Looking for insight across multiple sources

TAL is a life insurance provider with more than 3.7 million customers and 1,600 employees. Part of Daiichi Life Group, one of the worldʼs largest conglomerates, TAL pays around AUD$1 billion per year in claims.

In 2015, after several corporate acquisitions and the subsequent launch of new products and capabilities into market, TAL recognized the need to extract more meaningful insight from the data being gathered by its on-premises contact center solution, PureConnect by Genesys.

Prior to implementing emite, poor transparency into contact center performance made it impossible for the company to accurately measure the impact of business decisions on customer experience and other metrics, and to align contact center outcomes with corporate strategy.

Now emite provides TAL with a single customer view via dashboards that correlate contact center data with information from its enterprise resource planning (ERP), customer relationship management (CRM) and other third-party applications, including workforce management software. TAL staff and executives can now make better decisions faster using data thatʼs combined and analyzed at lightning speeds from multiple sources across the business.

Instead of having to produce time-consuming monthly reports, which only provide a historical view, staff can now anticipate and resolve issues as they occur and quickly take advantage of new opportunities.

Jen Rufati, general manager, customer service and operations, TAL, said, “Before emite, we were getting information at 11am telling us that the average customer call wait time at 10am was 12 minutes, rather than receiving that information as it happened and acting on it immediately. Now we always know what the average call wait time is. And, because emite alerts us whenever weʼre approaching the threshold of calls being abandoned, we simply assign more agents to handle calls before customers are affected.”

Delivering timely and relevant customer experiences

With emite, TAL has achieved unprecedented insight into the work methods that drive productivity. Agents can also see how theyʼre performing against KPIs in real time, so they have more control, more accountability and higher levels of motivation.

emite links data to every customer interaction, so staff can see previous conversations and activities. With emite seamlessly guiding them on how best to engage with each contact, agents create more relevant and mutually-rewarding customer experiences.

“With real-time visibility into agent statuses and a real-time understanding of calls in queue, call wait times and so on, we started significantly reducing our call abandon rate as soon as emite was installed.”

TAL has also started using policy value and expiry data from back-end systems to accurately forecast revenue. Now, automated, timely and targeted outbound call campaigns are reducing churn and adding value by protecting customers from the insurance coverage gaps that occur when policies lapse.

Jen Rufati said, “emite shows us how many and which policies expire in the next seven days, 14 days, 30 days or whatever date range we choose to input. So not only can we target those that are closest to expiration but we can also prioritize them by dollar value.”

Saving time and money compared with traditional BI

TAL considered several options before selecting emite.

Jen Rufati said, “We considered traditional BI but we ultimately chose emite because the other solution couldnʼt represent the data in real time. If I canʼt see how many agents are on my queue, updated every five seconds, as we can with emite, then itʼs not really of any use to me.

“As well as the hardware costs, traditional BI would have been prohibitively expensive from a licensing perspective, as every agent would have required a SQL license to view the data. Because emite uses an Elasticsearch index engine, which is open source, we avoided having to purchase extra licenses.

“emite was easy to learn. Staff could use it effectively after just 55 minutes of online video training. Building a single report with a traditional BI solution would have taken eight days, but with emite we were building eight or more reports in one day just with a basic level of knowledge. And now that we have some experience, we can produce as many as 20.”

Quickly achieving operational best-practice

Now that emite is installed and fully operational, TAL has noticed significant benefits. Jen Rufati said, “Iʼm impressed by the way it handles huge amounts of data without the added cost of expensive databases.

“The dashboards are clear and easy to use. They put the power to build reports into our hands, so we donʼt have to hire expensive BI developers to do it for us.

“emiteʼs expertise in contact centers has meant that, from day one, we had all the measures, metrics and KPIs out of the box that we needed to run our business.”

Getting top marks for customer service and agent retention

Prior to installing emite, TALʼs Net Promotor Scores (NPS) would fluctuate wildly, but now, because the enhanced view of its operational data lets TAL customer service agents provide outstanding service, the contact center consistently hits top marks. Jen Rufati said, “We are now consistently above 86 per cent on our NPS, which we are very happy with.

“With real-time visibility into agent statuses and a real-time understanding of calls in queue, call wait times and so on, we started significantly reducing our call abandon rate as soon as emite was installed.

“Instead of spending countless hours creating reports, managers now focus on helping the team deliver exemplary service, and thatʼs what truly drives them.

“Managers can aggregate business KPIs at any level, so we can now see how departments, teams and even individual agents are performing by simply filtering the emite reports by organizational hierarchy.

Jen Rufati said, “Now that we know where agents are spending their time, we can analyze that data and formulate benchmarks based on the top performers. So we are bringing our entire team up to that level.

“Agent retention rates are higher now because job satisfaction has improved. Staff are reaching their KPIs more frequently and securing the bonuses that go with that. The longer they stay with us, the less time and money we spend on onboarding and training new recruits.

“By providing all these insights and efficiency gains, emite has completely transformed our entire operation.”