The following press release is fascinating from this major UK insurer - how do you think you can make it work effectively?

More Th>n, the direct financial services arm of UK insurer Royal & SunAlliance, is introducing a personalised call centre service where each customer will be assigned their own service manager.More Th>n says it is the first insurer to offer customers their own personal customer manager (PCM) free of charge, so they have a specific contact at the company.

Customers can contact their PCM by e-mail or by phone. If a customer emails their manager, More TH>N promises they will have a response within 24 hours.
The launch follows a pilot of the service with 60,000 customers, who were able to contact their PCM at any time of the day, by phone, voicemail and e-mail.

More Th>n says all voicemails and e-mails were responded to within 24 hours. For each pilot customer, the PCM was completely responsible for managing the relationship between other departments at the company and ensured follow-up calls to the customer were made.

I personally know other call centres that do it, although not in the financial service sector, and this can work very well as long as customer expectations are set and met. However I know of one example where a PCM (not at More Th>) had taken ten days annual leave and returned to find 250 voicemail messages and some unhappy customer as the business forgot to check her voicemail whilst she was out of the office.

I’m assuming (back to More Th>) that when a PCM is on holiday/off sick etc that another PCM will pick up their customers call and emails etc? Therefore should it not be a case of the company ensuring that all their customer service advisors are able to deliver a high standard of customer service on each and every call?

Within their press release I am interested in the statement ‘and ensured follow-up calls to the customer were made’? Should this not already be happening without having to allocate one person to co-ordinate this? It can also imply that currently follow up calls do not take place within the company?

I guess that time will tell how successful this is when rolled out to their entire customer base.

But how do you balance the workload and ensure that all of your agents get a fair share? Over a period of time wouldn't the "first class" customer service reps get a bigger and bigger workload?

But how do you balance the workload and ensure that all of your agents get a fair share?

I guess Ann-Marie that this will be down to the call centre management team to ensuer that the work loads is shared out across all advisors and to also ensure that service levels are maintained when the PCM's are either on annual leave or off sick.

Over a period of time wouldn't the "first class" customer service reps get a bigger and bigger workload?

They would indeed and I guess this would be when the company would recruit more staff either that or service levels will start to fall.

I would also like to know if the new PCM's have been given any additioanl training to provide them with the skills and knowledge to carry out this role?

A very interesting discussion point.

My opinion is that one of the benefits of call centres is that customers can be offered a service at any time of the day or night. If my calls are only handled by one individual then this ceases to be the case, and I have to wait until they're back in work before I can get an answer. In a lot of circumstances this is a step backward.

On the other hand I can certainly see the benefits. Customers feel a little more loved, a rapport is built up between agent and customer resulting in a stronger brand, and agents have a bit more ownership ensuring that they feel they're doing a good job. Could be a winner all round for both staff and customers attrition.

So perhaps the answer is to run some kind of buddy system where 4 agents are responsible for a customer at different tiers. Ordinarily I would be routed to agent A, but if they're unavailable I always go to agent B, etc...

One of my clients recently considered some intelligent routing to pass repeat calls through to the original agent by default (achieved either by CLI or by customers ID which was passed from IVR). This was eventually rejected because the reason for many repeat calls was the original agent didn't deal with the customer correctly in the first place.

Two things spring to mind.

1) Most call centres want their staff to be utilized as highly as possible. Therefore each agent will have a large number of customers (and load balancing will become a problem as AMS suggested).

2) In my experience, callbacks from voicemail take 50-100% longer than the original call would have taken in the first place.

Because the agent would still be on the phone most of the time, they will be dealing with nearly 100% callbacks. This isn't very good for customers and is likely to wreck the handling time / calls handled in a day.

Surely this will put the cost of handling each customer so high that it's unacceptable.

Definitely needs more thought.

As ther are only providing contact with your PCM they could get quite clever with how they manage the workload.

For example I guess that when your PCM is not there you will be encouraged to email. So I leave an email message with my query and low and behold I get a response the next morning addressed from my PCM.

Who is to say it was my PCM that did the query?

We are doing something similar here where we are allowing users to respond from another teams email address if they can answer a query. For example a query that has been sent to the wrong queue, so it doesnt have to be rerouted. This enables any further contact from the customer to go to the queue.

I am reliably informed that More Than don't yet have this up and running but that at the moment they are collecting the details of customers who may be interested in having a PCM...so I guess its "watch this space"

It will also be intersting to see if any other contact centre follows their lead

I am sure this is technically possible. As far as your agents have the remote login facility and they are given a fixed number of accounts, I dont see any problem. Even if the agent has taken a week's off, they can still access their mail, voicemailand the customer database through their laptops by a secured login. The load balancing is done on the basis of the account value and the case history. When the accounts are being assigned, it is ensured that the priorities are being set in terms of Grade A, B, C, etc. hence that defines the workflow. When it comes to Grade A accounts, the issue has to be handled by the account manager himself. But say in case of a grade c account it can be assigned some one else, for a short period. I have seen this happening in one of the financial organisation.

Regards,

Pankaj