A Verint Virtual On-Demand Session

Manulife is a financial institution who provides financial advice, insurance and investment solutions for individuals, groups and institutions. At Verint Virtual, Lisa Buck, Speech Analytics Analyst, CX Insights, Strategy & Design, hosted a session called “Self-Serve,
Simplify or Sell: Optimising in Times of Uncertainty.”

She covered how speech analytics and self-service tools helped Manulife identify drivers of demand and become a digital leader. In this blog, we will cover:

• Speech Analytics and Drivers of Demand
• Identifying Call Types, Customer Experiences, and Treatment
• Simplified and Improved Processes and Uncovered Opportunities

Speech Analytics and Drivers of Demand

Manulife focused on using speech analytics to become a digital customer leader, accelerate growth and improve efficiency.

In an effort support its mission, Manulife had to figure out why people were calling in and quantify it. Because there can be multiple call drivers per call which may not be logged—and agents can log information differently—speech analytics helped this initiative.

Taking it one step further, Manulife wanted to know the treatment customers received when they called in and how to make the experience better.

Each of its business units have different customer goals. For example, the banks have the customer goal of managing money. For everyday dealings, people call in to the contact centres and speech analytics can help Manulife pull apart why people call in by breaking it down by customer episode—aligned to the global customer journey.

When customers start to get to know a company like a bank, they begin to learn more about it, from products and services they offer to deeper questions such as how do I manage my everyday account? Change address? Make transactions such as deposits and withdrawals? In this case, customer experiences are where call categories are built out.

Once Manulife built separate customer experiences, they could determine how customers were being treated. The whole crucial takeaway is about the customer treatment and how that flows into drivers of demand.

Identifying Call Types, Customer Experiences, and Treatment

For customer treatment, Manulife needed to identify what the intent of the original call was. For example, it’s great to know a customer called about an address change, but why were they changing their address? The agent will receive the call and change the address, which is an instruction-type treatment. An instruction or order is given to the CSR, and it’s a low-value call for Manulife.

Conversation call types involve more of a back and forth dialogue between CSR and customer. It’s the value-add type call Manulife wants as an organisation. The explain type call is when something needs to be resolved or the CSR needs to take an action and call back. Manulife samples the calls to learn how the customer was treated and how they came in.

Once they have the buckets of customer experiences and treatment, you have the drivers of demand.

Once you understand why customers are calling, you can take conversations as an opportunity to upsell or cross sell. For example, if someone calls into the group benefits call centre—and their claim was denied there—can the customer be moved to individual benefits for help instead of losing their business?

These insights also allow Manulife to understand which types of inquiries could be moved to self-service options, such as chatbots. Once the company understood how to match customer treatment to the driver of demand, Manulife could simplify processes to begin with and reduce escalations or issues.

The Results: Simplified and Improved Processes and Uncovered Opportunities

Once Manulife understood the call types, customer experiences, and customer treatments, the company was empowered to simplify processes and identify opportunities to lower costs and upsell or cross sell. 

Based on the customer experiences and customer treatments, Manulife could identify which percentage of calls it could simplify via self-service options and which calls could be offered an upsell/cross-sell option.

These insights are tremendously useful across the organization, from business unit operations leaders, training and marketing departments, to ultimately the CEO. Speech analytics data provided each part of the company with a takeaway.

For example, marketing gained visibility into how to simplify communications and include the right information, and IT could assess automation or chatbot projects.

Other processes were simplified: by increasing conversation-type calls and decreasing instruction-type calls by deflecting them to the website or self-service channels, Manulife could spend more time with the customers who required an agent.

So what did identifying the drivers of demand do for Manulife?

Now the company can really understand true customer insights. By quantifying the drivers of demand, Manulife could clearly define customer treatment and prioritise customer improvement programs.

Another major win was demonstrating the value of speech analytics. Not only did speech analytics uncover opportunities for upselling, but it also helped the company with COVID-19 trends, analysis and insights.

Click here to listen to the full Verint Virtual On-Demand session, “Self-Serve, Simplify or Sell: Optimising in Times of Uncertainty.”