With the insurance industry targeting young Indians (average age 24 years), it is extremely important for the industry to offer services on delivery channels which this age category is more comfortable with.
Self service on interactive voice response (IVR) will itself not suffice as the mobile subscriber base is likely to cross 348 million by 2010. So with 38 million customers using the Internet, the net savvy base poised to reach 58 million by 2008 and 23% in this age group using chat, use of other channels like email and chat for services will bring in efficiency.
As the agents can then simultaneously attend multiple customers on multiple channels, it reduces the cost of transaction.
Enabling different channels of communication is very crucial even if demand is low as of now. Customers will ultimately decide how they want to reach a contact center, and not enabling a channel could drive potential business away.
New customers get in touch with the life insurance companies for their requirements on insurance plans, tax benefits, specific plans for the family/women and children and the benefits associated with the same.
Although lot of information is available on the Internet, new customers may have some queries. A chat section will definitely help them get in touch with the insurance specialist at the contact center. This will also help the insurance company to sell suitable products to the customers.
Existing customers can use email and chat channel to know about their renewal payment due dates, grace period for payments, claim formats, documents required to file a claim, post a requirement for payment receipts, change profile, requirement for an ECS form etc.
All these channels can be integrated by Avaya such that the customer care executive has the complete customer history on the screen irrespective of the channel - mobile, SMS, email, chat or IVR.
The customer care supervisors will have complete access to real-time/historical reports to monitor the contact center performance across channels.
The Avaya application can identify key words in an email and select standard responses from the historic data and mail it back to the customer if the query matches the response.
For example, for claim documents the system can mail back a standard list for the same. If not, it can present a draft mail to the customer care agent for him to edit and send. This in turn enhances the customer care agent's performance.
