Short-term insurance company Santam has successfully launched its national call centre service with a second call centre complex in Cape Town.
The country`s best personal insurer in 1998 according to SAIBA (South African Independent Brokers Association), Santam wanted to expand its existing call centre to incorporate a new range of personal insurance products.
"Our first call centre was launched in Johannesburg in 1989 to service our Teleplex brand of policies," says systems manager Yvonne Loubser. "Since then, we`ve diversified and extended our product range from the low-risk, conservative Teleplex policies to the more robust Multiplex brand, which in turn demanded a more robust call centre architecture than we had in place."
Santam issued a request for proposal (RFP) to determine which vendor would best meet its requirements.
"Although we didn`t want a full-house solution from day one, we needed the call centre to grow with our business," says Loubser. "Equally important were interactive voice response (IVR) and automatic call distribution facilities, voice logging and a firm commitment by our chosen vendor to be our business partner throughout the process and beyond."
Having won the business, InfoTel company ATIO had to synchronise its AtioCall software with Santam`s existing Harris call centre switches, something that hadn`t been done before.
"Working with and resolving the compatibility issues between the two systems was critical to making the project work as we intended," says Loubser. "Any teething problems we encountered in the design and implementation stages were swiftly dealt with by our combined call centre teams."
Making the call
Three incoming ISDN feeds give the combined call centres 90 voice channels that service up to 3 000 incoming calls a day. This figure is expected to double in the next year.
The project promises to boost productivity by allowing Santam`s agents to answer and process many more calls in a day than were previously possible. Santam is considering maximising this benefit with a "virtual" call centre, combining the two regional centres in Johannesburg and Cape Town into a unified repository of consistent customer service. The call centres would operate independently but appear as one entity to the caller.
"We had to synchronise our service levels from both centres so our clients would be oblivious to the location of their call," says Loubser. "Both toll-free numbers are directed to either call centre by Telkom on a 50-50 basis, so neither centre is overloaded at any given time."
Cutomers calling in to either of Santam`s two toll-free services are automatically transferred to the first available agent, irrespective of their physical location. The interactive voice system has been designed to ease the customer through the process, from selecting language of choice to determining specific product needs before they are put through to the relevant human operator.
"We`ve almost eliminated paper out of the equation," adds Loubser. "Because of the sophisticated voice logging facility built in to the IVR solution, customers can apply for and be accepted into a policy contract without filling in any forms or signing on any dotted lines."
Loubser concludes that the emphasis of the project was to continue Santam`s personal service philosophy, preserved in each of its products, and use the best technology possible to translate that service to existing and potential clients. "We wanted a simple, straightforward solution that made it easy for our clients to interact with our staff as efficiently and conveniently as possible," she says. "The fact that ATIO went beyond the brief, combining call centre technology with Santam`s business focus, made the difference."
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