350% Cost Reduction for Insurance Payment Processing

One of the challenges of being a leading, major insurance company (MIC) is that at a certain point you have so many customers that it becomes tricky to give them all the attention and service they need.

This was precisely the state that one of Plum’s clients found itself in. The company wanted its agents to provide high-touch customer service to everyone, but the sheer volume of phone calls MIC received, most of them dealing with routine issues, made it difficult to follow through.

The situation got to the point where something needed to be done, so MIC began to investigate automation. One of the most frequent types of calls that MIC received was from customers making a payment so they knew they needed a solution that was PCI-compliant if it was going to process payments. In addition to security, MIC wanted to lower its customer service operating costs. After all, the per call cost of having agents process payments is typically about $5 per call.

MIC chose Plum Voice because Plum is an IVR leader and offered a PCI-compliant platform. VoiceTrends, Plum’s analytics toolkit for IVR, also helped to sway MIC because it provides actionable data.

After MIC launched its Plum IVR solution, the company’s containment rate for payment processing over the phone jumped to 89%. Whereas the cost per call with an agent was about $5, the cost for the IVR to handle the same call cost pennies on the dollar. This translated to an annual savings of more than 350%.

Eliminating the need for agents to handle the vast majority of payment-related calls, also freed up agent phone lines, enabling agents to provide the high-touch service that MIC wanted to provide.

To learn more about MIC and how they transitioned from agents to self-service automation for payments over the phone, read the full case study.