The Customer's Perspective

"Our performance metrics are driven by what we consider quality from our customers' perspective," says Jack Schumaker, Electric Insurance Company's vice president of call center operations.

Electric Insurance provides home and automotive insurance. The company was originally established 1966 to serve the needs of General Electric employees but now offers insurance to the general public nationwide.

The company has one call center located in Beverly, MA where about 150 agents work in three departments: customer service, sales and claims reporting. Electric Insurance's customer service and sales reps are licensed insurance agents.

With the help of customer focus groups, the company has established key performance metrics that they use to manage performance and service level, often referred to within the company has "critical to quality" (CTQ). Some of these CTQs include speed to answer, first-call resolution, helpfulness and callbacks within a promised timeframe.

Quality assurance is also considered a CTQ. Electric Insurance uses Nice Systems' NiceUniverse quality monitoring software to evaluate agents' soft skills (e.g., how they greet the customer and whether they display appropriate empathy) and how they execute transactions. Both team leaders and a dedicated quality assurance evaluator monitor agents' calls. On a weekly basis, the team leader and quality assurance evaluator have calibration sessions where they listen to monitored calls to coordinate scoring standards.

To provide agents with customized views of their performance metrics, Electric Insurance uses Merced Systems' (Redwood City, CA) Merced Performance Suite. The software integrates systems across the call center to provide a consolidated view of performance metrics at the agent, management and executive level. The main sources of data currently include NiceUniverse; an Avaya ACD; and IEX's TotalView workforce management software.

"We create dashboards for each rep so they can view a personalized dashboard that displays their productivity, handle time, talk time, after-call work time, schedule adherence and quality scores," says Schumaker. "We also use graphs to benchmark agents against the rest of the department."

Team leaders view stats on their entire team and can drill down to view data about specific individuals. At the executive level, Schumaker views stats for each of the departments that make up the call center.

Another benefit of the software is its ability to send alerts to individuals and management when something deviates from the norm. For example, if a rep's handle time exceeds service levels for a prolonged period, the software will alert the rep of the problem. If the problem continues, the team leader receives an alert.

According to Schumaker, this feature helps the company identify areas where they need to improve and the specific individuals that might need more training and coaching. But the majority of the time, agents resolve the issue that triggered the alert on their own before it even gets to a team leader.

Electric Insurance was also able to capitalize on the software's ability to capture agents' demographic information and analyze it to identify common attributes that the most successful agents share. Some of this demographic information includes education background and prior work experience. The software provides scorecards that rank the agents based on their productivity, quality, and schedule adherence. The human resources department uses all this information to create hiring profiles.

Schumaker says that the company has seen a 60% decrease in new-hire attrition since using the new hiring profiles. And according the company's data, in October 2001, only 40% of new-hires passed their insurance license exams but in October 2003, this number increased to 90%.

"We wanted the software to fill in the gaps of our knowledge and the biggest gap was our understanding of what makes an agent successful," he says. "And we found that it's not critical for a candidate to have insurance or even call center experience. What is important are people who are able to learn and who work well on a team."