Search past winners/finalists


  • MESA logo

Assurant Solutions

  

SASCS11 How to Enter Bug

 

Company: Assurant Solutions, Atlanta, GA USA
Company Description: Assurant Solutions companies develop, underwrite and market specialty insurance, extended service contracts and other risk management solutions. Principal lines of business include debt protection administration, credit insurance, preneed life insurance, and warranties and extended service contracts on appliances, consumer electronics, automobiles, recreational vehicles and boats.
Nomination Category: Customer Service & Call Center Awards Achievement Categories
Nomination Sub Category: Award for Innovation in Customer Service

Nomination Title: Call Centers That Don't Suck

    Tell the story about your organization's innovations in customer service since the beginning of July last year (up to 500 words). Focus on specific accomplishments, and relate these accomplishments to past performance or industry norms. Be sure to mention obstacles overcome, innovations or discoveries made, and outcomes:

Some of the most ingenious inventions don’t come out of the technology
companies – they originate from companies like Assurant that have a problem to
solve and unique talent to solve it.

Assurant is not like every other customer service company – sure, we need to
decrease customer attrition and increase our share of each customer’s wallet.
But unlike others, we genuinely want to have conversations with our customers.
We reasoned that if we could pair up every caller to our call centers with a
CSR that the customer should have excellent rapport (or said a better way,
affinity) with, we’d save more callers, make more sales and in the process our
customers would be happier. But the problem remained, how do we identify what
those factors are that drive excellent customer/CSR affinity?

So we put our rocket scientists to work on the task and they discovered
something amazing – something no one else has figured out yet – that for each
customer calling our center, there is a unique agent that is optimally suited
for that customer – an agent that will have the highest probability of
achieving a successful outcome. Like the matchmaking web sites say, “there is
someone for everyone”! But, most of the time that “someone” is already on the
phone with another caller and our ‘state of the art’ systems could not deal
with that. So we invented RAMP – the Real Time Analytics Matching Platform. Our
expertise in analytics (we’re an insurance company after all) enabled us to
look at the problem a different way. We poured through our historical data
about our customers and CSRs and found some surprising facts – things that were
always (and never) true when CSRs had excellent affinity with their customers.
These Affinity Models worked fantastically, but equally important was RAMP’s
ability to hold callers in queue while waiting for the optimal agent to finish
up their current call. Holding the caller had an effect on service level, but
we quickly learned that giving RAMP more time had a direct and very positive
effect on REVENUE. We also discerned that blindly adhering to an 80/20 service
level wasn’t really an indicator of customer satisfaction – customer
persistency or time on the books was. Given that customers typically were
willing to wait much longer than 20 seconds without affecting the call outcome,
we resolved to allow RAMP to use that additional time and … Voila! A game
changing, patented technology was born.

In the first year of operation, RAMP more than doubled our saved fees to 187%!
And that’s not all – agent attrition dropped 25%. We saw customer requests to
be put on the Do Not Call Registry drop 20%. And, since RAMP is based on self-
learning neural network technology, we allowed our silicon based intelligence
(computers) to replace our carbon based intelligence (humans) in scoring agent
performance/skills. RAMP detects changes in agent performance long before their
supervisors do. Not bad, for an insurance company! ;^>

    List hyperlinks to any online news stories, press releases, or other documents that support the claims made in the section above. IMPORTANT: Begin each link with http://, and enclose each link in square brackets; for example, [http://www.youraddress.com]:

http://money.cnn.com/2010/04/08/technology/call_center_improvements/index.htm

http://www.pcworld.com/businesscenter/article/191827/ibm_insurer_develop_eharmony_for_the_call_center.html

        http://www.livestream.com/newintelligence/video?clipId=flv_b6e34913-6404-457c-8f8a-e09797c6e262

http://www.ventanaresearch.com/blog/commentblog.aspx?id=3874

    Provide a brief (up to 100 words) biography about the leader(s) of the nominated customer service organization:

Cameron Hurst is a contact center visionary who is out to change the world, one
call at a time. He is a graduate of the United States Air Force Academy and
received his Masters of Science from George Washington University. Cameron
founded a call center software company in the mid 90’s and 34 countries,
20,000+ agent seats later, sold it to move on to the next new thing in Contact
Centers. He found it in RAMP – Assurant’s Real Time Analytics Matching
Platform. He now devotes his energy into making the most out of each customer
interaction.