Call-center employees ring the changes at Liverpool Victoria

Liverpool Victoria, the UK’s largest friendly society, is implementing a new performance-support system to help to boost customer service and to provide a base continually to monitor and improve operations.

The solution, New Wave Learning’s SupportPoint, went live last September to help 500 call-center employees to gain access to need-to-know information within three to four clicks of the mouse on their personal computers, rather than the 50 or so it used to take.

Liverpool Victoria offers products and services including savings,investments, life insurance, home and motor insurance, asset management, banking and financial advice. OCP, a company specializing in organizational change, has worked with Liverpool Victoria for ten years. Gary Wooliston, partner for OCP,explained: “Different customer-contact teams worked quite separately on diverse product ranges. We needed a robust, consistent system that gave us the confidence that it could offer continuous skill improvement and would not need technical updates every six months.”

The performance-support system delivers moment-of-need information to users’desktops, quickly and in context with their current job. This helps employees to answer any query more accurately and consistently, thus improving call-handling times. This approach to disseminating knowledge to call-center advisers and senior management also aims to build staff confidence and to reduce the high attrition rates typically associated with call-center environments.

Gary Wooliston continued: “There are pricing issues in the insurance industry, where low costs are needed to attract customers in the first place. Yet handling claims is the biggest cost. The performance-support system gives us an evolutionary approach that can link different divisions, support employees,and ensure learning is a priority.”

Colin Terry, New Wave Learning managing director, commented: “Liverpool Victoria has a number of product specialists who know the business inside-out. However, ensuring their knowledge is passed through to every contact-center employee has previously been an onerous problem. SupportPoint enables employees to learn differently. They have correct information on tap to do their jobs more effectively, at their moment of need.”