One of the biggest challenges facing insurance companies is maintaining a high level of customer support from frontline workers in the face of high quit rates among contact center employees across industries. . A Centric Consulting study found that 83% of contact center employees quit within three years and 30% within three months.

Additionally, a McKinsey study found that customer-facing employee attrition costs companies up to $10,000 to $20,000 per employee in recruiting and training. For large insurance companies with thousands of support workers – the largest insurers have over 20,000 customer-facing employees – it adds up quickly. Even using the low estimate ($10,000) of contact center attrition costs per worker, an insurer with 20,000 customer support employees and an 83% attrition rate over three years would need to spend around $166 million. dollars simply to maintain its operations. That’s a lot of money to burn to operate essentially on-site.

What’s behind this alarming turnover rate among customer-facing employees at insurance companies? In many cases, these employees leave their jobs because the salary is relatively low. But another key reason for attrition is the nature of the job: being a front-line employee for an insurer is difficult and stressful. Indeed, the customers with whom these workers interact through a contact center are usually stressed themselves. Their homes may have been badly damaged or their vehicles destroyed, and they need answers and assistance from their insurers. Now!

Dealing with this kind of pressure (and sometimes abuse) for hours on end without the proper training or job tools is a recipe for quick burnout and high customer service turnover.

Thrown into the depths

When front-line employees start their jobs, they are usually new to the world of insurance. They don’t understand the technical aspects. They are trained on different employee practices, products, and procedures, and all the while they have to show empathy on live calls. There’s a lot to learn, and that’s why training frontline workers is so time consuming and expensive.

Boxer Mike Tyson once said, “Everyone has a plan until they’re punched in the mouth.” Likewise, when frontline workers are suddenly faced with an irate or panicked customer yelling at them on the phone, all that training can instantly fly out the window. At this point, it becomes nearly impossible for the frontline employee to meet customer expectations.

Fortunately, technologies such as artificial intelligence, machine learning, natural language processing, and sentiment analysis are available to help customer-facing workers be more efficient.

A smart and insightful assistant

With an AI-powered customer interaction platform, frontline workers speaking on the phone to an unhappy customer will receive prompts for appropriate responses based on real-time analysis of what the customer is saying (and how it has been said). Helping frontline employees optimize their responses to customers – both in terms of the information provided and the empathy conveyed – increases the chances of a positive outcome and reduces employee stress.

All information on a single window

A customer experience platform can also improve employee performance and job satisfaction by simplifying their user interfaces. Frontline support workers typically work with multiple systems, which means they may have to open multiple computer screens simultaneously for a single call. (If you think dealing with an angry customer is difficult, imagine trying to do so by switching between 20 or more screens while being reprimanded.)

Modern contact center platforms can be integrated via middleware with multiple systems to bring together all the relevant data a frontline employee needs to serve a customer on a single pane of glass. The result is more efficient, less stressful customer interactions and faster problem resolution.

More effective management and training

Supervisors of frontline employees want to help them improve their performance by customizing development paths and training modules. This typically requires managers to listen to every call to assess where these workers need to improve. AI can determine whether frontline workers speak too softly or too loudly, their level of product knowledge, whether they convey the right amount of empathy, and other variables that impact efficiency.

AI can also detect when a customer crosses a line and begins to abuse the frontline worker. This allows supervisors to be notified in real time so they can intervene and save the employee from further abuse.

The “Great Resignation” has impacted many industries where the majority of positions are customer-facing. For insurance companies, this growing aversion to frontline jobs is making it even harder for them to attract, train and retain quality customer support workers. An AI-enabled contact center that provides these employees with tools to do their jobs better and reduce their stress levels is one way to minimize the costs and disruptions of constant turnover.

Ilya Filipov is director of industrial strategy for financial services, insurance, at Chat desk. He can be contacted at [email protected].

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