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M&A Pains Stifle Efforts To Shore Up Call Centers

Bob Mueller August 2007

If you think your contact center (what used to be your call center before e-mail and Web chat were added to the customer service mix) doesn't do much for sales, you might have a look at a new study from Genesys Telecommunications Laboratories Inc. The Daly City, Calif., maker of contact center software recently surveyed 500 consumers in the United States, and found that almost half placed more importance on customer service than product quality, price or the vendor's reputation when it came to loyalty. A full 40% said they'd stopped doing business with a company solely because of a bad contact center experience.

Donna Fluss, president of DMG Consulting, a West Orange, N.J., company that specializes in helping clients build contact centers, says the centers should be playing a more significant role than just keeping customers happy and loyal-especially for insurance carriers.

"Insurance companies have an opportunity a lot of other organizations only touch on," she says. "The opportunities to up-sell and cross-sell are tremendous in the insurance industry." So far, though, "it's an opportunity waiting to happen."

One reason insurance industry contact centers lag behind some other industries when it comes to exploiting that opportunity, says Fluss, is that many carriers lately are the products of mergers and acquisitions, and they're still busy consolidating all the systems and processes they've inherited. "They've had to integrate many different operating environments, businesses, systems and processes, and they're still working in that direction," she says.

Although he might not agree that his company's contact center lags behind anyone's, Bill Maurer, assistant vice president and head of a 110-employee center at AEGON USA's Annuity Products and Services (APS) Customer Center in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, is certainly wrestling with the challenges mergers and acquisitions have brought.

"Right now, my staff is being trained on four different systems," he says.

AEGON's annuities business uses the Vantage-One policy administration system from El Segundo, Calif.-based Computer Sciences Corp. (CSC). When it acquired Providian Life and Health in the 1990s, it also acquired Providian's system. And, when AEGON acquired Transamerica in 2000, it got not only Transamerica's system, but another system that went back to a third carrier Transamerica bought some years earlier.

Eventually, says Maurer, all the systems will be consolidated, but meanwhile, he's cross-training some of his more experienced customer service reps on the other systems in order to handle needs of pre-acquisition annuity holders.

COSTS OF THE CONTACT CENTER

Although customer service reps at AEGON don't do any selling, there is a small group of 13 licensed sales agents under Maurer's purview. Their job is to try to retain annuity customers brought in by agents who no longer sell AEGON's lines.

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