I. Overview

Along with the fast economic development and gradual improvement of life quality of people in our nation, our domestic insurance market has always maintained the substantial scale and potentials, where the huge capacity of this market and further openness of our domestic insurance market have led to a sharp increase in the number of insurance operation subjects in our nation. According to statistics, there have been totally 93 insurance companies of various kinds in our nation by the end of 2005, among which there have been 35 property insurance companies, 42 life insurance companies, 5 re-insurance companies, 6 insurance (group) companies & holding companies, and 5 insurance property management companies, thus forming a pattern of predominance of state-owned commercial insurance companies, co-existence of Sino-foreign insurance companies and competition between multiple insurance companies.   

In the fierce market competition environment, the call center has emerged as an indispensable service means to various insurance companies.

II. Analysis of Demands for Insurance Call Center

Along with the intensification of insurance market competitions, the call center services have been transformed from the monotonous consultation, complaint services into such integrated services as service acceptance, sales support and marketing, where the supply of services has stretched from headquarters to various branches. As the insurance marketing channels are enriched, the call center service needs to be converted from the simple voice services into the abundant multimedia services such as E-mail, SMS, WAP, fax and Web, etc. So, the development of service modes has posed a great challenge to the call center operations.

1. Coordination of Call Center with Other Service Departments

In the course of call center operations, there are often a few cases as described below. The sales departments can have a great deal of timely sales information and sales plans to release, but frequently, such releases cannot be timely transmitted to the call center and so, there can be no rapid response to customers when they have inquiries; More often than not, the call center would send outbound calls to remind a customer to renew his/her payment of insurance premium, but the customer has made the payment a couple of days ago. To a certain extent, such cases have caused the declination of service experiences of users, and have affected the corporate image and subsequent service development. Thanks to a probe into the reasons thereof, such cases are mainly created due to a lack of effective interaction of call center with other service systems. In the course of processing customer services, the call center shall apply a closed-look working process mechanism to deal with the service needs of customers. The work flow can enable the call center to deliver services in the form of electronic work flow to relevant departments, and return the processing results in the form of work flow back to the customer service center. The call center will inform customers of the results and realize the whole-course closed-loop management and supervision of processing of ever service need to ensure the service quality.

The call center shall be connected to various service departments within an enterprise, and be organically linked with the service processing system, customer relationship management system, office automation system and mail system. Through the platform of telephone center, it is possible to carry out the fast, accurate and effective transmission of various information via the call center to customers, and to provide customers with the one-stop services. 

While completing the internal coordination, the call center also needs to conduct its external coordination. Currently, there are a lot of insurance sales channels such as agents, bank insurance, broker and agent companies, counters and e-commerce and so on, where the external coordination is mainly manifested in the changes of service resources in correspondence with those of channels. In agent marketing modes, it is necessary to realize the standardization and unification of services and images.

2. Call Center Management Modes

According to statistics, nearly half of all the inbound calls at an insurance call center will be forwarded into the staff service sector. Therefore, the quality of agent service will determine the corporate service image to a large extent. At now, a great majority of enterprises have set up agents at different places, where the dispersivity of such agents in geographic distribution has intensified the infiltration force of services on one hand, and increased the complexity of management on the other hand. This case has also created certain difficulties to the integration, normalization and standardization of call center operations. As such, how to achieve the effective management of operations would be the focus in the call center operations.

Taking the agent performance appraisal for example. The performance indexes for agents would mainly include the outbound call traffic, online time length, schedule rate, rejection rate, policy discard rate, complaint rate and script execution capability, where it is required to extract relevant parameters by means of data statistics and online recording. In the decentralized management mode, however, business enterprises can hardly group together the data from various places in a short period, so that problems can be existent over a long period and cannot be solved. Consequently, the management efficiency of business enterprises would be decreased.

3. Effective Identification of Customers

There is also the Pareto Principle (80/20 principle) prevailing in the insurance industry, namely that 80% of profits would come from 20% of customers. Therefore, the corporate resources shall be allocated according to the customer importance degrees. How to achieve the fast and accurate identification of quality customers when they access into the call center and provide these customers with services of higher level would serve as both one of the key functions of call center, and an important means by which the insurance practitioners can optimize corporate resources and enhance customer loyalty. So the real realization of insurance profit increase can only result from the enhancement of real insurance marketing. Naturally, the expert contact service shall be available for those VIP customers, while problems of those customers of low value can be solved in the automatic service system. Therefore, it is completely possible to implement the customer classification, where the real valuable customers can be separated out, and the value of each customer can be exhibited in the background operated database of call center and manifested in the report form to eventually realize different sale methods.

III. Introduction of Donjin Insurance Call Center Solution

By summarizing the service characteristics of insurance institutions, Donjin Tech believes that the insurance call center is first a contact center, which can effectively integrate the internal and external information of an enterprise and realize the effective management of operations to provide users with the one-stop, personalized services.

1. Service coordination with other departments

2. Satisfying the customer needs for multiple ways of communication.

3. Distributed access modes

4. Flexibility of loaded applications

5. System stability

6. Customer identification

7. Service monitoring

A key feature of this solution is that building a call center can create great stimulating effects on the customer service work of insurance companies. The actual applications of call center in the customer consultation, complaints and safety insurance of insurance companies can largely increase the work efficiency and promote the service level to better satisfy the needs of many customers. The call center is not only a simple consultation and complaint system. It can be integrated with the office automation system, information management system and service data processing system to joint constitute an overall corporate customer service solution, so that the insurance companies can devise their strategies well and gain profound success in the vehement market competitions.

Main Insurance Service Development Cases

1. Insurance Service Consultation

Advertising can serve as an important constituent of corporate image for an insurance company to infuse the public with the special service number of its call center.  When people have any doubts about insurance services, they will think of this number and then dial up this number for consultation, and further, will be likely to become customers of the insurance company.

The system can have the function of identification of the calling telephone number, where any customer dialing the call center number will at least leave his/her telephone number. Thus, in the event that a customer makes an inbound call to the center, but has to hang up because the insurance service representative is too busy to give a manual answer, this call can be forwarded to the automatic service system. When becoming disengaged, the operator agent will initiate a phone call to this customer to learn about his/her requirements, and recommend the insurance programs of this insurance company to him or her.  

On the other side, any insured of this company can dial this number to consult the related insurance affairs or contact with his/her insurer.

Customers can also use the fax auto reply function of customer service center to receive quite detailed written insurance materials.

An insurance company can build up a uniform call center in a city to group together the outstanding customer service personnel who are originally scattered in various service departments, and proceed to provide the standardized services of high quality, while saving the manpower cost and increasing the utilization rate of devices.

2. Verification of Identity of Insurance Agent

Various insurance companies would popularly adopt the practice of assigning their agents to visit the customers and sell their insurance services. To prevent some unlawful individuals from defrauding the customers of money or properties in the false capacity of insurance agents,     , the customers can verify the identity of these agents via the call center to avoid any deceit or fraud.

3. Effect Insurance By Telephone

When customers have needs for a certain insurance risk, they can dial the call center number to inform the insurance company, and the company will send related professional staff to visit these customers to undertake the relevant procedures.

4. Complaint Acceptance

Customers can make complaints to an insurance company about its services or other issues. Customer complaints can be directly forwarded to relevant departments for processing, while the distribution and processing of these complaints can be automatically recorded. Meanwhile, based on the processing of recorded complaints, a performance appraisal can be conducted of relevant working staff, and statistical analysis can be periodically conducted of complaint data, so that measures can be adopted for making improvements.

5. Notification Function

According to the system settings, the insured can be automatically notified of related insurance service information.

Due payment calls will be made periodically to those insureds who fail to pay off the insurance premium on time.

6. Internal Contacts

The call center can also serve as a convenient service tool for agents. The agents can enter special passwords to make inbound calls to the call center system to acquire the needed service support. Meanwhile, an insurance company can keep in close contact with its agents by telephone or pager via the call center.

7. Customer Data Analysis

Detailed records can be available for every phone call between a customer and the call center. Through the analysis of bulk customer data of this kind by means of professional data analysis software, it is possible to find out regular things to help the analysis, location and decision-making of insurance companies.