South African Call Centre Solution Benefits US Insurance Company

August 22 - A medical insurance company in the United States sought the help of the Johannesburg-based Hi Performance Learning (HPL) over problems it was having with its call centre. According to the insurance company, the call centre service was plagued with a high staff turnover, poor customer satisfaction and high costs.

HPL was called in to identify the problems and offer a viable solution.

HPL realized that because the medical insurance call centre covered the entire United States, one of the main problems was that the staff were simply under qualified to provide the correct answers to clients because of the differing laws in US states pertaining to insurance.

To obtain high quality staff, the medical insurance company was forced to high medical professionals to answer calls, instead of regular call service staff members. As a result, the cost of hiring these professionals was simply too high. The company was seeking ways to bring down these costs, as well as limit the staff turnover that was occurring at an incredible rate because of the high pressure nature of the job.

In addition, customer satisfaction was at an all time low because clients were forced to wait up to 45 minutes as call centre staff waded through endless information in a bid to offer the correct advice.

By identifying these problems, HPL redefined how learning and performance support is offered to call centre employees. The solution drastically reduces the need for top agents to answer complex questions and allowed less experienced workers to field calls.

"In addition," said the director of HPL, Ryan Falkenberg, "the solution has significantly reduced risk to the medical insurance company because correct and accurate information is communicated by all agents in a consistent way."