The other day I had to avail myself of a corporate call centre. Said call centre has recently embarked on multiple rounds of automation which resulted in me being utterly unable to talk to a real human being and also necessitated a roundabout of security verification to ensure that the business in question, who had no intention of actually answering my enquiry, could confirm my identity.
I was thinking about call centres the other day as I watched a family member show Herculean patience when dealing with another call centre situation.
For context, said family member had their car stolen about a month ago. Being a fairly relaxed sort of an individual, this trevail was taken in stride and plans were made to acquire a replacement voiture. Nek minnit, as that famous Kiwi video from a few years ago popularised, they received a phone call from the New Zealand police advising that the car had, in fact, been found. It was found sans all the stuff that had been inside it when it was stolen and, more impactfully, sans a working ignition. The nefarious individual who stole the car uses the somewhat unsophisticated technique of starting the car by jamming a very large screwdriver into the ignition and forcibly turning it. The net result was that the vehicle was intact, but it would need a new ignition.
One would have thought that this was a pretty run-of-the-mill situation for the insurance company. One would have expected that the insurer would just had the vehicle taken to their nominated repairer and, tout suite, had the ignition replaced and my family member would again be vehicularly mobile within a few days.
Alas, that is not the case and almost a month after the vehicle was stolen, the hero of this story was still awaiting any sort of notification from the insurer about the what and when with regards to the vehicle. Would the vehicle simply be written off? (It seems counterintuitive that a simple ignition replacement would make it uneconomic to fix but who knows). How long would it take to fix, if indeed a fix was on the cards? When might our protagonist actually be informed of the plan?
I’m on the board of an insurance company. True, health rather than fire and general insurance, but nonetheless I understand call volumes and the reality of assessment and claim processing and the like. However, the insurance organisation that I’m involved with prides itself on being as responsive as possible and has internal metrics that determine the success or otherwise of delivering upon this response. As a board, we’ve always kept our eye on this operational detail – some might suggest this is too down in the weeds but service performance is a fundamental part of delivering our promise to policyholders.
I’d also suggest that right now there is a laser focus on insurance and banking organisations as we enter the era of CoFI. For those who haven’t had the pleasure of delving into CoFI, it is also known as the Conduct of Financial Institutions regime (Yes, CoFI is far easier), it introduces a new regulatory regime to ensure registered banks, licensed insurers and licensed non-bank deposit takers comply with the fair conduct principle when providing relevant services to consumers.
Of course, it is the time of the year (Christmas is a guarantee that at least 75% of the business world in New Zealand shuts down for a month or so) that service levels stretch out a little bit. Notwithstanding the yuletide slowdown, I think there is something more fundamental going on here. Companies that are trying as hard as possible to drive down their cost base. Organisations that see automation (cue extensive use of Interactive Voice Response or IVR) as a way of reducing headcount rapidly. Entities that would rather invest in a veneer of customer service driven by AI’fuelled social media bots rather than, you know, actual human beings.
There is a positive epilogue to this story in that the protagonist in this story eventually heard back from the insurer and had a resolution to their sage. In this case, it meant that, somewhat bizarrely, the insurance company decided to write off the car deeming that simply replacing the ignition was worth more than the entire vehicle itself. That is in itself a bizarre situation but one for another day, methinks.
But the core point remains – automation is great and certainly drives efficiencies. but if you’re an organisation that has customer service as part of its fundamental value proposition – best you don’t undermine that with poor use of said automation.
