(End-to-End) Experience performance against leading North American
insurance organizations, from the call center to the claim settlement
customer experience.
Providing good customer service in a competitive insurance market is critical to acquiring new customers and keeping the ones you have. Based on the fact that most customers only contact their insurance provider at renewal time, the real opportunity to provide good customer service is when a customer files a claim. Providing good service for a customer claim experience, means making it easy to file a claim, having helpful claim personnel and the claim is settled quickly. In most cases, a quick settlement is more important than the amount of the settlement.
Based on the fact that a customer’s claim experience has such a profound impact on the company personnel’s ability to reduce operating costs and satisfy and retain customers, it is critical for management to conduct SQM’s Customer Claim (End-to-End) Experience Benchmarking Study. Furthermore, call center and claim department personnel should have common VoC metrics for which they are jointly held accountable. This allows improvements to be made for both call center and claim department issues that are hindering their ability to settle claims on the first call, reduce claim costs, satisfy customers and, most importantly, reduce customer defections as a result of customer claim (End-to-End) experiences.
Of all the experiences that a customer has with an insurance company the claim experience has, by far, the greatest impact on retaining customers or creating customer defections. Given the importance of the customer’s experience with how an organization handled their claim and its impact on customer retention, SQM uses a Customer Protection (CP) SCORE™ as the main metric for evaluating the organization’s ability to retain customers. As shown in Figure 1, the CP SCORE™ is based on customer survey results meeting the below criteria for the three related metrics (i.e., customer claim is settled, customer is satisfied with claim experience and customer continues to do business with the organization as a result of their claim experience).
Figure 1. CP SCORE™
Why Participate in SQM’s Customer Claim (End-to-End) Experience Benchmarking Study…
Do you know…
- how your customer’s claim experience compares to leading insurance organizations?
- how many customers get their claim settled on the first call?
- how satisfied customers are with their (end-to-end) claim experience?
- how many customers defect as a result of their claim experience?
- the reasons why customers have to make repeat calls to settle their claim?
- why customers are defecting to your competitors as a result of their claim experience?
- what it would take to keep customers from defecting to your competitors?
- the main sources of your customer defections (e.g., organization, call center, etc.)?
- what call center and claim department VoC metrics should be the same?
- your Customer Protection – CP SCORE™?
- the revenue that was lost as a result of a customer’s claim experience?
- the organizations that customers will be switching to and why?
If you don’t have quality answers to these questions, let the experts at SQM Group assist you in assessing your customers claim (end-to-end) experience.
Top Reasons to Improve your Customer Claim (End-to-End) Experience
Reduce operating cost – for the average call center that SQM benchmarks, a 1% improvement in their FCR performance equals $276,000 in operational savings. If you are performing at the call center industry average of 59% FCR rate for claim calls, you need to understand that at least 41% of customers calling your call center about a claim have to call back because their claim call was not resolved on their first call. For the average insurance call center that SQM benchmarks 25% of their calls are a claim call, so for most call centers the claim call represents the biggest opportunity to improve their FCR performance.
Reduce customers at risk – customers that are at risk of going to competitors as a result of unresolved claim settlements have the biggest impact on the organization’s financial performance. The cost to the organization of customers at risk (as a result of their claim not being settled) is 5-10 times greater than the operational savings received from improving FCR performance. Most organizations are not aware of how much revenue they are losing as a result of the customer’s claim going unresolved or taking too long to get settled leading the customer to defect.
Customer Claim (End-to-End) Experience Study Methodology
Our Customer Claim (End-to-End) Experience Benchmarking Study takes key aspects of our Post-Call Customer Claim Survey and Operational Survey to provide greater insights into the opportunities for improving claim response times, costs, customer satisfaction and retention.
1. Post-Call Customer Survey
A random sample of 400 phone surveys are conducted with customers who called a call center about a claim. The phone survey is conducted 30 days after they called the call center so that the customer would have experienced the (end-to-end) claim experience. The in-depth interview survey based on up to 50 rating and open-ended questions is conducted by phone by SQM personnel and is 7-10 minutes in length.
2. Operational Survey
Call center and claim department management complete an operational survey which has 45 metrics covering areas such as claim cycle inventory time, number of claim calls a CSR handles per day, salary and turnover.
Customer Claim (End-to-End) Experience Report Deliverables
A 100 page customer claim (end-to-end) experience report will be delivered to you and your management team via a conference call or on site with a senior SQM consultant outlining your performance and opportunities to improve.
Specifically, SQM’s Customer Claim (End-to-End) Experience Benchmarking Study will provide the following:
- Percentage of customers whose claim call was settled on the first call
- Customer satisfaction with (end-to-end) claim experience
- Customer Protection – CP SCORE™ as a result of customer claim experience
- How much effort do customers have to put forth to settle their claims
- On average how many days does it take to settle customer claims
- Amount of revenue the customer claim experience protected and lost
- Reasons why customers want to defect
- What it would take to keep customers from defecting
- Organizations that customers are switching to and why they choose them
- Benchmarking comparison to leading North American organizations
- Benchmarking comparison to peer group, call center industry and world class call center
- Reasons why customers have to make repeat calls to settle their claim
- Unresolved claim calls’ impact on operating costs
- Targeted opportunities for reducing repeat claim calls
- Operational benchmarking data for 45 metrics
- One copy of SQM’s book, World Class Call Center
Your Investment
The total investment for the Customer Claim (End-to-End) Experience Benchmarking Study is $12,000 plus applicable taxes. The only additional charge would be to cover travel and accommodation expenses for an SQM senior consultant to present the results to you and your team on site.
