Phoenix Life Insurance Simplifies Customer Service Experience

Phoenix Life Insurance is a manufacturer of life, annuity and alternative products distributed through a variety of non-affiliated partner relationships. The Hartford, Connecticut-based carrier recognizes that the customer experience is directly tied to business success.

Over the years, Phoenix had accumulated multiple policy administration systems from several vendors, requiring call-center representatives and back-office users to keep multiple host system sessions open on their desktops. Having the multiple platforms added a level of complexity to each customer interaction.

“To reach economies of scale and decrease unit costs, the company needed a technology platform that would simplify its customer service transactions.” said Deborah Zawisza, senior vice president, Information Technology, Phoenix Life. “To that end, we needed to more effectively serve our life and annuity contract holders and the financial advisors who distribute our products.”

Unifying Call Center and Back Office

Rather than a wholesale conversion of its existing policy administration systems, Phoenix opted to consolidate the data into one Web-enabled interface that presents a single view of the customer using CSC’s Customer Service Accelerator®.

Customer Service Accelerator is the only system that combines call center, business process management and integrated back-office workflow capabilities. It enables Phoenix Life’s customer service representatives (CSRs) to immediately access all customer information and contact history – no matter where it resides.

“Customers expect issues to be resolved on the spot,” Zawisza said. “Our customer-facing CSRs can now handle work in a once-and-done manner.”

To further improve business processing, Customer Service Accelerator was linked with four of Phoenix’s policy administration systems, its in-house customer repository, CSC’s PerformancePlus® incentive and compensation management system and DST’s Automated Work Distributor.

Automating Workflow and Integrating Systems

With the system in place, Phoenix’s more than 150 call-center representatives and back-office users in Albany, N.Y., no longer need to have multiple host system sessions open on their desktops. Instead, with the Web-enabled interface, they are able to view data from all five systems on one screen, speeding access to pertinent information, delivering lower unit costs, faster call times and shortened training for new CSRs.

In order to contain costs and mitigate financial risks, Phoenix migrated to an offshore model for IT work with CSC. CSC’s client-centric approach ensured a fast transition with minimal disruption of the carrier’s day-to-day operations. Skilled CSC resources in India enabled Phoenix to reduce costs while facilitating growth.

Faster, More Efficient Service

As a result of the Customer Service Accelerator implementation, Phoenix Life employees have improved customer-facing interactions – performing tasks with greater consistency, increasing productivity, accelerating access to pertinent information and reducing the likelihood of errors.

“As the CSRs have become familiar with the system, they have determined faster methods to answer customer inquiries.” Wert said. “They have improved their efficiency in servicing customer calls by 15 percent.”

Phoenix Life also experienced a reduction in training costs. “Because Customer Service Accelerator provides a unified front end, we no longer have to train new CSRs on all the intricacies of each back-end system,” Zawisza added.

Get More Information

Learn more about Customer Service Accelerator or contact us by phone or email. Only CSC will use the information you provide.

Read the full case study (214 KB PDF).