Vincent Placer, Managing Director of Teletech, shares his expert opinion on the transformation of customer relations organizations in the insurance industry. You can also download our full study on the subject, available here.
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Vincent Placer, in a few words?
After more than 11 years at Orange as Strategic Marketing Manager and then Deputy VP, I held the position of Executive Director at EY. From 2015 to 2022, I was Managing Director of the Colorado Group, a specialist in customer experience and relationships.
Since June 2022, I have been putting my expertise in omnichannel customer relations to work for Teletech.
Could you tell us about Teletech?
Teletech is a major player in the contact center middle market. We renew customer relations outsourcing by combining the best of human and artificial intelligence.
With sales of over €25 million, Teletech has more than 600 advisors in France (95%) and Morocco (5%).
We have strong roots in the insurance, public sector and energy sectors. energy sector.
Our teams can cover all the key moments in a customer journey (information, assistance, complaints, etc.), whatever the communication channel (telephone, e-mail, chat, etc.).
Can you tell us why insurers are outsourcing their customer relations activities?
Outsourcing all or part of customer relations activities in the insurance sector meets a number of strategic needs.
Firstly, there is a need for flexibility to manage the seasonal nature of the business, particularly from December to February and from November to March, when the volume of interactions increases significantly, notably with the renewal of third-party payment cards or the revision of contribution amounts.
It should be noted that the most mature players have understood the importance of maintaining a constant flow - outside peak periods - of outsourced tasks to the service provider, to avoid wasting expertise and ensure better resource management.
Outsourcing customer relations can also be a way of boosting productivity. The company can delegate conversations that require less expertise, but which are important in terms of volume, and reserve the management of more complex situations for itself.
Outsourcing also offers opportunities for challenge and benchmarking, as companies seek to compare themselves and continually improve their practices.
What about the choice of location for customer relations activities?
In the mutual insurance sector in particular, there is also a strong desire to maintain a presence in France, close to in-house centers, enabling better collaboration and regular visits by principals to service providers' sites. Mutuals often prefer this proximity for reasons of quality and control.
When insurers opt for nearshore or offshore solutions, many have chosen to develop an in-house center.
What impact do you anticipate the PSC (complementary social protection) will have on customer relations?
The first challenge concerns the sizing of activities. The migration from individual to group contracts will generate significant activation activity. Nor should we forget the management of beneficiaries and retirees.
This peak in activity could be spread over six months.
Customers will need to mobilize to manage this transition, and some of them are already planning outbound call campaigns. Some are even considering outsourcing to a partner to cope with this temporary increase in activity.
It should also be noted that, as collective bonuses are generally lower than individual bonuses, the challenge of optimizing management costs is likely to arise, with a potential reconsideration of the current sourcing strategy. By outsourcing certain operations, companies can look forward to productivity gains and cost reductions.
Your value proposition is based on the right balance between human and artificial intelligence. What AI solutions do you offer your customers?
Our first project launched back in June 2019 was voice intelligence. We developed in-house an intelligent voice assistant, named Stella, capable of handling simple at first, and now complex, incoming conversations.
Subsequently, we created chatbots for our insured areas based on this AI. We also started with the simplest tasks, such as requests to issue third-party payment cards and cancellation requests. As the scenarios are fed in according to need, we have gone from 50 scenarios at the start to 600 today, thanks to machine learning.
Today within our group, AI is also used for claims management and to make certain outbound calls, for example to contact new policyholders or warn of changes to cover.
Can you measure the effectiveness and ROI of your AI-based solutions?
In terms of productivity, we are now able to handle 20% of our customers' incoming requests independently. This percentage is set to rise even further, even though we strongly believe that the right mix of services must remain a key factor in a brand's customer experience.. In addition to these autonomous conversations, the duration of communications transferred to an advisor is also shortened, since the caller's identification and the reason for the call have already been carried out. This represents an additional gain of 20 to 25%.
AI also makes it possible to create new services such as an automatically processed call to immediately inform the policyholder that his reimbursement has been issued.
When it comes to post-call customer satisfaction, ratings for human advisors and AI show similar scores, and in some cases even higher for AI (particularly outside business hours). What's more, the gains made by autonomously handling a portion of conversations can, depending on the company, be reinvested to offer new services such as proactive insurance assessment or other actions aimed at building policyholder loyalty.
Transforming customer relations organizations in the insurance industry
The customer relations professions in the insurance industry are facing profound transformations that are set to accelerate in the months and years to come: balancing customer satisfaction against the business model of the insurance industry.
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