Company: MetLife Investors Group | Financial services

Profile

MetLife Investors Group is an affiliate of MetLife, America's largest life insurer. MetLife serves 1 out of every 11 American households and 86 of the Fortune 100 companies. The company offers a full line of financial products, state-of-the-art technology capabilities, and high-touch service, with a primary goal of making business easier for the intermediary. The company is comprised of two insurance groups, as well as an investment management entity. MetLife Investors' products include a range of variable annuities, distributed through registered investment advisors, financial planners, regional broker-dealers, wirehouses, and banks.

Challenge

MetLife Investors' CSRs must be equipped with the necessary tools to ensure they are servicing their customers in the right manner. This means making it possible for customers to contact company investment agents via any communication medium they choose—phone, fax, e-mail, or Web—and enabling agents to effectively and efficiently service customers while properly managing all interactions. Additionally, MetLife Investors recognized that efficiently handling customer interactions was not enough. CSRs must derive value from every customer interaction, making each and every interaction matter.

Solution

In addition to seeking a contact center solution that supported multichannel forms of communication, MetLife Investors needed a comprehensive solution to support its two customer service centers, encompassing its sales and administrative departments, located in Newport Beach, California and Des Moines, Iowa. The two centers supported 250 CSRs, more than 150,000 financial brokers, and millions of consumers who contact the company to obtain account information. MetLife Investors was seeking a fully integrated call center solution to meet the following requirements:

§  Skills-based routing and intelligent routing with alerts based on business parameters

§  Informing agents about the interactions waiting to be handled

§  Identifying callers

§  Enabling investment agents to form strong relationships with customers

§  Continuously improving service

§  Keeping costs down when implementing a new solution

The Apropos' Interaction Management Solution was chosen to help manage all customer interactions, and Channel Parity was selected to design and implement solutions for multi-channel centers. Together with Apropos, these two vendor solutions enabled MetLife Investors to facilitate a single consistent view of customers across all communication channels.

Benefits

The benefits to the company were several, including the following:

§  Helped drive millions of dollars in revenue by supporting customer interactions

§  Enabled the core business to function efficiently and effectively

§  Provided an efficient and consistent level of customer service—regardless of how they chose to communicate with the company

§  Increased CSR productivity by providing intelligent call routing to the appropriate agent group or individual, based on CSR skillsets, customer history, and so on

§  Improved visibility of customer information allowing agents to sustain high call volumes while providing high-quality service.