Redesigning the life insurance experience

Making life better

One of America’s largest direct brokerages, eFinancial, helps customers get the right life insurance easier, faster and more affordably. Service is delivered from three contact centers in Bellevue, Washington; Chicago; and a new site in Tempe, Arizona. Together, they handle around 50,000 contacts a week via inbound, outbound, email and text.

What really sets the company apart is the way it brings the best of technology and personal touches to the life insurance experience.

A lifelong Genesys on-premises customer, eFinancial decided to go to the cloud. “We needed to scale up the business and wanted a system that would move around with us, giving people the option to work securely from home,” said Paul Bourdeaux, Chief Information Officer of at Vericity (Fidelity Life Association and eFinancial). “We also wanted to make resources stretch through greater automation and a model where hardware and software updates were managed for us.”

Thoroughly benchmarked and tested

As an existing Genesys customer, it would have been easy to take the soft option and sign up for the Genesys Cloud platform. But, eFinancial conducted its own due diligence and explored all options.

“We did a six-month deep evaluation of several providers, arriving at a shortlist of three, which we piloted,” said Bourdeaux. “Genesys Cloud performed best for user experience, software updates, dial performance, omnichannel roadmap and routing capabilities.”

A three-month plan achieved in 21 days

Bourdeaux and his team did the first implementation in about a month using out-of-the-box tools and scripting. Then COVID-19 hit, throwing a three-month migration plan suddenly into a tailspin.

“Genesys Professional Services were part of our SWAT team and present in our standups and scrums,” said Bourdeaux. “On March 22, we still had two call centers running on-prem. By the end of the next day, we were 100% on Genesys Cloud, with 400 staff relieved to be working from home. April turned out to be one of our best-performing months on record.”

During April and May, the number of dials and contacts rose by 25%, fueled by increased customer demand and agent availability. About to go live, Genesys Workforce Engagement Management will take the heavy lifting out of resource scheduling, increasing accuracy for less effort. “Getting an analytical platform that helps schedule and properly staff as demand peaks and falls was another big factor in our decision to go with Genesys,” added Bourdeaux.

Data-driven insights and integrations

Built on Amazon Web Services microservices, the Genesys Cloud platform has open APIs for easy connection with back-office systems. Agents get bespoke screen pops for different insurance partners. The company’s CRM system is fully integrated as well, so there’s no need to continuously toggle from screen to screen or re-key information. Compliance data, such as consent recordings and do-not-contact lists, are also centrally housed within the platform.

Making full use of Genesys AppFoundry partners, the company introduced PureInsights. It’s using PureInsights Configurable Dashboard to simplify real-time reporting and PureInsights Hosted DB to accelerate time to value with historic data from Genesys Cloud for intake into the artificial intelligence (AI) process. “PureInsights gave us access to all the data that would be normally hidden behind the API cloud and allows us to replicate it across our analytics, so we can follow customer conversations and things like time to first call and number of dials per contact,” added Bourdeaux.

Crucially, eFinancial can better leverage data, AI-built algorithms and machine learning to guide routing and customer journeys — with everything tightly tracked through up-to-the-minute metrics like time to first call and dials per contact.

Customers completing web forms are contacted within 10 minutes. “It’s closer to two to three minutes,” said Bourdeaux. “In fact, we had to throttle back because Genesys Cloud was getting agents on calls too quickly and not allowing time for us to run our AI process.”

Pushing new boundaries

Now the outbound team quickly spins up campaigns without having to involve IT. Plus, the IT team no longer needs to maintain hardware and software. “We’d carry four major updates a year, running a full suite of regression tests, each taking about two weeks,” said Bourdeaux. “Now, that’s time in the bank for value creation.”

New initiatives include A/B testing of dialing strategies for high-intent leads. Effectively using machine learning lets eFinancial rank prospects by the strength of buying signals and then move top scorers from a predictive to preview dialing campaign. To further improve customer experience, eFinancial wants to embed SMS at the start of the journey. The idea is to send a text that states, “This is {name} from eFinancial, an agent is going to be calling you shortly,” and then start a conversation ahead of the call.

“I am excited for the future,” Bourdeaux said. “There was always the thought about working remote but until we were able to implement it, and prove it on a large scale, we didn’t know what that would look like. We didn’t know if it we’d be able to perform as well as we did working in the call center. We didn’t know what training would look like. And for good or for bad, due to COVID, we were forced to find that out very quickly and it was largely successful. We have learned that we can, in fact, be productive and successful in a 100% remote environment. And that extends to our agents, our transfer reps, our case managers, our IT support. And without a contact center, that really served as the backbone behind our sales platform, we wouldn’t have been able to.”