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Assurant Solutions

How to EnterCompany: 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:  When Software Behaves Badly - Assurant Mobile Technical Support

Tell the story about your organization's innovations in customer service since the beginning of July 2011 (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 clever inventions don’t come from technology companies – they originate from companies with problems to solve, companies with talented individuals, companies like Assurant Solutions.

Assurant Mobile Services is not like other mobile handset insurance providers – sure, we need to reduce claims keeping phones in customer’s hands. Problem is, devices these days are so complex sometimes just installing too many apps, or downloading a custom ROM can turn a humming device into little more than a fancy looking brick. Too often our insurance customers call us for a replacement believing the problem is mechanical in nature – when it’s actually just software behaving badly. So, we sought ways to find root causes to help customers fix and even preempt problems in the field. We knew if we gave customers multiple avenues to solve problems and performed with excellence in every channel, we’d reduce claims, keep perfectly good phones out of the repair centers and in the process delight customers. But the problem remained, how do we excel in every channel?

The answer was our patent pending Mobile Triage! We assembled the best mobile self-help content in the world, augmented it with a personalized user portal where a customer could log in, run diagnostics remotely and even uninstall malware apps we discovered while customers were sleeping. We then built a mobile client that ran on all phone types (even feature phones!). This mobile client became so smart it detected emerging problems and gave proactive alerts so actions could be taken well before issues emerged. Additionally, we reasoned that not every user wants to solve all problems in a self-help tool. Some would prefer to speak to the carbon based intelligence in our solution (our call center reps).

So in the spirit of superior customer service, we gave customers a button they could always tap on their phones. This clever button gathers all the settings and events, pushes that data into our cloud servers, reserves an agent in the call center, and populates the agent’s computer screen with the incoming caller’s detailed information. Then, without delay, our app connects the customer to the reserved agent. No beeps, tones, prompts for language preference – just a direct connection to a friendly CSR greeting the customer by name. This feature is adored by users, but it isn’t enough.

So we put our rocket scientists to work and they discovered something amazing – something no one else has figured out yet – that our mobile client could constantly, and very efficiently capture data from the mobile devices we manage and send that data to the cloud – encrypted and compressed to about the size of an email. Once you have millions of devices capturing thousands of data elements every day, epiphanies begin to appear in the data. For example, we’ve learned that certain non-factory AC chargers on some tablets actually destroy battery life. We never would have learned this had we not been capturing ‘bread-crumbs’ from our managed phones.

Not bad, for an insurance company!

 

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 Mobile Triage – Assurant’s Next Generation Mobile Device Technical Support Platform. He now devotes his energy to making the most out of each customer interaction.