The secret to Hartford Customer Services Group's world-class service delivery comes in the form of a three-legged stool, says Chief Operating Officer Jay Fleming.
There's a bilingual leg, a telecommuting leg and a flexibility leg.
"The three legs consist of human resource initiatives -- and contact centers are human resource intensive," Fleming says. "We look at this as part of our strategic plan to deliver best-in-class sales and service."
The Hartford Financial Services Group, Inc. established its Ft. Washington, Pennsylvania-based Hartford Customer Services Group in 1998 to handle calls for third-party clients related to healthcare issues for seniors, including Medicare, long-term care, dental, vision and pharmaceutical services. The center has 1,000 customer service and sales representatives who handle more than 17 million contacts per year. While, initially, the call center's primary focus was customer service, over the years it developed a telemarketing group, which now consists of 450 telesales professionals.
Filling a Growing Language Need
In early 2004, one of The Hartford's clients expressed an interest in expanding its Hispanic customer base. To meet the client's future needs and expectations, Fleming needed to quickly increase the call center's bilingual staff, creating the first leg of the stool.
"We've always maintained a team of bilingual CSRs, but to accomplish what our client wanted, we needed to do more."
In the span of six months, Fleming grew his original crew of 22 bilingual CSRs to a "community" consisting of 75 CSRs in four teams covering a wide range of contact center disciplines. The bilingual teams "fill a real need that's a growing trend in this country," says Fleming.
Finding the CSRs with the required language skill set was not too much of an effort, he adds. "More than 50 percent of our bilingual hiring came from referrals from our existing employees. We have an open, diverse environment here, and our employees respond by referring us to friends and family. We've been able to grow without significant bilingual recruiting and marketing efforts -- which has been vital in this community."
Telecommuting Boosts Productivity and Retention
The second leg of the stool, telecommuting, began in 1998 with a pilot program to retain a few individuals with special needs.
"They were great employees, so we made arrangements for them to work from home," Fleming says. "As time went on, we added other people with disabilities and family issues that required them to be at home to provide care. For the first six years, we accommodated about 20 people with special needs."
At the same time, the management team was looking for ways to develop a more flexible workforce. As technological advancements made it easier to deploy work-at-home CSRs, telecommuting grew into a strategic initiative with surprisingly good results, Fleming says. "All of the performance metrics for telecommuters were as good as or better than those of the staff in the centers. Folks were more productive at home and our employee retention rate was phenomenal. The turnover rate for at-home workers was one-quarter the rate for our contact center, which was already best-in-class."
Interest in the program rapidly grew. Today, approximately 15 percent of the Customer Services Group's workforce telecommutes. The contact center expects to expand the initiative in the future with approximately 20 to 25 percent of its staff deployed at home versus in the traditional office.
"There's clearly a trend to move to home-workers," Fleming says. "Besides our staff's interest in it, we've definitely benefited recently as gas prices continue to rise."
Flexible Work Arrangements for Retirees
The last leg of the stool -- flexibility -- arose from the changing definition of retirement. Today, more retirees are seeking new careers or volunteering as opposed to spending their retirement relaxing at home. Some are in need of part-time work for extra cash; some are simply looking for social interaction.
To meet the needs of his workforce, 15 percent of which is retirement-eligible, Fleming launched a program this year that provides unlimited flexibility to those who might want to scale back on the hours, but who don't want to leave their job entirely.
"If someone spends the winter in the south, and wants to work here in the spring and summer, we'll accommodate them. If they take care of their grandkids and need to leave work every day at 1 or 2 o'clock, we'll give it to them. You name it as long as you're in good standing at the time of retirement," he says.
As the bulk of the baby-boomer generation move into retirement, analysts predict that there will ultimately be a "brain drain" in the United States. By providing his employees with flexible work arrangements, Fleming hopes to avoid the pitfalls that come with a decreasing population of workers.
"People develop a certain view of retirement throughout their working years, but once they retire, they realize that there's something missing," he says. "We have folks who have 30 years' experience with our customer base and products -- they're valuable assets. We don't want to let that knowledge walk out the door if we can help it. If they can come back to work on their own terms, it's a good thing."
Richard Webster is a business journalist based in New Orleans.
Copyright 2006 CMP Media LLC. All rights reserved.
9/1/06, Issue # 1909, page 59.
