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Call Center Fills Critical Insurer Need

Recent changes in laws regarding health insurance have made insurance companies more cognizant of the changing demands on their customer contact centers, and they have used existing databases of customers’ information to inform their decisions about how to improve the service that the customer contact centers provide.

According to Insurance & Technology, the first major shift in call center trends during this era of insurance law changes is actually a backward shift in regards to technology; whereas many existing or potentially new customers who are comfortable with e-commerce might normally use the Internet to exchange information with the insurance company, the uncertainty of new rules that has accompanied the changes in recent laws has led to a heightened level of concern, and customers have wanted to talk to a live agent to get reassurance on coverage despite many of the changes. 

In order to mitigate the increased burden on customer contact centers, it is helpful to use custom APIs that bring as much customer data to the agent as quickly as possible and in as much of an organized fashion as possible to help that agent inform the customer properly and minimize the time lost looking up files or having a customer wait on hold.

The next major shift is toward giving customer contact center agents access to all of the data from multiple databases.  In the past, agents may have had access to data or notes on a customer from prior calls with other agents, but there were unaware or at least unable to access data from customers’ website interactions. 

More clever use of APIs will integrate the customer call center database with the websites’ database to create a more complete profile for each customer and this will in turn allow agents to get a better idea of how to meet the needs of the customers.

The reason that leveraging customer data is such an effective way of improving efficiency is because it does not require many expensive changes other than the structure and access to data by the customer contact centers.


Edited by Rory J. Thompson