Insurance group invests in new call recording and quality monitoring system

Business Systems (UK) Ltd has installed its quality monitoring and call recording solution at Equity Insurance Group.

With key operating facilities in Colchester, Brentwood and Swansea, Equity Insurance Group employs around 500 agents providing an end-to-end service dealing with insurance enquiries, sales, renewals, claims, fraud prevention and service recovery.

Equity Insurance Group always aims to meet its compliance responsibilities while delivering the service standards expected by affinity partners, customers and brokers. Consequently, it has invested in a new call recording and quality monitoring system. Working with call recording specialists, Business Systems, “NICE Perform Quality” was identified as the solution best suited to its business needs.

Equity Insurance Partnerships Limited (EIP), one of the first in the group to implement the solution, operates a contact centre in Colchester, where over 200 agents handle approximately a million inbound calls each year. Mick Larkin, Head of Operations at EIP, commented: “With NICE Perform Quality, we can use the management information to drive real-time changes and improvements in the business. The real-time reporting focuses on individuals, teams and business areas; in the past this would typically take our quality advisor three to four days to produce, but now the information is just a few mouse clicks away. The reporting suite has really changed our business dynamics; we can run reports on evaluations which have been completed and identify where agents failed in a call…we can then decide if this indicates a need for refresher training, a need to revise scripts or whether a more fundamental change is required to our processes.”

He continues: “We operate in a tightly regulated industry, so we wanted a system that gave us the reassurance we would meet all governance, controls and regulatory requirements. We now have a compliant monitoring system with 14 critical fail-safes built in, ensuring robust procedures are in place to meet the regulatory requirements of the FSA, whilst achieving full PCI compliance accreditation.”

There has also been a significant cultural change within the contact centre operation. Agents can take responsibility for the output of their own calls; where they believe they have excelled, they can listen to those calls and forward them to their manager or quality team, increasing their promotional chances whilst also providing a benchmark for other agents.

Call benchmarking has also been revolutionised. Affinity partners no longer need to physically sit alongside team managers and collectively rate calls in areas such as soft skilling; with calibration reporting, the process is now automated and all calls are reviewed on individual desktops.

This is a huge step forward for team managers, who can now get straight to the heart of issues. With easier access to calls, quicker retrieval and enhanced reporting, the group has effectively quadrupled the amount of monitoring, having removed many of the previous labour-intensive processes.

According to Mick: “The NICE system enables us to tie together all the calls relating to one customer…we can now appraise the full end-to-end process, which means we can better understand the customer experience and whether it met our standards. We now have the tools to help us refine the journey with further analysis, looking at the root causes of problems and understanding whether there are more systemic issues to be considered.”

Mick concludes: “This project was one of the most seamless I have experienced, with no slippage, all the critical timelines met and the team at Business Systems has been very responsive to our needs. The training provided was a real eye-opener in terms of understanding the system’s capabilities and what it could deliver for us. We gained some best-practice tips for form design and report creation that will deliver genuine business insight going forward.”