Why Contact Centers have to Evolveto Customer Engagement Center?

White Paper

Insurance

Sudhakar Bellam, Head, Business Process Management and Integration Practice, Insurance and Healthcare

Sudhakar is an Enterprise Architect and leads the Business Process Management (BPM) and Integration practice of Tata Consultancy Services' (TCS') Insurance and Healthcare unit. Sudhakar specializes in leveraging BPM, case management, and integration solutions to enable leading organizations to transform customer engagement, automate back office operations, and improve business agility and operational efficiency.

Sudhakar has over 20 years of IT industry experience and is a TOGAF consultant as well as a certified Pega and IBM platform expert. Sudhakar has a master's degree in Machine Design from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur.

Sambeet Mishra, Head, Enterprise Cloud Solutions Practice, Insurance and Healthcare

Sambeet leads the Enterprise Cloud Solutions Practice where he focuses on devising strategies for contact center transformation, agent empowerment, mobile enablement, customer relationship management (CRM) modernization, and app rationalization. With over 20 years of industry experience of which over 10 years involved working on Salesforce.com, Sambeet today works with key TCS insurance and healthcare clients in North America, leading strategic technology initiatives and driving innovation programs.

Sambeet is a Certified Salesforce Product Consultant and has experience in implementing innovative CRM solutions for companies with a large customer base across geographies. Sambeet holds a master's degree in Business Administration from the FORE School of Management, New Delhi, India.

About the Authors

Faced with fierce competition from non-traditional players, the insurance industry is compelled to explore new avenues for customer engagement and retention. Customers today expect consistent, relevant, and personalized services. Recognizing the steep rise in demand for this superior customer service, 40 percent of organizations now use dedicated customer experience resources while 85 percent support multi-channel customer

1 interactions.

Traditionally, insurers have leveraged the call center model to handle service requests from customers and agents. However, with rapid technology strides and the opening up of myriad channels of communication, insurers realize that holistic customer engagement, and not just reactive customer service, is the need of the hour. A customer engagement center (CEC) takes customer service to a whole new level, by not merely resolving requests but also recommending the next best approach for continuous engagement across the customer lifecycle. It combines call center service with next-generation technologies and applications for enhanced CRM.

Digitization has significantly helped reduce the human element in customer interaction through intuitive, high-end technology. The CEC offers a strategic approach that balances personalized human engagement with modern connected technology to help establish stronger customer connect.

This whitepaper delineates the trends and challenges faced by insurers in their journey towards setting up a CEC. We recommend the key components of a next-generation CEC, and highlight the benefits of setting up this customer-focused framework.

Abstract

[1] Deloitte Consulting LLP, 2013 Global Contact Center Survey Results (March 2013), accessed November 11, 2014, http://www2.deloitte.com/content/dam/Deloitte/us/Documents/process-and-operations/us-sdt-consulting-2013-global-contact-survey-051513.pdf

Contents

Why Insurers Need to Better Connect with Customers 5

What Is Driving the Transformation? 6

What Todays Customer Engagement Center Must Account For 6

Strengthening Customer Engagement 7

Realizing Strategic Value and Operational Efficiencies 9

Ensuring a Successful Transformation 11

Conclusion 12

5Why Insurers Need to Better Connect with CustomersThe insurance industry is at a critical juncture. With digitization changing the way customers acquire information and interact with insurers and agents, traditional call centers are fast becoming a thing of the past. Today's customers are better informed - access to information across multiple channels makes it easy for them to compare products and services, and bargain for quality customized services. Customers are also willing to change loyalties if their demands are not met, making it imperative for insurers to embrace transformative strategies to improve customer acquisition and retention. These strategies involve a dramatic change in the way customer service is perceived - from being a mere value addition to a strategic business growth driver. The industry is fast recognizing this trend. Research indicates that 62 percent of organizations consider customer

2experience offered through contact centers as a competitive differentiator.

Leading insurance providers are investing in setting up contact centers - essentially customer hubs - which not only offer information and resolve customer complaints but also support sales and marketing initiatives.

While the role of the CEC may vary from organization to organization, its broad function has been well articulated by Gartner: A customer engagement center (CEC) refers to a logical set of technologies and business applications that are engineered to provide customer service and support,

3regardless of the interaction (or engagement) channel.

Where previously call center modernization involving the upgrade of telephony and network infrastructure, and outsourcing of business process capabilities was sufficient, insurers are now adopting a more holistic approach to effectively transform the contact center. Today, the focus of the contact center has shifted to understanding the customer to offer a unique engaging experience.

A leading property, casualty, and life

insurance provider did not have a

common pre-sales or point-of-sales

platform to help agents with sales

processes. This often led to delayed

customer response and subsequent

loss of market share. The insurer

required a one-stop-shop sales

system to transform and streamline

the sales and operations processes,

increase distribution reach, and

expand the product portfolio in

compliance with data regulations.

After implementing an agency

system, the insurer migrated existing

captive and co-registered agents and

agencies to the new system. By

offering access to the sales app on

mobile phones and tablets, the

insurer witnessed improvements in

agent efficiency as well as realized

new cross-selling and up-selling

opportunities. This is just one

instance of how a CEC transformed

the business.

[2] Deloitte Consulting LLP, 2013 Global Contact Center Survey Results (March 2013), accessed November 11, 2014, http://www2.deloitte.com/content/dam/Deloitte/us/Documents/process-and-operations/us-sdt-consulting-2013-global-contact-survey-051513.pdf

[3] Gartner, IT Glossary, http://www.gartner.com/it-glossary/customer-engagement-center-cec/

6What Is Driving the Transformation?For effective customer engagement and issue resolution, insurance providers need to optimize their use of data, people, and technology. This is especially important in light of the trends that have gained prominence in the insurance industry:

Customers seek consistent, round-the-clock engagement options: Todays customers value the quality of service over almost everything else. When consumers contact an insurer, they expect their concern to be satisfactorily resolved, seamlessly and quickly. This is irrespective of whether the service has been provided by the insurer or by any third party on behalf of the insurer.

There is greater acceptance of digital technologies: According to a recent study by McKinsey & Company, about 73 percent customers use the internet to gather information (up from 55 percent in 2008) while the rest use call

4centers, either for standalone research or to supplement their internet research. The contact center is no longer a standalone entity in the insurers value chain. It must support the insurers overall customer experience strategy and business priorities by complementing the services and support delivered through digital channels to drive holistic customer engagement.

Faster access to integrated data is essential: Insurers are increasingly using custom Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) to enable rapid access to data that resides in disparate organizational systems. Custom APIs help organize and integrate data across silos to create a complete view of the customer. Agents can quickly access this consolidated data and respond to customers with the relevant information to enhance customer satisfaction.

What Today's Customer Engagement Center Must Account ForCustomer engagement has evolved significantly from the days of need driven, reactive customer support to becoming a key success measure. To serve its purpose as a business enabler, the CEC must therefore keep pace with:

Mobile technology: With more customers embracing mobile technologies, insurers are compelled to simplify and adapt their products and processes for this new distribution channel. A customer can start a transaction on the smartphone and then contact the CEC to complete the transaction or for support on an issue. In either case, the agent should be knowledgeable about the product the consumer has selected, and have real-time visibility into the data already provided so that they do not ask the consumer the same questions again. It is also essential to enable all transactions on the mobile channel so that the consumer does not need to contact the agent for a particular transaction.

[4] McKinsey & Company, Winning Share and Customer Loyalty in Auto Insurance, Insights from McKinseys 2012 Auto Insurance Customer Insights Research, accessed on 15 November 2014, https://www.google.co.in/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=3&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=0CDcQFjAC&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.mckinsey.com%2F~%2Fmedia%2Fmckinsey%2Fdotcom%2Fclient_service%2Ffinancial%2520services%2Flatest%2520thinking%2Finsurance%2Fwinning_share_and_customer_loyalty_in_auto_insurance.ashx&ei=sjBvVKWGCsrkuQT53YK4DA&usg=AFQjCNGy06Zqgqwd3JCl17eO60LAKHuGyg&bvm=bv.80185997,d.c2E

Social media: Industry players see social media emerging as one of the most powerful contact channels, second 5only to email. Since insurance is a highly regulated industry, legislative and regulatory changes will be required

before insurers can use social media to answer specific queries on benefits, eligibility, or claims as they do over the telephone today. However, the CEC can allow insurers to leverage this channel to better understand a consumer's expectations when they contact the insurer. In instances where it is permissible, insurers can consider tracking requests submitted on social forums, contact the consumer through a more traditional channel, resolve the situation and then post on the network that the issue was resolved. Even a simple message from a consumer on a social platform that discusses the insurer's efficiency can have far-reaching impact.

Collaborative tools: To effectively reach out to Generation Y and Millennia customers, insurers need to evaluate innovative options beyond emails and chat. Consumers who are already used to Siri, Google Now or Cortana can question the effectiveness of a call center interactive voice response (IVR) or that of the final agent who picks up the call. Options such as virtual avatars can help promote more interactive engagement with the consumer irrespective of the channel (web or mobile) and provide a more contextualized experience. Techniques such as natural language processing, voice and text analytics, Big Data analytics and machine learning make these ideas a reality for insurers to take advantage of.

Levels of customer awareness: To cater to the modern empowered customer, insurers need to develop a 360-degree view of the customer that can allow greater levels of customization and personalization. They should be able to glean insights from the abundance of data on customers, events, and demographics. Customers are used to personalized offers such as those by leading retailer Amazon. While insurers may not be able to deliver this extreme personalization, they can maximize data mining opportunities to stay relevant and competitive.

Strengthening Customer EngagementTo achieve its intended purpose, the CEC needs to go well beyond support for issue resolution to promote marketing opportunities, resulting in customer acquisition and retention. The CEC should integrate modern technology tools to transform inbound call centers into high-performance omni-channel customer engagement channels, and should:

Enable customer analytics to enhance customer support: By offering a 360-degree view of the customers various relationships and interactions across channels, independent of product lines, customer analytics can truly empower the insurance service agent. Service representatives can gain access to contextualized recommendations for cross-selling and up-selling opportunities by applying analytics on the customers interactions and buying patterns to derive a Customer Life Time Value measure. This will help sell the right product to the right person, thereby increasing customer confidence and building and maintaining a long term relationship with the customer.

Customer analytics can also help in churn prevention by offering human interaction over a digital channelvideo chat, telepresence, or phone call. Insurance websites often provide a live chat session option for customers for

7

[5] Deloitte Consulting LLP, 2013 Global Contact Center Survey Results (March 2013), accessed November 11, 2014, http://www2.deloitte.com/content/dam/Deloitte/us/Documents/process-and-operations/us-sdt-consulting-2013-global-contact-survey-051513.pdf

quick issue resolution and feedback. By merging the customer's history with the customer's social profile, insurers can predict the churn risk. Armed with this insight, insurers can define strategies to mitigate this risk.

Leverage Next Best Action (NBA) recommendations to drive business growth: This key enabler can help optimize and personalize every customer interaction regardless of the channel. The NBA can power the centralized decision hub that guides both inbound and outbound customer communications in real time. At the heart of NBA lies a predictive and adaptive analytics powered engine (as compared to static analytical models), which can optimize every customer interaction in real time. While predictive analytics uses past customer interaction history to anticipate the expected customer behavior and suggest the relevant service or product, adaptive analytics learns from every customer interaction and continuously improves the success of propositions. A promising technology, NBA can empower carriers and agents to identify and present the right products at the right time. The NBA concept across marketing, sales, and service channels is depicted in Figure 1.

Internet of Things (IoT) / Machine to Machine (M2M): A concept which will strengthen future of Contact Engagement Center by updating Agent systems via automated or semi-automated messages from connected devices. The future scenarios of risk prevention could come from vehicles, machines or smart homes integrating with insured risk portfolio. The CEC will be a key component in enabling & sustaining the ecosystem collaboration among consumer, partner networks & the carrier. Tasks and actions will happen in real time eliminating the dependence on workflows through multi-party collaboration using M2M interaction and updates being sent to Agent Console at CEC. Delivering cross touch point customer experiences drives need for new capability and IoT plays an important role in letting an Agent view real time data from sensors & connected devices. It provides them an early advantage to coordinate and interact with multiple parties and give customer a better service experience. IoT and M2M can help changing customer service and agents from reactive in to preventive mode.

8

Figure 1: . An Overview of the NBA Recommendation

n Interaction optimization (Call Script)n Retentionn Agent Decisioning

n Personalizationn Targeted Offeringsn Testing / Validation

n Guided sellingn Relationship managementn Cross-sell/Upsell

Service

Marketing Sales

Next BestAction

9Realizing Strategic Value and Operational Efficiencies The CEC can enable several operational efficiencies through integrated technology and real time information updates. The seamless data integration and intelligent, intuitive control can drive faster decision making while presenting cross-selling and up-selling opportunities. To drive business transformation, the CEC must offer:

Intelligent routing: An engagement center's primary objective is to deliver value to each interaction - whether it is simple issue resolution, request for more information, or a potential selling opportunity. To achieve this, it is essential that each request is treated uniquely, and routed to the person best placed to respond to it. While this may seem easy in principle, in practice, several interplaying factors can render this task complex. A request can originate from an individual or a machine, on any of the channels made available by the insurer. By capturing the source and context, and analyzing the meta data, the CEC should route the customer request to the appropriate recipient. For instance, if the insurer has advertised in traditional media, it is important that leads originating from that campaign are directed to the customer service representatives (CSRs) who speak the appropriate language. In addition to the source, the context should also be considered in determining the type and priority of the request.

Insurers can use several strategies to identify the source. These could be as simple as providing different contact numbers for the different campaigns and recognizing the number the request was initiated on, or leveraging location based services offered by mobile carriers or internet providers.

Once the source and context are determined, a set of business rules should be applied to the meta data to determine the priority of the request and the recipient to whom it has to be routed to. For instance, a request originating from Google Adwords may be assigned a lower priority than a request from a hotline number. The determination needs to be made at machine speed and acted upon based on set rules. Intelligent contextualized routing can be achieved either individually or through a combination of IVR capabilities and contact center technology platform functionality, and will ultimately play a strong part in determining customer satisfaction.

The Desktop of the Future: Simply routing the request appropriately is not enough - the next hurdle in improving engagement is the CSR's traditional desktop, comprised of several interfaces integrated to multiple backend systems, local databases or spreadsheets, with sticky notes around the monitor. Transforming the traditional desktop into the desktop of the future through simplification of the technology landscape and associated business processes can help insurers:

n Better engage with the customer, irrespective of the channel such as web, call, mobile, or social media

n Enable straight through processing of requests originating either from the consumer, or a machine or sensor associated with that consumer, which could range from wearables and smart watches to intelligent fire alarms

n Derive a 720-degree view of the customer by combining the internal (data within enterprise) and external 6perspective

[6] Tata Consultancy Services, Data in the Digital EraDriving New Business Models and Results for Insurers, http://www.tcs.com/resources/white_papers/Pages/Digital-Data-insurers-innovation-business-models.aspx

10

n Realize comprehensive contextualized knowledge management with the ability to record case articles on the fly and share it with a wider community. Knowledge management will ensure consistency in solutions provided and reduce call resolution time, resulting in call volume reduction.

n Advise the CSR on the NBA recommendation, for a service or sale request

n Leverage dynamic dashboards with analytics from Big Data, predictive modeling, voice calls, including traditional business intelligence reports. The dashboards provide real-time information to enable informed decision making.

n Promote collaboration among CSRs with the ability to reach out to customers through a customer community. This community could be a forum for CSRs to share their experience, challenges, and learn from a wider team, eventually leading to meaningful conversations.

Workflow automation: Often, the resolution of service requests involves collaboration or handoff to back office staff such as insurance underwriters or claim adjusters. With the CEC enabling a robust workflow and case management capabilities for workflow automation, insurers can:

n Trigger and assign service requests to the back office users

n Enable straight through processing with rules driven workflow processes

n Support dynamic case management and collaboration with back office users in real time for expert advice

n Ensure better visibility into the back office case status to offer customers accurate information about their request status and expected resolution time

Seamless integration of backend systems: For efficient contact center operations, it is critical to seamlessly integrate backend systems. This enables consolidation of business data from across systems to make it available to the contact center agents in real-time. Service oriented architecture (SOA) can enable real-time interfacing with channels, back-end systems, and third-party services.

Some of the conventional insurance call center solutions have been integrated with backend applications through point-to-point or batch oriented interfaces to exchange business critical data. The seamless integration with backend systems will enable insurers to empower CSRs with accurate and complete information about the customer to:

n Reduce call resolution time

n Reduce the number of systems of engagements

n Enable 'one call' resolution

Combined, these will help insurers realize new efficiencies and more importantly, deliver on the promise of customer centricity through improved customer service.

A large North America based life and retirement commercial insurer struggled to manage their multiple applications for customer servicing. This led to increased call handling and waiting periods, poor first call resolution rates, inaccurate and inconsistent reporting and dashboards, and increased training expenses. The insurer required a unified view of their customer across systems with integrated knowledge management systems. Following the implementation of a Contact Center, the insurer now offers customers an omni-channel experience with voice, social, web, and machine interactions. Call resolution times have reduced by 20 percent while the time taken to bring CSRs onboard has reduced from 6 weeks to just one week.

Ensuring a Successful TransformationAlthough the contact center transformation promises to deliver wide-ranging business benefits, there are several potential migration challenges insurers need to plan for, before they undertake this journey:

Migration is costly; take it one step at a time: The simplification of business processes and backend systems, and the ability to seamlessly integrate these with the CSRs' desktop systems are some of the most resource intensive challenges that an insurer must address. Since transformation is a long-drawn out activity, one of the best practices to follow is to deliver the capability in iterations. Delivering a faade layer that separates the desktop from the interfacing systems in the initial iterations is particularly essential.

Data management in transition is difficult: For operations spread across business units and geographies, it is difficult to manage data stacks and ensure that the right information is available at the right time. Defining the right enterprise data strategy could be the key to address data management challenges such as:

n Master data management

n Data governance and ownership

n Metadata management

n Data life cycle and archival

n Data quality management

n Data security and storage

User Experience Strategy: Providing consistent and Intuitive user experience to customers and agents is one essential part of the overall transformation journey. Providing single desktop, single customer view, reducing systems of engagement ensuring agents have all the information they need to serve customers. Customers need open access to information and user experience in collaboration, automation, self-service, knowledge management plays important role in overall Customer engagement. Agents experience in call guidance, customer stats, downstream information at right connect point is key to provide transformation solution to customers.

11

12

Review and revise to ensure compliance with regulations: With the rapid increase in fraud cases, and regular changes to statutory laws and regulations, insurers need to constantly review and update systems and business rules to ensure compliance.

ConclusionIn the Contact Center Satisfaction Index 2013, 46 percent respondents stated that their first choice for issue resolution and other service requests was something beyond the customary phone call. CEC focuses not only on resolving the customer issue but on improving customer satisfaction and driving customer loyalty through value creation and active engagement for long term sustaining relationship. CEC enables Organization, agents and customer service to be more agile and proactive. CEC focuses not only on customer service but also on agents' productivity. It helps to acquire, retain and train agents and allows them to mine their business book and be vigilant of their product performance to sell and serve better. CEC bundles collaboration, data, knowledge management, personalization, automation and user experience to provide cutting edge to Organizations to stay ahead of the curve. Towards this end, insurers are striving to understand and better relate to customers in their journey towards risk protection, while actively engaging with them at every step. Though the path is strewn with challenges and could be relatively long one, enterprises that can make the successful transition from call centers to CECs will realize benefits at each milestone of the journeywith happy customers, increased revenue, and an efficient workforce. And the transformation journey starts now.

[7] CFI Group, Contact Center Satisfaction Index 2013, accessed on 11 November 2013, http://www.cfigroup.com/downloads/CFI_call_center_satisfaction_index_2013-eo.pdf

All content / information present here is the exclusive property of Tata Consultancy Services Limited (TCS). The content / information contained here is correct at the time of publishing. No material from here may be copied, modified, reproduced, republished, uploaded, transmitted, posted or distributed in any form without prior written permission from TCS. Unauthorized use of the content / information appearing here may violate copyright, trademark and other applicable laws, and could result in criminal or civil penalties. Copyright 2015 Tata Consultancy Services Limited

IT ServicesBusiness SolutionsConsulting

Subscribe to TCS White PapersTCS.com RSS: http://www.tcs.com/rss_feeds/Pages/feed.aspx?f=wFeedburner: http://feeds2.feedburner.com/tcswhitepapers

About Tata Consultancy Services (TCS)Tata Consultancy Services is an IT services, consulting and business solutions organization that delivers real results to global business, ensuring a level of certainty no other firm can match.TCS offers a consulting-led, integrated portfolio of IT and IT-enabled infrastructure, engineering and

TMassurance services. This is delivered through its unique Global Network Delivery Model , recognized as the benchmark of excellence in software development. A part of the Tata Group, Indias largest industrial conglomerate, TCS has a global footprint and is listed on the National Stock Exchange and Bombay Stock Exchange in India.

For more information, visit us at www.tcs.com

TCS

Des

ign

Serv

ices

I M

I 03

I 15

ContactFor more information about TCS' Insurance Business Unit, visit: www.tcs.com/insuranceEmail: global.insurance@tcs.com

About TCS' Insurance Business Unit

With over four decades of experience in working with insurers globally, TCS delivers solutions and services to help insurers meet rising customer and agent expectations, address non-traditional competitors, manage low investment yields, and drive growth in emerging global markets.

TCS has built an unmatched track record in enabling insurers transform, enhance business agility, improve operational efficiencies and increase customer engagement, while ensuring regulatory compliance. 7of the 10 world's largest insurers and over a hundred insurers globally partner with TCS.

Our state-of-the-art innovation labs and global solution centers, and cutting edge solutions and technologies set clients apart from their competitors. We leverage the combined expertise of our industry trained and certified (LOMA, LIMRA, CPCU and so on) consultants to support the entire value chain for Life, Annuities and Pensions, Property and Casualty, Health, Commercial and Reinsurance companies.

Page 1Page 2Page 3Page 4Page 5Page 6Page 7Page 8Page 9Page 10Page 11Page 12Page 13