The Market Is Stable For Insurance Call Centers

Two years ago, the DataMonitor growth figures might have looked drab. Today, “insurance is actually listed as one of the growth markets,” says Elizabeth Kennedy, a DataMonitor analyst. “Insurance is a stable marketplace for vendors.”

Despite the weak state of the economy, insurers “are still seeing contact centers as a competitive differentiator,” says Karen Hardy, product marketing director at Aspect Communications Corp., San Jose, Calif.

Many insurers are still willing to invest in the technology they need to assess callers on the fly.

Dan Plashkes, founder of eAssist Global Solutions Inc., San Diego, a company that develops customer contact management software, cites a commercial that says consumers can get auto insurance from one insurer after spending “only” 20 minutes on the telephone.

That call will cost the insurer about $20, and “thats really expensive for an inquiry,” Plashkes says. “The cost per call is too high for unqualified calls.”

In a downturn, Plashkes says, “I want to speak to the best customers first.”

Insurers are also willing to spend to make better use of the Web and consolidate the systems they already have.

In Jacksonville, Fla., for example, Florida Blue has used systems from Aspect and Connextions.net Inc., Orlando, Fla., and call centers obtained through Connextions, to add telephone support for Web-based health insurance sales. The new operation now accounts for more than 5% of sales, Pratico says.

Edgewater is helping other companies with retroactive integration efforts. Many larger insurer call centers “have a lot of disparate systems,” Fortin says. “Its difficult for them to get the information that they want.”

Experts interviewed estimate that a typical insurance company call center agent could be using as many as 20 different incompatible software applications. In many cases, an insurer will use a call routing system that asks customers for their account numbers, then fails to pass the account numbers on to the call center agents.

But some insurer technology executives admit that all they really want to add to their call center technology is reliability.

“Just make it more stable,” says Hugh Hale, director of technical services at Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Tennessee.

At Tennessee Blue, crashes are rare, but, when a crash does occur, “it brings the company to its knees,” Hale says. “Theres not enough fault-tolerance built in. If one bad thing happens, it brings the whole system down.”

Reproduced from National Underwriter Edition, March 3, 2003. Copyright 2003 by The National Underwriter Company in the serial publication. All rights reserved.Copyright in this article as an independent work may be held by the author.