How to prepare an insurance call center ahead of a storm
In 2021 alone, climate disasters resulted in losses of over $100 billion causing significant distress to American families. And, if your organization isn’t properly prepared to face the storm, your heavily impacted customers will not have the support during one of the most difficult moments of their lives.
During a natural disaster, insurance companies need to be prepared to facilitate exceptional service with increased claim submissions– particularly for automotive and home insurance. This can be extremely challenging as many organizations do not have access to additional highly trained staff on demand.
However, by building in flex capacity in tandem with an established First Notice of Loss (FNOL) team, you can equip your call center to handle the increased demand with standout customer service.
Flex capacity
Normal day-to-day at a customer engagement center might not require an inordinate number of agents; however, at certain parts of the year, particularly around natural disasters and other similar events, the demand for staff spikes. For this reason, implementing a flex capacity plan to account for these times is important. Flex capacity can come in different forms, but it always comes down to providing workers with the necessary resources and support needed during busy times. For example, adding additional temporary staff, investing in more efficient technology, and offering training programs to help employees handle these high-stress situations can all act as flex capacity and provide the needed support to employees.
FNOL
Another important consideration might be to develop a concierge FNOL team. In fact, this doesn’t necessarily have to be tied to a specific event; it’s important your customer engagement center is equipped with the right FNOL team at all times of the year. This team oversees mitigating the claims process, reviewing the initial reports, and directing customers to the applicable resources. This can help free up agents for other calls, reducing workload and helping take pressure off call center staff. It can also improve overall efficiency, in turn improving wait times and customer experience.
When in doubt, overflow teams are effective
If you do not have the resources available to accommodate an internal flex capacity plan, your customer engagement center may elect to seek out a partner that can provide an overflow team. This is a great option to have readily trained service associates. An outside partner in the form of a third-party contractor or another secondary customer engagement center can help support staff by managing the additional volume in tandem with your core teams. This support will protect your customers’ experience during outage events and natural disasters. Having access to trained additional resources allows peace of mind that even in the event of an impact to your customer engagement center, your customers are serviced quickly and efficiently via additional support staff.
Quiet hiring: call center edition
The latest buzzword, many industries have been ‘quiet hiring’ for some time or bringing on talent without making a full-time offer. This mainly comes in the form of contractor hires. In preparation for the busy times of year, insurance companies should always be looking for ways to better their teams. Outside contractors can help provide additional support during busy times of year and bring valuable insight and perspective. Insurance companies should also look to take advantage of turnover to manage the size of their customer engagement center teams during slow times of the year. This frees up the budget to be used when it’s needed to provide extra resources during high demand times of year.
Preparing your insurance customer engagement center for the unexpected is not an easy task. All insurance organizations strive to maintain exceptional customer experience, retain top talent, and optimize the claims process. In adopting a flex capacity plan, you can help ensure your customer engagement center is equipped with the right support resources, at the right time, to handle increased demand while maintaining the highest standard of customer service.
