Insurance is a necessary part of life whether you’re buying a home or a car, having a child, planning for a natural disaster, or arranging your posthumous affairs. When policyholders make online inquiries or calls to their insurance company, they expect compassionate service without waiting in a queue for hours. Unfortunately, most insurance companies are playing catch up when it comes to providing the customer service policyholders expect. PwC recently found an 18 percent gap between the service people want from their insurance provider and the service they receive.

Policyholders Want Quick, Efficient Customer Service

Four out of five Americans (80 percent) believe that quick service is an important part of the customer experience. Customer service leaders across all industries are reporting increased call volumes and inquiries, which impacts how quickly agents resolve issues. For insurance companies, repeated calls from customers needing clarification on previous solutions contribute to increased call volumes.

Insurance companies also experience extended call durations due to the complexity of inquiries. It’s the perfect Catch-22: the longer agents stay on a call to see it through to resolution, the longer other callers must wait in the queue. According to PwC, nearly 50 percent of consumers say this inefficiency is enough to drive them away from a company or brand.

Contact Center Solutions Can Improve Call Management

The traffic weaving in and out of a customer service department is a lot like a freeway interchange: increasing traffic volumes quickly create a slow-down or pile-up, and the only way to clear the jam is to focus on what you can control — not the cars but the traffic lights. For an insurance company, this means investing in a call management system such as a cloud based contact center.

Insurance companies can use contact center technology to:

• Automate call flows and improve service speed.
• Resolve problems on the first call, reducing contacts per customer and allowing agents to focus on more complex issues.
• Transition from reactive to proactive customer service and optimize interactions using computer telephony integrations that match inbound calls to customer records.

Broadvoice offers a contact center solution, GoContact, that provides insurance companies with these capabilities and more. The easy-to-use, easy-to-manage, and easy-to-afford platform has the following features:

• Omnichannel capabilities to retain conversations from one channel to the next.
• Agent Assist advanced script-building to guide agent conversations and improve the time to resolution.
• Auto Dialer to facilitate outbound campaigns and increase touchpoints per hour.
• Queue Call-Back so policyholders can avoid long wait times.
• Advanced Call Routing with customizations to streamline responses.
• Real-Time Analytics to access performance metrics and reports.

A Contact Center Solution Can Improve Customer Experiences

Insurance companies are in an unenviable position: customers begrudgingly pay for services they don’t immediately use and are unhappy when they need them because it means they’ve suffered a loss. Insurance companies can boost customer experiences and perceptions by improving wait times and resolving problems quickly and efficiently using a contact center solution.

Contact us to learn more about how GoContact can speed up customer service for insurance companies.