DAS Legal
DAS Legal Expenses Insurance Company's call centre is the face of more than 3,500 business partners – partners who range from banks, lawyers and regional business associations, to insurers who require out-of-hours or emergency cover. Unsurprisingly, DAS receives 450,000 calls a year; around 80% of which are branded and answered in the name of the partner firms. The call centre is open 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.
In October 2003, Anita Yandell-Jones joined the company as operations manager, with a specific remit to address quality and productivity within the call centre and general staff issues such as morale and sickness. As she puts it: “Staff were under pressure to deal with a high number of often tedious administrative processes which, given the call centre environment, were keeping them off the phone.”
A department audit was carried out to review staff, processes and technology, and a dedicated customer care team was set up. Comprising four staff plus a manager, this group’s principal function was to review and manage everything associated with customer care – from processes to complaints and the carrying out of customer satisfaction surveys.
The results of the audit and the first departmental staff satisfaction survey were enlightening. Yandell-Jones explains: “Staff morale was low, high sickness levels were costing the department £69,000 a year, and little was being done to maintain exceptional customer service.”
Seeking a strategy to improve morale, streamline costs and improve the call centre operation revealed a role for call recording, quality monitoring and analytics that wasn’t really working in its current guise. The call centre needed something more sophisticated – something that could play an active part in the overall quality improvement initiative and have a positive impact on staff and processes.
After Verint’s Ultra (current version, Verint Witness i360 v.11) call recording system was deployed at DAS, Yandell-Jones started noticing a difference very quickly. After just a few months, the results were impressive. Tracking down calls became simple, taking just seconds rather than days. “Calls can [now] be retrieved by any of a number of chosen indicators, from specific agent to business partner to customer number, meaning that any disputes can be looked in to and handled immediately,” she says. “We’re also using [the system] to source and store best practice calls for training purposes.”
Staff like using the system and are more motivated, helped in a large part by the coaching element of the technology, which means that staff can self-assess their performance and undergo bespoke training. This has resulted in lower staff turnover and vastly reduced absenteeism. In fact, sickness levels have gone down by about 300%.
But the biggest difference has been in quality monitoring. “Quality was on our agenda and reviewed regularly, however, this was perceived as a task and not an integral part of our culture,” says Yandell-Jones. “The reality meant that we did have some way to go before being able to claim superlative quality.”
Today, the customer care team is at the heart of the call centre, with the additional support of the call centre supervisors carrying out different sorts of monitoring on each customer call they select for review. Currently, each supervisor monitors eight calls of each type – for example, legal advice, household breakdown or claims management – per operator, per week. Given a pledge to perform 360 degree monitoring this number will, over time, increase to enable each call to have supervisor, mystery shopper and direct customer call treatment for evaluation purposes. In fact, productivity in evaluation is up by more than 70% already, meaning that more agents are evaluated far more regularly.
Consistency of customer service is vital for any organisation and DAS is no exception. As Yandell-Jones comments: “[The system] has become firmly embedded in our call centre and is an inherent part of our quality improvement programme. As time moves on, we plan more detailed analysis, using the analytical tools, to look at quality scoring techniques, and [will] use that data to ensure our agents and processes are performing as well as they could be.
“Our agents [are all] given time each week to self-evaluate a selection of calls they’ve been involved in,” she adds. “We’re finding that people are much more critical of themselves than any coach could be and this is proving very effective in helping improve overall quality of the customer experience.”
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