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Many insurance professionals come into the industry with an interest in the field, but little direct experience. A new partnership between industry strategist Gradient Solutions and Canadian solution provider blueC 802 aims to turn new insurance professionals into pros at helping customers have the best insurance experience.
Gradient Solutions’ training program, SCORE, now works within blueButler’s call-recording and call management environment, which means broker management teams have access to all of the features they need to do one-on-one staff coaching, without throwing tons of information at new employees all at once.
“The blueButler concept is to empower the front lines staff and use that ‘butler’ to be the assistant on every phone call,” said John McDonald, CTO and vice president of product management at blueC.
At the beginning of a phone call with a customer, blueButler probes the broker management system (BMS) to bring up the client file as well as information about the team members that were helping that client, their active policies, and, in some cases, open accounts receivable items. The user can also see the recent call history so if a customer wants to be connected to an agent or broker they spoke with earlier, it’s easy for staff to direct that call.
During the conversation, the insurance professional can also ‘tag’ it for each purpose, whether the customer is asking about claims, a policy change or coverage inquiry. blueButler provides a visual audit trail screen to staff and management displaying all calls (in and out) so that each individual can see their own calls for the day, and whether they did or did not link the tagged recording and create an activity in their CRM for that call. This stops important call information from falling through the cracks. While on the phone, the blueButler scripts and guides help the professional with checklists and key points they should hit on.
“It makes them experts in every market because all of the information is on the screen,” said McDonald. “It’s a central system so everybody is using the same materials, and it drives that more consistent Disney-style customer service practice.”
Staff are frequently rotating in and out of insurance agencies, in part because many professionals are retiring and newcomers are taking their place, said Sean Mulcair, co-founder and certified lean team leader at Gradient Solutions.
“A lot of them don’t have any education or training background and for a lot of the information, it’s like drinking water through a firehose – you get inundated with content,” he explained. “They need to be able to refer back to it on a regular basis so that when they’re having conversations with clients, those conversations can be a lot more professional and they can also be a lot more efficient in terms of the time that they’re spending on the call.”
Getting client signatures has also become easier for insurance professionals through the partnership. blueC was the first to develop an audio signature process with Economical and, a year later, all of the major carriers in Canada were accepting audio signatures since they’re efficient to use for brokers and create a stronger legal document.
From a management perspective, the analytics available through blueButler, which work hand-in-hand with the tagging feature, can help companies understand where time is spent during the day. Mulcair told Insurance Business to picture it as a pie chart that breaks down how much of the day is spent on new business phone calls, renewals, or someone calling with claims questions.
“What we see when we look at it is a lot of these calls that people are having are not around new business – they’re around servicing and managing accounts. When we talk to our customers, we say it’s a little bit easier to understand potentially why you’re not growing as much as you want to – look at the types of conversations that people are having on the phone,” he said.
“The more we understand and the more we learn, the more we can drive efficiencies and help a broker run and manage a more effective business.”
