving integration challenges, companies must determine how to measure performance. Assessing performance may require compiling data that isn't always readily available or electronically captured. For instance, customer satisfaction may be a judgment call made by the CSR or supervisor, an interpretation gleaned from call-auditing technologies such as voice-stress analytics, or a data point gathered from post-call surveys.

"Everybody measures quality–auditing phone calls and giving CSRs and front-line staff a quality score each month by pulling calls, scoring calls, and giving feedback," Cecchini says. "However, only the best-run service centers randomly survey customers shortly after the interaction to learn whether their needs were met."

Esurance does survey its customers post-call. "We obtain about a 15 percent response rate, which gives us a great barometer to assess the experience of those who call into the service center," says Ward.

BCBST also will need to create some new data capture, such as by replacing manual notations with electronic forms for CSRs and by automatically gathering performance data. The company is considering using text analytics on notes taken during customer service or case management calls to assess the quality of service being delivered, including one-call resolution.

"Measuring customer satisfaction today is a very manually intensive process. Survey results need to be entered into a database, and tabulating results is not a timely process," Brooks says. "We believe we can combine the results of the text analytics with existing structured fields in relational databases and develop predictive models that have more power and accuracy than if we had used structured data alone."

BEYOND THE COST CENTER

Steiman argues although enhancing the service CSRs deliver is a worthy objective, the ultimate goal of companies should be to transform their call centers into revenue generators.

"Improving service performance and managing customer relationships are cost-savings activities," Steiman says. "But in the process of capturing data better and more effectively using your staff resources, you can begin to focus on developing marketing campaigns based on that data. You work toward selling to existing customers and boosting the top line."