In sales, the rapport between a prospective buyer and seller can be the deciding factor. Using analytics, Assurant Solutions has tripled its success. (A case-study interview.)
Credit insurance and debt protection product seller Assurant Solutions ran a classic customer service
call center–operationally optimized, “skills-routed,” managerially enlightened. But when it explored analytics-based approaches to rethinking how the center worked, a strange thing happened: The success
rate for customer interactions tripled.
According to Cameron Hurst, vice president of Targeted Solutions at Assurant, the result surprised them. “We learned that operational efficiency and those traditional metrics of customer experience like abandon rate, service levels and average speed to answer are not the things that keep a customer on the books.” They found instead that technology could assist the company in retaining customers by leveraging the fact that some customer service reps are extremely successful at dealing with certain types of customers. Matching each specific in-calling customer to a specific customer service rep made a huge difference. Science and analytics couldn’t quite establish why a particular rapport would be likely to happen, but they could look at past experience and predict with a lot of accuracy that a rapport would be likely to happen.
In this SMR case-study interview, Hurst explains how Assurant Solutions figured out the right questions to ask, used analytics to focus on new ways to match customers with reps and figured out the best ways to solve the problem of conflicting goals.
3 Comments On: Matchmaking With Math: How Analytics Beats Intuition to Win Customers
This article literally begs for the follow up article: Mapping Your Call Center Hires to Optimize Outcomes. Even if the “talent/skill” that produces the desired outcomes has not been defined,plotting the service reps and clients on a multi-dimensional space should indicate quadrants where “gaps” exist and “balancing” could take place. I foresee some innovative new services in the area of human resource selection consultation based on this article. For instance, some car dealership chains have “media groups” that advertise and then arrange client appointments with sales personnel in the appropriate dealerships. Not all the sales personnel are equally effective in utilizing these appointments and, like in your article, the outcome may be related to currently undefined factors. Based on this article, the mix or composition of auto sales personnel could radically change.
@David Short – I concur. As the article indicates, these data don’t explain the ‘why’ of the results, which is a clear next step for research.
David,
This is exactly the kind of work my company does. We focus exclusively on human capital management for the call center industry. In recruiting and screening call center agents, we look to match the skills, personality types, and aptitude scores of successful agents to those in the applicant pool.
Funny thing is, many call centers still hire on “gut feel”. Our aim is to change that!