Covernotes interview with Chris Berry
30 January 2010
Karen Malin interviews Chris Berry of Liquid Voice - One of the Sponsors of This Year's Charity Ball Held in June - on Behalf of Covernotes
What sparked your interest in the Insurance Industry?
My interest in the insurance industry is two-fold really - firstly, 70% of our end users are in this space so it's something I naturally like to keep an eye on. Secondly, one of my closest friends is a director at one of the larger local brokers in the area and he tends to keep me posted on goings on. When I discovered that the FSA had introduced compulsory call recording for stock-broking firms, under Policy Statement 08/1, it was obviously of great interest as a provider of call recording systems to this market-place. This led me to research further into FSA regulations. I found an host of information on this thing called 'TCF' and realised that our unique Quality Assurance software was ideal for providing evidence for brokers of meeting TCF outcomes and indeed assists with the entire process!
How much do you know about TCF now?
More than most, surprisingly; you'd be amazed at just how few people fully understand the implications of TCF on their businesses. I have had some professional training, as you know, and I have recently embarked upon an IFS course which will give me a recognised qualification in regulated customer care. This is giving me huge insight into the concept of TCF and will help me to formulate bespoke and effective solutions for brokers.
So what is your Quality Assurance software and how does it help?
Our software allows the user to build their own question sets which are effective marking schemes for telephone calls. The assessor listens to the call and checks off the listed questions. For sales calls, for example, a question might be 'Did the operator disclose the firm's FSA status?' The system can then be configured to send management reports out on a scheduled basis to nominated individuals within the business - exactly the type of internal process the FSA would look for in one of their Arrow visits.
Many brokers don't make specific sales calls, what about general conversations?
It's not just sales calls that are of relevance, it is the entire customer experience which is looked at. One of The advantages of call recording is that all conversations can be recalled which will help in any resolution of dispute with insurers, or indeed customers, and acts as an excellent audit trail. This could save time and money in dealing with complaints or claims and questions surrounding what has actually been agreed - a common issue with many businesses we visit.
Can you identify different types of call so that it is easy to pick out what needs monitoring?
Absolutely, you can use NGNs (non-geographic numbers) so that incoming calls can easily be identified or more sophisticated versions of the software allow users to tag calls with predetermined information through the telephone keypad or via buttons on the screen. You could use a different number for quotations generated from a specific advertisement which would measure the effectiveness of that campaign and also help you to prove that promotional materials were correctly targeted. Claims, complaints and new business could all have different numbers or you can distinguish by means of direct dials and extensions. Similarly outbound sales calls can be identified by using a specific line. This would make it faster to select calls for observed sales monitoring.
If you can't remember the time of a call, can you still retrieve it?
Not a problem. There is a huge array of search criteria which can be used to identify a call within the system. Aside from date and time, you can search by user, extension, team, the customer's phone number, call direction and much more. In some cases we allow customer's internal systems to populate ours with a unique ID such as quote or claim number so that this can be used for cross-referencing and quick searches - the options are endless really but in most cases calls are found within seconds.
Are your systems used by smaller single site firms or just large call centres?
Both, our systems are financially within reach of provincial broking firms who form a large part of our customer base and can also be complex enough to deal with multi-site and diverse operations like Towergate Partnership who we are official call recording supplier to.
* Source: Covernotes (Leeds - Chartered Insurance Institute)
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