Many call centers today, under pressure to keep costs low and increase their functionality and the quality of customer service they offer, are turning to unified IP-based call center platforms to accomplish their goals. Gerber Life Insurance Company, which provides juvenile life insurance and other financial product, has reportedly done both – reduced costs and improved customer service – as a result of deploying Interactive Intelligence Group, Inc.’s unified IP business communications software solution.
Gerber Life replaced its existing telephony system and multi-vendor add-on products with the Interactive Intelligence all-in-one IP communications software suite, Customer Interaction Center (CIC).
“Prior to the Interactive Intelligence software, we had a multi-vendor solution that proved costly and labor-intense due to extensive integration and system change requirements,” said Gerber Life’s vice president of IT, Mike Borowski. “Interactive Intelligence gave us a multitude of features all running on an open, single platform. This has saved us more than $100,000 annually in maintenance contracts alone, not to mention reduced labor costs.”
According to Gerber Life, the implementation of Interactive Intelligence's CIC solution has helped it improve customer service and increase efficiencies throughout the contact center.
“CIC enables us to route customer calls to the agent licensed to provide insurance services in that caller’s home state,” Borowski said. “This, along with screen-pop capability, which gives agents vital customer information simultaneous with a call, has helped us provide faster, more effective service.”
Thanks to CIC, Gerber Life has been able to add an outbound dialing application and multichannel support to its existing processes, as well as a virtual hold feature that allows customers to hang up and still retain their place in the call queue.
“We can now automatically switch an agent between outbound calls and inbound calls, emails and Web chats,” said Borowski. “By allocating resources where they are needed based on call volume and availability, as well as having agents support multiple channels, we’ve dramatically increased efficiencies.”