CCH Software Development has assisted insurance giant Fedsure to create and manage one of the most effective call centres in the industry. The call centre enables Fedsure to generate and maintain a single view of all the Fedsure Individual Life and Unit Trust clients.
The 60-seat call centre, based in Cape Town, is used to support Fedsure`s brokers nationwide, to provide service to policyholders, and a follow-up service to branches and hubs. It averages between 2 300 and 2 500 calls a day.
It incorporates all client details, and drives a high degree of business intelligence, says Sean O`Connell, the business unit leader responsible for the call centre, data warehouse and intranet for Fedsure Individual Life. "From our call centre our agents can gain a single, cohesive view of all client details and client portfolios," says O`Connell. "The call centre is supported by a database of all client information and allows us to keep track of the most recent client interactions."
The call centre was one of the positive applications inherited from the acquisition of Norwich Life. It was so well designed that it has evolved to become Fedsure`s national call centre. It makes use of Versatility technology which runs on Oracle and interfaces with a digital PABX, and manages all telephone calls, recording and call centre operational statistics.
CCH ensured continued support of the systems during the crucial takeover period, notes O`Connell. This approach enabled the call centre to go live with a consolidated view of all clients.
The depth of client service comes from the CLues (CLient Update and Enquiry System) developed by CCH. The client-centric, three-tier CLues, developed in Visual Basic, is enhanced and maintained by an 11-strong team from CCH Software Development, including four people in the data warehouse team. They ensure data is extracted from the operational systems using file transfer protocol and remote procedure calls and pumped into the data warehouse, based on SQL Server, for analysis. Most client information is available through this method.
These extracts have enabled Fedsure to run their legacy systems independently and have thus eliminated the costly and risky requirement of consolidating the source systems, which are written in different development languages.
At the heart of the highly indexed CLues is a high-speed search engine, providing call centre agents with split-second response times to queries. In time, call centre agents will only ever have to deal with CLues, which will be able to update the legacy systems in realtime from the call centre. CCH is responsible for all software in the call centre, which Fedsure views as truly business-critical, and which therefore has to be permanently available when the business needs it.
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