The Global Association for Contact Center Best Practices & Networking

Creating a Culture of Continuous Improvement

"Using the Confirmit platform to make agent feedback accessible across the business has enabled us to create a culture of continuous service improvement" – Debra Lechner, Assistant Vice President of Customer Insight, Farmers Insurance Group

Part of the Zurich Financial Services Group, the companies that comprise the Farmers Insurance Group rank as the third-largest Personal Lines property and casualty group in the United States. Farmers is also an insurer of small- and medium-sized businesses and operates a large Life insurance company. Farmers sells through 17,000 agents in 41 states who provide the "face" of Farmers for sales and service to 15 million customers.

For several decades, Farmers operated 9 service centers to handle agent enquiries, covering billing enquiries, product questions, and underwriting issues. Over time, however, the systems in place failed to keep pace with market demands. Debra Lechner, Assistant VP of Customer Insight explains, "We were working in a world of days, rather than hours, to complete service transactions. We needed new facilities and infrastructure to enable us to be more responsive to our agents so they, in turn, could be more responsive to their own customers."

In 2005, Farmers began replacing the 9 service centers with 3 large, high tech, high capacity, call centers equipped with the latest CRM systems, telephony, and workforce management. These enhanced facilities were able to improve the speed of service provided to Farmers’ agents, but Farmers wanted to do more. Their goal was to provide exceptional customer service, and to do that, they needed to talk to the agents about their experiences. To achieve this, Farmers implemented a feedback program, giving agents the opportunity to comment on their most recent interaction with the center.

Farmers implemented the Enterprise Feedback Management platform Confirmit to create this feedback program. Using Confirmit, Farmers deploys around 600 surveys every day; a representative sample of the calls into the call centers. Lechner adds, "We investigated a number of options for the feedback program, and Confirmit met all our needs. It allows us to build the surveys the way we want them to look, limited only by our imagination and skills to create. It also allows us to share the results of the surveys easily around the business, which was a key requirement."

Agents receive an e-mail invitation to complete a survey following an enquiry to one of the call centers. The survey has a response rate of around 17.5%, meaning that over 100 responses are received every day, each of them relating to a specific call into the call center. Confirmit enables Farmers to build an ongoing picture of how processes, teams, and individuals are performing over time. The survey tells managers why the agent called, whether their issue was resolved, and how the call center agent performed. This gives Farmers a more detailed picture than is allowed by standard call center metrics, such as first call resolution. It also provides the pointers that Farmers needs to create demonstrable improvements in service.

Tactical and Strategic Advantage

Farmers uses the daily agent survey program to identify the key drivers of agent satisfaction, giving the Customer Insight team the data they need to modify processes to improve customer service.

Confirmit’s alerting capabilities help Farmers to quickly resolve immediate issues raised by agents. When an agent responds to a survey with a satisfaction score of "1" (the lowest possible satisfaction score), Confirmit sends an e-mail alert to a supervisor with details of what the call was about and the call center agent who handled the call. The supervisor then opens a report to handle the situation and resolve the problem.

Lechner explains, "The closed loop alerting helps us understand when agents weren’t happy, and why. At a tactical level, it means we can resolve that particular issue, but at a more strategic level, it helps us prevent it being repeated in the future. When the supervisor receives an alert, he or she completes a report to explain what action was taken. Often that action will involve re-contacting the agent to discuss their issue further. Agents are always so impressed when they realize that we not only read their responses, but act on them."

Agents see the benefits of this system through a much reduced response time to their queries. This helps the agents to offer a better service to their customers, ensuring not only higher agent satisfaction, but a higher satisfaction level amongst the customer base as well.

The Power of Insight Across the Business

Closed-loop alerting addresses individual issues as they arise, but Farmers also use the feedback at a more fundamental, strategic level. They use the feedback they gather across the business through Confirmit’s reporting platform, Confirmit Reportal. This dashboard reporting tool is part of the Confirmit platform and brings the insight from the surveys into every level of the business.

Lechner states, "The ability to access Confirmit Reportal makes it easy for everyone to get involved in monitoring feedback. All employees can log into a feedback dashboard where they look at top-line and team scores. The managers with responsibility for processes at the centers can use deep dives of the data to guide their decision making. Executives and front line employees alike look at the data and discuss how we can use it to improve our services further. It helps ensure a common goal so that we are all working together."

The Customer Insights team rolls verbatim, or free text, responses together each month, quantifies them, and puts them into groups. They then feed summaries of these responses back to the business so the hot-button issues can be addressed fully. This ensures that all feedback the agents provide is taken into account and utilized.

Great Motivation

The impact of the program has had further reaching implications than improving service to Farmers’ agents. The call center staff is also seeing the benefits of the system. It allows them to improve their skills, by ensuring they receive all the training they need, and is used to provide positive feedback when they have performed particularly well. "We have "high-five alerts" explains Lechner. "These are used to provide rewards to call center staff members who have received scores of all "5’s" from agents for a particular call. That’s a really motivating factor for individuals. From a team perspective, everyone has access to Confirmit Reportal so they can compare their team’s results to other teams. They now compete in real time to try to get the best scores, which is incredibly powerful."

Farmers has managed to streamline and improve their training program as a result of the feedback Confirmit provides. When a call center agent receives lower satisfaction scores from agents, the supervisor and coaches are able to identify training requirements in a far more efficient way than they were able to in the past. Lechner summarizes, "Previously we would have sent some people for training that they didn’t really need, while leaving some training gaps in other areas. With the feedback we receive now, we are able to work very closely with our Training department to accurately pinpoint training needs. We’re really sharp on what topics and units need addressing."

The Future

The feedback program which Farmers has implemented has delivered a range of benefits already, but there are plans to expand further. Farmers’ Customer Insight Services Group is working with the sales team to harness the power of the Confirmit platform to help their agents gather feedback from their respective customers, as well as direct surveys from Farmers to the final customers. Lechner sums up, "We’ve used Confirmit to provide so many real-time tools to management, so real-time decisions can be made. Our next step is to drive similar benefits for our own agents so we all have a view on how our ultimate customers feel about every aspect of the Farmers service."

About Confirmit:
Confirmit is a global provider of software for customer and employee feedback, as well as Market Research (MR). The company has more than 200 employees. Global 5000 companies and Market Research agencies use Confirmit’s wide range of software products for feedback/data collection, panel management, data processing, analysis, and reporting.

About Farmers Insurance:
Farmers Insurance Group of Companies is one of the country's insurers of both private Personal Lines passenger automobile and homeowners insurance, and also provides a wide range of other insurance and financial services products. Farmers operates primarily in 41 states across the country through the efforts of approximately 20,000 employees. Farmers exclusive and independent agents, along with Farmers employees, are responsible for servicing more than 15 million customers.