Supernova Award Category

The Problem

In the fall of 2015, Erie Insurance Group noticed a significant portion of their customer base (more than 50 percent) were using credit cards to pay their auto, home, and life insurance policies every month. As customers continued to opt into this payment method, either out of convenience or for personal gain, such as to earn airline miles, the burden on Erie Insurance Group to cover their customers' transactional credit card fees grew heavier and fees amounted to an estimated $10 million per year. The company knew that although the option was popular with many of their customers, including their largest ones, they could not sustain such a high expenditure. It needed to discontinue offering this costly payment option, but had no idea how customers would react to the news or whether the change would result in a loss of business. To get this level of insight, the company needed a customer listening solution that would be fast, flexible, easy-to-use, and would allow it to analyze customer conversations and track negative sentiment trends. 

The Solution

To solve its customer listening conundrum, Erie Insurance Group partnered with customer engagement software company, Calabrio, and deployed Calabrio Analytics to start tapping into customer sentiment. Within a matter of days, the system was up and running. They then made their announcement to customers about the change in payment options and waited for the data roll in. The response was tremendous. Hundreds of customers began calling in daily about the changes and, after months of careful listening, Erie Insurance Group found that, while some customers had serious concerns about no longer being able to pay by credit card, most were happy to switch to paying by e-check or other direct payment methods. What's more, after the payment change went into effect, the company saw a complete drop-off in incoming query data (ie: conversations that mentioned the payment change), proving that the change had no effect on customer loyalty and it had made the right decision.

The results

By using Calabrio Analytics, Erie Insurance Group was able to validate its decision to discontinue offering credit as a payment option to all but its largest customers– resulting in $4 million in annual savings. The business went from having no understanding of how customers would react to a change in payment options and if this decision would result in a substantial loss of its customer base, to realizing the change was in fact significantly less impactful than anticipated. In total, less than 100 customers were dissatisfied with the new payment options, and Erie Insurance Group was able to work with them on a case-by-case basis to find an agreeable payment arrangement. The reaction from Erie Insurance Group’s leadership was extremely positive and, as a result of the success of the initiative, the company continues to use Calabrio Analytics and has implemented the entire Calabrio ONE suite to transform its contact center into a customer engagement center and a valuable source of customer insight.

Metrics

With Calabrio Analytics, Erie Insurance Group was able to:

• Save approximately $4 million annually in unnecessary credit card fees
• Isolate the issue to 65 customers out of a possible 2.5 million
• Field and analyze data from thousands of customer calls
• Run daily reports to measure trends in customer concerns, questions, and sentiment
• Keep data timely by making query adjustments in less than 24hours 

The Technology

Calabrio Analytics allows businesses to analyze 100% of customer interactions, and monitor customer service agent activity in a simple, cost-effective way. This easy-to-use, scalable, multi-channel analytics package includes speech, desktop, and text analytics capabilities that turns thousands of unstructured phone, email, and text conversations into meaningful information for business leaders to make more strategic, data-driven decisions throughout the organization.

Disruptive Factor

The most disruptive aspects of Calabrio's analytics software are its accessibility and intuitiveness for users. Prior to working with Calabrio, Erie Insurance Group had not utilized analytics or customer listening technology in its contact center.  The company did not rely on near real-time analysis of customer behavior data to make business decisions, and had certainly never written or used analytic queries to mine their data. Yet with Calabrio Analytics, they were successfully able to collect and analyze their data in a matter of days and then share it across the organization. 

Shining Moment

Shortly after deployment, Erie Insurance Group noticed sata was not coming in as expected. It needed to make an adjustment to the queries to capture all calls related to the payment options change, so the team worked with Calabrio to refine and add queries. Immediately, they saw an uptick in data. It was at that moment that the business recognized the true power of the analytics tool and just how quickly it could gather and share the relevant insights across the organization.