An Interview with Elda Conde, Customer Service Director, and Members of Her Customer Service Team

Company Snapshot

Based in Mexico, ABASEGUROS is part of the General Motors Acceptance Corporation (GMAC) insurance group, one of the largest property and casualty insurance companies in the United States, with operations around the world, and a part of the General Motors family of companies. Specializing in Property and Casualty (P&C),  ABASEGUROS has developed a wide range of products at competitive costs, offering customers the highest quality of service through its wide network of insurance agents.  The office infrastructure includes strategic locations throughout Mexico, and the company’s Customer Service Center implements state-of-the-art technology.

Please describe your contact center environment

“In 1995 ABASEGUROS created the Customer Service Center to strengthen the relationship we have with our customers. In Mexico the simplest and most common way to purchase an insurance policy is through an insurance broker. This makes the role of the Customer Service Center all the more important. It is a strategic part of the company, because in most cases the customer service representative offers the end customers their first contact with the company.

“We have two Customer Service Centers, with 240 agents who handle an average of 480,000 calls per month, of which 65% are outgoing, 35% incoming. The incoming calls are mostly from customers who had a car accident, customers requesting price quotations, wanting to pay policy fees, providing a change of address, etc. Outgoing calls mainly relate to campaigns, such as collections,  cancellation, claims, renewals, and “welcome” calls.

“In addition to the customer service area, we operate a direct sale distribution channel from the contact centers, which generates over $35 million in annual sales.”

 What are the performance requirements of your agents?

“For a company whose product is a service, our people, our critical human resource, have the strategic responsibility for delivering the highest quality of service during their contact with the customer. All of our agents should have the customer service tools and skills that will enable them to exceed the expectations of our customers.

“The different types of calls we receive from our customers require us not only to have a high level of communication skills but also to be proficient at identifying the needs of our customers, without this necessarily being obvious. They must also be endowed with problem solving skills. We have to treat our customers with respect and always be courteous. But, above all, we need to show a sincere interest in trying to do our best to help them.”

Please describe the NICE implementation at your site

“We currently have two contact centers running on NICE. We record all calls and screen activity. We use the NICE solution for advanced quality monitoring (QM), webbased reporting and evaluations. Furthermore, our call center applications add business information to each customer interaction to allow an effective search by key parameters, finding the necessary recording faster.”

You say that life has changed since implementing NICE, what do you mean by that?

“There are enormous changes in the way we do things in our contact center since we implemented the NICE solution. It allows us to ensure that the information supplied to customers is accurate; it helps us to understand our agents’ and call center’s weaknesses.

“By having all the information we need regarding quality of service consolidated in one place, we have tight control over our business operations. Without NICE we would not be able to ensure such high levels of service or be able to satisfactorily meet our customers’ needs.  NICE enables continuous improvement, and through this approach we can effectively ensure an excellent customer experience.”

How has NICE helped improve Quality Monitoring?

“Firstly, the evaluations provide critical feedback to the agents and enable them to comply better with processes and regulations. For supervisors, we can better identify agents who are not complying, for example – they need to mention that there is an option to make payments with credit cards, when handling collections calls. Furthermore, when supervisors review a new report and identify a quality area that requires coaching or training, he or she can easily check out prior evaluation reports to get the fuller picture and best understand what course to take with this particular agent.

“NICE has also opened the door to the business administrators by helping them to define accurately which points they consider significant for evaluation and to communicate this easily to the quality team. NICE provides us with the opportunity to be more professional every time.”

How has NICE helped with quality of service?

“We monitor calls in which customer concerns are voiced and where insurance claims are solved (or not…), so that we can best understand what the customer’s true level of satisfaction is, and improve where needed.

“For example, we realized that if the agents who were handling a particular campaign (the “Welcome Campaign”) were to provide more information to customers who requested a cancellation instead of referring them to agents who handle cancellations, we could significantly decrease customer defection.

“Another example comes from a typical call that we get. When a customer calls in to report a car accident, they request one of our staff (adjuster) to come to the site and provide an estimate of the damages and determine which party was responsible for the accident. Often the agent may not be familiar with the locale of the accident – Mexico is a big country. If it happens that our staff arrive at the wrong location, our customers can become justifiably frustrated with the service we are providing.  We can analyze these calls, evaluate what really happened in the field and provide the requisite feedback to the agent for service improvement.”

How has NICE helped with customer satisfaction and loyalty?

“When an agent hears a customer expressing dissatisfaction, the impact is much greater than just reading it as a comment on an evaluation report. This approach provides motivation for agents to actually call the customer back, apologize, and provide a real solution for whatever the issue may be. This is part of our procedure, and one of the reasons why we receive almost no negative feedback from customers regarding our agents.