Inbound Service Call Volume

by Mark
(Cleveland, OH)

We are an insurance wholesaler, which means that we provide middle man services to insurance agencies. These agencies can have a single agent, or more. Volume is important to us, because we operate on a thin margin with each insurance carrier. The agents don't pay us a dime for our services (which is our selling point)

The problem we faced was the number of inbound calls from agents regarding applications for quotes they had submitted. All they wanted to know was the status so they could communicate it to their customer. However, they would call 2-3 times a day.

With hundreds of active agents, this put a huge load on our customer service representatives. As a result, their quoting process came to a grinding halt; generating even more phone calls. It was a catch 22. We sold them on our service at no cost to them, and we couldn't keep up!

With the help of Mike, we were able to reduce the inbound calls by more than 85%; almost overnight. Of course, we still had inbound calls, but they were for other reasons. Once he understood the problem, the plan to correct it almost sounded too simple. But we went with it.

What he did was utilize a tool we already owned to monitor the status of our quotes. All he had to do was create some custom field codes for a few merge templates. As the quotes went through our process, not only would the status change, but the representative assigned could also change.

At this point, an email went out automatically to the agent who submitted the quote giving them information about the current status of the quote and the customer service rep that was assigned (with contact information). And to top it off, the email appeared to come from our sales associate assigned to the specific agent (they were also bcc'd so they were aware).

In only a few circumstances would we get calls implying we hadn't sent this update to them. We knew we had because it was logged in our customer database. But, instead of pointing that out, we simply apologized and hit a resend button! It was amazingly simple but filled a huge whole in our low margin business.