Life assurance giant Metropolitan Life is reaping the benefits of its R8 million investment in a consolidated client-centric interface for its call centre agents, handling in excess of 3 000 calls per day. The solution was implemented by Comparex Africa Western Cape, with products and services provided by the company`s Networks, System Support, Customer Oriented Applications (COA) and Project Management divisions. It provides an interface designed to work with vast volumes of data for the combining of information for the company`s 4 million policyholders.
"The success of the call centre is in line with our Customer Service and Administration Division`s campaign to render unsurpassed service," says Coenraad Schoeman, Metropolitan Life`s senior manager for the call centre. "Since full implementation of the centre, we`ve been achieving the key objectives of our service offering - consistency, completeness, correctness and cost-efficiency."
The need for new technology within the division became evident in 2000. With the drive to improve client focus without compromising cost ratios, branch offices with low numbers of customer interactions around the country could not be justified. Larger contact volumes needed to be handled, and efficiency improvements through computer telephony integration (CTI) seemed the obvious way to go.
The implementation of the system followed the successful consolidation of Metropolitan`s Ordinary Business and Voluntary Group lines of operation and the building of an online data store (ODS) by COA to consolidate client and policy information across the business units for the call centre interface. "With the traditional administration processes of new business, claims and premium collection already fully optimised, the biggest opportunity for process improvement in the division lay in efficiently dealing with real-time customer interactions. Establishing a call centre was one of the key initiatives to gain competitive-edge," says Schoeman.
Comparex Africa`s Projects division strives to match a client`s business goals to the most suitable products, technologies and services available, customising and integrating the various components to achieve a cohesive, effective solution.
The project, which was split into two phases and completed over a two-year period, presented a number of challenges. The first phase saw the implementation of the ODS, which created challenges centred on the complex differences between the two business lines, and establishing and implementing the business rules for the data migration and merge.
"In order to combine multiple live data sources into a single target database, the staging process had to be created from scratch. Data had to be extracted from a variety of legacy systems to form records across the two product lines. This involved extracting the data from Metropolitan`s operational mainframe platforms, generating the new flat files, and performing the ETL (extract, transform and load) process on the data for the Oracle call centre database," says Schoeman.
COA used Ascential Software`s DataStage software for the ETL stage, together with custom scripts developed for the mainframe data extracts. The second phase of the project involved setting up a distributed call centre operating in Johannesburg and Cape Town - the main challenges being the synchronisation of decentralised telephony, and increasing the response time of the wide area network (WAN) to an acceptable level for a call centre. The technology had to support a distributed model of linked call centres in multiple locations allowing automated call overflow to maximise productivity in peaks and troughs and to minimise Sharecall costs, receiving a large percentage of calls within a 50km radius. Such an effective distributed telephony system would enable calls to be received at more than one place while accessing data from a centralised area.
The hardware solution selected to meet the business requirements was Nortel Meridian 11C, with Symposium as the software for telephony management and Remedy for contact management, running on an Oracle database. The Meridian/Symposium system was decentralised and linked across the WAN to effect automated overflow at multiple sites.
Comparex Networks was responsible for the provision of the call centre infrastructure, software and the user requirement specification. This included the Nortel Meridian PBXs in Johannesburg and Cape Town, and the upgrade of the Metropolitan WAN to Nortel high-end Passport switches to cater for the increased voice and data traffic across the corporate WAN. The Nortel Symposium Call Centre software had to be customised to meet Metropolitan`s user requirements, which included integration with Remedy and ODS, call centre agent management and skill-based routing across the network to provide world-class service to Metropolitan customers.
A key component for Comparex Africa`s Projects division in the implementation of a solution was the skills transfer to the Metropolitan Life staff. Focusing on the importance of a team perspective, the call centre staff took part in all major project deliverables to ensure the seamless transfer of skills in the technologies implemented.
"The entire project was completed on time and within budget - a considerable achievement considering the challenges faced," says Schoeman, who sees the major benefit of the call centre as being consistency of client service. "The main objective of the call centre is to complement existing customer service and administration processes, focusing predominantly on contact management. This incorporates full view of portfolio, contact history and follow up action. Through the call centre, we can identify and track trends, ensure efficient data quality and take advantage of marketing opportunities and sales leads."
The project was initially run in a pilot environment in 2000 with 14 agents. The team was then expanded to 70 agents and is likely to grow to 140 seats in the long-term.
"We want to service as many clients as possible, and our volumes will increase as clients become more comfortable with the concept of being serviced through a call centre. Our next major thrust will be to concentrate on customer relationship management (CRM) issues. At the moment the call centre is predominantly inbound service-oriented, so the focus for the future will be to structure and formalise the sales lead generation process while constantly improving data quality," says Schoeman.
Metropolitan Life clients are concentrated in four main geographical areas - Gauteng, the Western Cape, KwaZulu-Natal and the wider Eastern Cape region. While the model does allow for expansion, client demand and volumes will dictate whether further expansion into KZN and the Eastern Cape can be justified.
"In the longer term we will continue meeting increasing demands for higher service levels. This involves the development of a contact management system to record the nature and outcome of all contacts. It also sees the alignment of service channels to ensure consistency and minimised costs, and to add value in other areas, such as improved retention, utilising sales leads and improving data quality," concludes Schoeman.
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