Insurance brokers` resource centre answers calls with ATIO

The Insurance Brokers` Resource Centre (IBRC) has selected ATIO Corporation as the prime contractor for its contact centres. The solution consists of two Siemens Hicom PABXs and two Concerto ContactPro call centres.

IBRC is a fully-fledged outsourcing operation for short-term insurance brokers. The business model provides intermediaries with a multi-ensurer call centre facility on personal and commercial lines as well as the technical backup in broker`s marketing drive for commercial business.

The need for the IBRC stems from a number of reasons such as new legislation governing the intermediary insurance industry including the policy holders` protection rules, the Financial Advisory and Intermediaries Service Bill and the future deregulation of commission. There is also severe competition from larger brokers, direct insurers and special schemes making it difficult to compete for clients. The IBRC provides support, expertise and negotiating strength to broking organisations in this highly competitive and technically complicated industry.

This unique offering in the industry has resulted in unprecedented growth over the past 24 months, leading IRBC, which previously made use of a shared contact centre infrastructure, to implement its own customer contact centre infrastructure in Cape Town and Johannesburg.

Riann Kruger, Executive Manager Administration for the IBRC, said: "We were impressed with ATIO`s understanding of our business operations and their skills in the contact centre environment. We appointed ATIO as prime contractor for the installation. The project was completed in three weeks and went live without any interruption to the IBRC business process."

IBRC currently have 31 agents based in Cape Town and 23 agents in Johannesburg taking an average of 12 900 incoming calls from clients per month. In addition to the external calls they also handle around 1 200 internal calls and make 12 400 outbound calls per month.

The contact centre solution is based on the Concerto ContactPro suite. ContactPro allows businesses to accommodate all customer interactions, through all communications channels offered in today`s environment. The first phase of implementation at IBRC makes use of the inbound voice facility and other features such as Web interaction, Web chat and automatic e-mail distribution will be activated when required.