An effective call centre is critical to MBF Health Insurance because the private health care industry churns 50 percent of its customer base every three years, according to the insurer's project team leader Ilona Rabey.
To try and stem the high rate of customer loss, MBF made the decision to beef up its call centre operations by replacing a manual system that was sales-based and did not include preview dialling (which automates outbound dialling and call lists).
It had also evolved on a patchwork of technology and could not identify trends for customer campaigns.
As a result, MBF implemented Genesys Outbound Voice to work with existing Web-based applications and custom scripts operating on agents' front-end systems.
Speaking at the Genesys user conference, G-Force, in Melbourne on Wednesday, Rabey said the project was implemented and configured over six months.
She said the Genesys system works together with existing infrastructure and assists with agent call campaigns and data collation.
"Although we do not yet have predictive dialling (which establishes best contact times for individual client calls) we are using a blend of progressive and predictive dialling [where] we use a 'common sense' approach by assessing a client's career and location to determine when to call - obviously not when they are having dinner or sleeping," Rabey said.
"We handpicked an in-house team of about 50 people for outbound, customer satisfaction-only calls, and most of these were very keen to join."
She said a dialler administrator identifies calling patterns, customer trends and their changing needs to create campaigns and new targets for agents.
The company is closing a telecommunications RFP to upgrade the legacy network as the project is ongoing and yet to achieve planned productivity results.
MBF general manager customer services, Michelle Cox said while the project targeted customer satisfaction, it still strived for ROI.
"[The focus] wasn't just the ROI, it was the amount of customers retained that we would have otherwise lost," Cox said.
"We also targeted staff satisfaction as there is a direct correlation between staff and customer satisfaction."
Support vendor Touchbase established business requirements with plenty of site visits.
MBF is happy with progress made so far. "We have some seriously old legacy systems [and] we've been band-aiding for quite a while," Cox said.