Did you know that 25% to 30% of all customer calls to a bank or insurance company call center are people following up on previous requests?
What’s Wrong With This Picture?
Business processes do not include, or allow for, consistent notification capabilities to inform the customer when a significant milestone has been achieved (e.g. your claims check has been mailed, therefore they call back to find out what is going on). The request is inconsistently handled because it comes in through different channels—via fax, call center, web, social media, IVR, snail mail, or broker. In some cases, the request might disappear depending on what channel the customer utilized to make the request. Thus, they call in to inquire about the status.
Average Call Handle (ACH) time in financial services ranges from an average of four and a half minutes to 10 minutes—most of this elapsed time is dedicated to Customer Service Representatives (CSR) hunting for a customer’s information through many screens and systems. A well-known insurance company shared that their agents navigate up to 15 different systems and screens, depending on the nature of the request.
Causes
The vendor does not have all the information about the customer when the call comes in (the famed, but elusive, 360ᵒ view of the customer). Systems do not provide a consistent customer request processing layer with periodic notifications of activities completed. The vendor’s technology does not anticipate what the customer might be calling about once they have identified themselves.
Solutions
Online data grid and cache technologies can help a customer stage the most important data in memory for fast access. Master data management (MDM) can take over the heavy lifting of consolidating, cleaning, and screening customer data to present a united presence to other client applications. Business process management (BPM) tools can overlay the other systems and provide a consistent, manageable, and visible request fulfillment capability. Enterprise service bus technology can bridge the customer facing tools to the most intractable backend system of record and transform data to a useable format
Industry research has shown that for every five seconds shaved off the ACH time, a large financial services company saves around $700,000 to $900,000, annually. Thus, a reduction of 30 seconds in ACH is worth up to $4.5 million, as well as providing soft benefits, such as increased customer satisfaction, reduced customer churn, and stress reduction for call center workers. Take a closer look at how you manage customer data; ensure it properly addresses incoming requests in terms of selling and service.
For more information on ways to leverage Big Data, read the latest Gartner magic quadrant on application integration.
