The Unlimited Speech Analytics Success Story

The Unlimited is a direct marketer of insurance and other products, headquartered in Durban, South Africa. The company has two sales channels – face-to-face field agents and a telesales channel. In addition, it provides inbound and outbound customer care to its clients.

“First and foremost, The Unlimited is a direct marketer. The Unlimited is not a BPO. We own the relationship with the customer, so building trust in and protecting our brand is critical for us. Once a customer has become a member, our objective is to strengthen the relationship and maintain that customer for life,” says Wayne Mann, Executive of Legal, Risk & Compliance at The Unlimited.

The Unlimited has 600,000 members, including insurance policyholders. Together with its insurers, the company covers more than two million individuals in South Africa.

Challenges

Insufficient and inaccurate data

The Unlimited faced a few key challenges that were keeping the company from realising its goals. It was using manual quality assurance (QA) for just a handful of calls per month for each agent, which was limiting its ability to achieve accuracy and sufficient visibility into its customer interactions.  Although the company had outsourced the QA function, it realised that an in-house QA team was still required.

“After outsourcing QA, our challenges continued and we quickly realised that we still needed to maintain an internal QA team, just to vet the output from the outsourced provider. All we really did was shift the challenge elsewhere at a greater cost to the company,” Mann says.

The Unlimited needed to bring the whole QA function back in-house and find a solution that was scalable, without requiring an increase in QA headcount. The company required a solution that aligned with its overarching digitalisation strategy, as well as ensuring accuracy and consistency across more than 800 telesales agents and 14 locations.

“Our challenge was compounded by the fact that we’re marketing insurance products, a heavily regulated industry. Manual QA simply doesn’t allow us to keep an ear or eye on what each agent is saying to our customers 24/7,” Mann says.

Ineffective and inefficient compliance monitoring

The Unlimited needed the flexibility and agility to allow the risk function to promptly inform the product and sales teams of any compliance issues. This would enable any necessary product refinements to be made and tweaks to sales scripts to be implemented. In addition, The Unlimited wanted dependable and consistent results so that any potential risk across its various channels could be more accurately detected and mitigated. The goal being to put its customers in the best possible position to make an informed buying decision.

“We’re in the business of paying claims, and any disconnect between what a customer thinks they’ve bought versus what they’re actually covered for erodes trust in our brand. Integrity is literally everything in our business,” says Mann.

In order to gain the visibility into what its agents were saying to ensure that customers received consistent information, while abating risk, the company determined that they needed a speech analytics solution.  

Solution

After an initial review of several systems, CallMiner and its Eureka platform swiftly rose to the top of the list. “We literally came across CallMiner in a Google search. Due to the dedication of the CallMiner team, their speech analytics solution became the frontrunner. In fact, the other systems we considered were very quickly discounted, and we’ve never looked back,” says Mann.

The Unlimited followed a quarterly milestone approach to implementing CallMiner into its business. The company developed clear goals and timelines for each milestone to ensure that QA analysts received the proper training and gained a deep understanding of the system’s functionality.

“We aimed to ensure that the overall configuration was correct and efficient and was aligned with our long-term vision. We also developed 20 scripts and their respective scorecards. Once this work was completed, the system was rolled out to the entire QA team.  Now, each analyst is working independently and actioning insights daily, we’re garnering amazing insights from CallMiner,” says Mann.

Results

The Unlimited quickly achieved dramatic improvements by actioning insights from CallMiner. It has reduced its QA analysts from 30 to four, decreasing total QA costs by 40%, while increasing QA coverage by 25-100% across all channels. It also improved trend identification efficiency by 92% and overall process efficiency by 80%. Most importantly, The Unlimited has been able to ensure the highest level of agent integrity in every customer interaction.

“By integrating CallMiner output with other systems and processes, we’ve been able to effectively mitigate compliance risk and increase script adherence. We use the CallMiner trend data to inform our training content with a focus on integrity to ensure that we protect our brand and always come from a place of truth and transparency,” says Mann.   

What’s Next

CallMiner has enabled The Unlimited to put the right information in the hands of the right people at the right time. The company’s new feedback flow uses insights from CallMiner to create the necessary categories and scorecards for high-risk items and other quality indicators. The Unlimited pulls reports and feedback from CallMiner so the risk team, sales directors, and sales managers can more effectively action insights with sales agents. Moving forward the company also plans to use the system for improving sales effectiveness, including implementing CallMiner Coach to automatically provide feedback to sales managers.

“What’s exciting for us is that we’ve just begun to scratch the surface with CallMiner. We’re just starting to appreciate the capabilities of the platform for providing insights into the effectiveness of our sales efforts and understand why customers are converting and sticking with us, or not. So, our next area of focus will be to analyse non-sales calls to better understand why customers convert and how best to make them customers for life. This will be a real gamechanger for us,” Mann says.