Case Study: Electric Insurance Company

December 2005

Electric Insurance Company (EIC), a nationwide direct writer of property and casualty insurance for over 35 years and benefit provider for the General Electric Company, was looking for a software solution to create digital dashboards (sometimes referred to as "cockpits") with views into performance data for call center operations.  In particular, the company required a flexible product that could support an exacting set of Six Sigma calculations and process metrics across the company's three call centers. 

The company was using an industry-leading business intelligence product and data integration tool to gather, report on, and analyze customer and financial data, but these tools could not provide adequate digital dashboards, reports, and analysis to meet their specific call center requirements.  An additional objective was to introduce automated, Web-based agent performance reports to improve agent accountability and self-correction.  At the time, agents received monthly summaries of their performance on key measures from their supervisors.

Electric Insurance selected the Merced Performance Suite, which integrated data from systems ranging from ACDs to workforce scheduling to a mainframe sales system.  Personalized, role-based dashboards were created so agents could see an updated view on their performance stats, where executives could see several dashboards with summary information on all aspects of operations including productivity, cost, and quality, with the ability to drill down into detail for root cause analysis.

With this solution implemented, EIC was able to reduce the amount of time analysts and managers spent preparing reports by over 50%.  EIC reported that some analyses that previously had taken two days could be conducted in 10 minutes due to the centralized data store and analysis features.  Most significantly, EIC's call center management could analyze aspects of their operations that were previously too labor intensive to perform on a regularly recurring basis.

EIC also chose to deploy workflow features including Forms and Alerts.  With Alerts, all levels of management could receive emails when performance was not meeting target thresholds.  With Forms, the company could comply with a critical Six Sigma requirement, the tracking of processes which were previously paper-based.  Also, several processes were automated including the hiring of new agents, tracking customer follow-up phone calls by agents, and collecting "Voice of Customer" feedback from customers.  Metrics were created for each of these processes (such as late call-backs), which were then added to management dashboards. 

By actively using these new data analysis tools and work flow features, EIC has reduced productivity variation by 16% to its lowest level in 13 months, despite a continuing influx of new hires.  It has gained greater insight into its processes, notably improving its sensitivity to the concerns of its customers and has used this knowledge to reduce justified customer complaints a consistent 50% year over year since 2001.

For more information, visit www.mercedsystems.com or www.electricinsurance.com.

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