Insurance giant Metropolitan has gone live with a R1 million expansion of its national call centre for life clients. Piloted in November last year, the expanded call centre will seat over 70 agents (up from 16) and increase call volume capacity to over 5 000 calls a day (up from 1 000) from Metropolitan`s Johannesburg and Cape Town centres.
The expansion follows the successful consolidation of Metropolitan`s Ordinary Business and Voluntary Group lines of business - with a combined total of 3.5 million customers - and the implementation of an online data store (ODS) by Comparex Africa`s Customer Oriented Applications (COA) division (previously PQ Business Intelligence) that integrates client and policy information across the business units for the call centre.
Comparex Africa COA was again consulted to implement the front-end interface for the call centre using Remedy Corporation`s industry-standard call centre software solutions.
"It made sense to continue with our tried and tested partnership of Comparex Africa COA and Remedy, with Remedy already implemented elsewhere in the Metropolitan group and during the pilot phase of the project," says call centre senior manager Coenraad Schoeman.
"The decision was made even easier when Comparex Africa COA took over the Remedy portfolio earlier this year, so their expertise and resources were optimal for our call centre expansion requirements."
Schoeman says the project involved customising Remedy modules to fit with Metropolitan`s legacy systems and ODS, then implementing the software to give call centre agents a complete portfolio view of each caller.
"The main benefit of the call centre - as part of our newly integrated divisional structure - is that agents can handle almost any query for any product in a client`s portfolio without having to access different systems or re-engage the client for further information.
"Since agents have a portfolio view of the client`s products, any changes made to one product can likewise be made across the portfolio using the Remedy interface to ensure that the different components of the client`s portfolio are updated on all operational and legacy systems."
Another benefit, says Schoeman, is the contact history available to the agent for every call a client has previously made, making call tracking and follow-ups more intuitive.
"An agent can see at a glance any notes or actions made by other agents, so the service back to the client is sped up significantly," he says.
"Equally important is Remedy`s support for our computer telephony integration (CTI) system, and its compatibility with external databases - including the ODS - which allows us to be extremely flexible when making different data sources available to our agents."
Metropolitan is investigating expanding the call centre to its regional offices, using Remedy`s Web-based solutions to give over 500 agents countrywide access to the company`s data repository.
"Most of the benefits, including portfolio view and contact history, are only available to agents in our main centres," says Schoeman.
"Using the Web we can extend these benefits to all our agents, giving them the tools they need to service our clients irrespective of their location."
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