Supernova Award Category

Data to Decisions

The Problem

Erie Insurance Group’s number-one priority is customer loyalty, and understanding customer sentiment is key to keeping the brand’s 92 percent customer retention rate intact. However, customer call volumes were growing by 10 percent per year, and company representatives had no idea why. Call redundancy was up, and the cost of one of three repeat calls was $3.5 million per year. At the time, Erie noticed that a significant portion of customers were using credit cards for their recurring monthly policy payments. The resulting credit card fees amassed to an estimated $10 million per year, which wasn’t sustainable for the brand. However, Erie feared that removing this payment option might result in dissatisfaction and customer churn. Erie needed a solution that would help the team gain the right insights to decrease repeat calls and understand sentiment surrounding the removal of the credit card payment option – all without sacrificing brand loyalty.

The Solution

Erie Insurance customer service representatives were having conversations with customers daily. The team knew that those conversations were invaluable, but they needed a solution that would help them separate the important information from all the conversational noise. In order to truly understand customer wants and needs, Erie implemented Calabrio Analytics, which allowed them to form search queries around those conversations and extract critical insights about customer wants. The solution was up and running in a matter of weeks and, with the help of contact center agent focus groups, Erie began forming queries to determine the cause behind repeat calls and understand customer feelings about new payment options.

The results

Erie Insurance immediately reaped the benefits of Calabrio Analytics technology. After the credit card announcement was made, customers began flooding the phone lines, all while the Erie team listened. After a few weeks, it became abundantly clear that the majority of customers had no issue with the change in payment options, and many redirected their payments to automated debit or other payment methods. In total, 65 customers were dissatisfied with the new options, and Erie was able to create custom solutions for each. Not only that, mere weeks after the announcement was made, conversations surrounding the topic ceased, indicating that the change was a non-issue. Further, Calabrio Analytics allowed Erie to listen to calls to analyze agent behavior, particularly in repeat or lengthy call situations. By understanding which agents were the most effective and why, they were able to properly coach employees to better performance and make any necessary changes to decrease volume and redundancy.

Metrics

The use of Calabrio Analytics technology not only saved Erie Insurance Group millions per year in credit card fees, but the team was also able to hedge against customer churn in the process of a major operational change. By identifying which customers were unhappy with the shift, the team was able to reach out and personally resolve the issue with every customer.

Additional results include:

• Validated a savings of approximately $10 million per year in credit card fees
• Zero customer churn as a result of a major operational change
• The ability to concretely analyze data in the midst of thousands of customer calls
• Daily reporting designed to measure trends in customer sentiment, concerns, or questions
• Saved thousands annually by reducing call redundancy through increased agent training

The Technology

Calabrio Analytics allows businesses to analyze 100 percent of calls, and monitor 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. That information is automatically reviewed, categorized and analyzed so brands can make better, data-backed decisions.

Disruptive Factor

Often, brands shy away from implementing speech analytics technology. The perception is that it is difficult to implement and queries are hard to master. However, Calabrio Analytics proves that this is not the case. While the primary challenge when implementing a speech analytics listening solution is determining which queries to use to generate desired results, the Calabrio solution is intuitive, even for novice users.

Erie opted to begin the query development process with the help of contact center agents, but initial data results regarding the payment updates were low. With the help of the Calabrio team, Erie refined the wording for the payment queries and add new queries to the mix. The combination of Erie and Calabrio allowed Erie to maximize the technology solution in order to analyze customer behavior in near real-time, even though the Erie team had never written or used analytic queries.

The Calabrio solution makes analytics accessible for brands of all sizes and with all skill levels, and unlocks customer insights almost immediately after deployment.  

Shining Moment

Insights from the contact center were used to inform decisions across the organization. The ability to use analytics to reveal customer sentiment made the contact center a valuable asset to Erie. No other department has as much contact with customers, and now, Erie Insurance can use those conversations to make informed business decisions. The project was so important that Erie has gone from three quality management employees to 10 for the 350 reps in the top-tier contact center.