Matchmaking With Math: How Analytics Beats Intuition to Win Customers

Assurant Solutions sells credit insurance and debt protection products. Maybe you’ve bought a product like theirs. If you lose your job or have medical problems and are unable to make a credit card payment, Assurant Solutions will help you cover it.

Like a lot of insurance products, payment protection is a discretionary add-on often made at the point of purchase. But when customers get the bill and see the additional fee of, say, $10.95 per month for payment protection, maybe they think, “Well, I’ll take my chances” and decide to cancel.

When those customers call, they reach Assurant Solutions customer service representatives, because the company manages insurance activation, claims, underwriting and customer retention (for many industry-leading banks and lending institutions).

It’s in that last piece — that attempt to retain customers, beat the churn and stem a high exit rate — that Assurant Solutions faced a now-universal management challenge. As a call center positioned as the pivot point of all customer interaction for its clients, Assurant had access to hoards of data as well as the ability to create the kinds of rules and systems that any operationally optimized call center would deploy. With skills-based routing, customized desktops with screen pops, and high-end voice recording and quality assurance tools, its efforts were state-of-the-art.

But it wanted to do better. Its 16% retention rate was consistent with the best industry standards, but that still meant that 5 out of 6 customers weren’t convinced to keep their coverage, let alone consider other products. That’s a lot of room for opportunity.

So Assurant Solutions tried something new: deep analytics. And it invented an operations system that capitalized on what the analytics prescribed.

The result? The success rate of its call center nearly tripled.

What Assurant Solutions found was that all the conventional tenets about contact centers “are not necessarily wrong, but they’re obsolete,” says Cameron Hurst, vice president of Targeted Solutions at Assurant.