The 5 Best Practices Of Insurance Company Call Centers

In the age of almost limitless insurance options, insurers’ contact centers can find it difficult to communicate with clients or potential clients. In fact, even when they are offered a valuable service, some perceive the phone contact as an unwanted interruption or even an annoyance.

Whether it’s notifying policyholders of changes or benefits, answering inquiries, or simply checking applications for new customers, insurance company agents need to be able to quickly establish a connection with call recipients. Otherwise, they might find an unreceptive person on the other end of the line.

What Are The 5 Best Practices Of Insurance Company Call Centers?

Fortunately, with the right strategic approach, call centers can achieve high response rates, keep customers happy, and create productive agents. In this post, we’ll outline five best practices for secure industry contact centers to help make outbound calls have a positive impact.

1) Choose The Right Metrics

It can be easy to see each individual call as a separate experience. But calls don’t exist in a vacuum; represent data points that indicate team effectiveness and strategy. Therefore, increasing customer satisfaction depends on charting the right success metrics.

There are a number of metrics that need to be tracked, including Success Response Rate (ASR), Average Handle Time (AHT), Calls Per Agent, Call Rate Occupancy, including metrics related to tone of voice and rate of speech. While it may be helpful to track as many metrics as possible, it’s best to focus on the ones that are key and work to improve them.

2) Know The Audience

As an outbound call center communicating with customers, user information must be accessible before agents start dialing the number. But just knowing the customer’s age, education, marital status, and policy information may not be enough to personalize the call to fit their needs.

Customer relationship management (CRM) solutions can help create a detailed profile of each customer you need to communicate with and make this information easily accessible from a central dashboard. Also, review previous contact and claim history, take note of calling preferences, and seamlessly transition between agents by sharing relevant call data. An effective CRM gives insurance agents a clearer understanding of each unique user, offering a unique customer experience (CX).

3) Call At The Right Time Of Day

According to a Salesforce study, call centers have traditionally enjoyed greater success when customers call at night, as opposed to in the morning or afternoon. Additionally, research suggests that Thursday may be the best day of the week to cold call, while Mondays and Fridays are much less likely to pay off.

However, knowing your audience means knowing what their hours of availability are. Someone who works exclusively in the evenings or who takes Fridays off will have different preferred times to receive calls. So keeping track of customer preferences and using them to strategize will help you communicate with each contact at the right time.

4) Watch For Conversational Cues From Customers

When it comes to outbound calls, there is a fine line every insurance agent must walk between professionalism and friendliness, as each customer will have different expectations.

For example, when a customer responds with short, terse responses, you may want to skip the niceties and get right to the point. On the other hand, those who chat happily and ask their own friendly questions may be more open to conversation. Hiring agents who are able to pick up subtle cues and adapt their approach can help create a better overall experience for your customers.

5) Identify Yourself

It’s hard to have a successful contact center if customers aren’t willing to answer the phone. Since less than 20% of people, according to Salesforce, will answer an unknown number, it is the responsibility of the insurance company to let customers know who is calling before starting a conversation. In this regard, Caller ID can help by sharing the organization’s name and phone number.