Digitally transforming our customer experiences within the Contact Centre

Published: August 30, 2023

Background

The Allstate Technology Support Centre (ATSC) started in the Northwest in 2004 with just 15 employees. Over the last 17 years it has grown significantly with now over 300 employees based across all of NI. The ATSC pride themselves on their digital transformation for customers and employees which has been replicated across the Allstate Enterprise in recent years.

The ATSC have been recognised for these efforts on a national level, picking up numerous awards in recent years including Contact Centre of the Year, as well as recognising key contributors within the team with individual awards.

The vision is to transform technology support to prevent demand and continually improve user experience. The ATSC's collective teamwork and culture have been critical in enabling and driving results and customer satisfaction in 2022 by allowing agents, customers, and employees to seamlessly navigate key technology platforms and providing a world class service.

Delivering Success

All teams' role model best practices across the 'Continuous Improvement Management System' improving customer experience. This approach encourages collaboration, responsiveness, ownership and transformation. It allows agile ways of working enabling teams to implement new elements increasing customer and employee satisfaction. The ATSC have created a culture where Front-Line Analysts are problem solvers, creative and critical thinkers. The team also have a demand reduction strategy to remove lower complexity demands, making Analysts more available to help customers.

The ATSC business strategy ensures that remaining competitive in the US insurance market is about optimizing cost for customers by reducing inefficiencies. The team have made it simple and personal by giving customers options on how they interact with the contact centre, providing innovative solutions including chat bots, self-service, self-ticket, chat, calls and Virtual Assistant. This resulted in overall time savings of 10 minutes per day for customers.

These tools helped make the average speed to answer rate improve throughout 2022, reducing overall by 23 minutes from 2021. Call average speed of answer dropped from four minutes in January 2022 to under 30 seconds in December 2022 and chat average speed of answer from five minutes in January 2022 to under one minute in December 2022.

In 2022, the ATSC dealt with 1.6 million contacts (665,083 self-service opportunities, 671,200 chats, and 300,602 phone calls). 41% of these contacts were handled via automation and self-service tools, up from 26% prior year.

Stephen Lomas, Senior Manager of the ATSC commented — "Our leadership team has been at the forefront of our Employee and Business transformation. My goal for our Contact Centre is to become an industry trend rather than following one and the team have been huge enablers of that vision! Their commitment to teams, their operational and strategic agility and execution, the ability to do the right thing at the right time and the culture they've collectively created is something that is hard to find in other organizations. I'm proud to lead and stand shoulder to shoulder with such a diverse and talented leadership team."