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Slide 1: Pronexus Case Study: Insurance Industry During its anticipated transition to a stock company, Fidelity Mutual Life Insurance needed a solution to help it handle calls from a new group of callers - its future stockholders. Using VBVoice, the company was able to quickly implement a speech enabled IVR system to provide information to, and handle requests from, future stockholders. Fidelity Mutual Life Insurance – An Overview Founded in 1878, Fidelity Mutual has a long and respected history in the life insurance industry. The company's primary focus has been on individual life insurance with approximately 60,000 insurance policies, totaling $2.8 billion of insurance in force. At a Glance: Customer Profile Fidelity Mutual Life Insurance is one of the oldest companies in the life insurance industry. The company handles approximately 60,000 policies, totaling $2.8 billion of insurance in force. Situation As a life insurance company, Fidelity Mutual is accustomed to serving its policyholders over the phone, and has dedicated a group of service representatives for handling phone calls from these customers. As the company prepares to change its form of ownership to a stock company, Fidelity Mutual needed to support an additional group of callers - its future stockholders. Since communication with future stockholders was not anticipated to be very active, it was suggested to implement an IVR (Interactive Voice Response) system that would handle call traffic from this new group of callers. The IVR system would enable future stockholders to make requests and communicate with Fidelity 24 hours a day, and not only during regular business hours. During regular business hours, the IVR system was also meant to handle call distribution to customer service representatives in an effective and efficient manner. Representatives needed to be able to answer calls from the system, as they were available to provide telephone support. Solution After an evaluation of several alternatives, Fidelity chose VBVoice. "Although we evaluated several alternatives before choosing this tool, VBVoice was the natural choice for us", said Mark McInnes, Senior Systems Analyst of Fidelity Mutual. "The tool's ease of use and intuitive Graphical User Interface were extremely impressive, and its Visual Basic environment allowed us to leverage our in-house knowledge of the programming language." Using Pronexus VBVoice™, Fidelity Mutual developed an IVR system that provides callers the flexibility to request information and perform various operations 24 hours a day, without speaking to an attendant. During business hours, callers have the option of being directed to a customer service representative if they wish to do so. The application allows callers to select from several options, such as change address information, request consolidation of certificates, or request to speak to a service representative. The caller is asked to input their shareholder number and security code. The system uses text-to-speech (TTS) technology to read back the numbers to the caller for confirmation purposes. Situation In the process of converting to a stock company, Fidelity Mutual faced the need to handle calls from a new group of callers – the stockholders. As a result, it needed a telephony solution to help it address the needs and requests of this new group. Solution Using Pronexus VBVoice, Fidelity Mutual was able to rapidly develop an IVR application that allows callers to perform various operations and get information 24 hours a day. The application also enabled Fidelity Mutual to automate its call distribution processes and improve the connectivity between callers and agents. Benefits Fidelity Mutual was able to achieve its goal of improving customer satisfaction by offering callers increased flexibility and 24 hour service. The company has also benefited from the system's ASR capability - it allows updating of callers' address information by automatically entering the data spoken by the caller into the company's database. The IVR also employs speech recognition technology (ASR) and allows callers to update their address information without the need for human interaction. Speech recognition technology makes this process very efficient - it eliminates the need to transcribe the address information from a message left on an answering machine, to the company's database. According to Mark McInnes, "maintaining current address and contact information on future stockholders is very important to us since their status as policyholders and future stockholders will soon have a separate and distinct existence. Using ASR technology has facilitated the process of maintaining up to date information on future stockholders, and has proven to be a valuable technology for us." Continues to page 2… Pronexus Inc. | 200-750 Palladium Drive, Ottawa, ON, Canada K2C 1V7 | phone: +1.613.271.8989 | www.pronexus.com © 2009 Pronexus Inc. – VBVoice® is a registered trademark of Pronexus Inc. All other trademarks are properties of their respective owners.
Slide 2: Pronexus Case Study: Insurance Industry The application also uses Agent X, VBVoice's client/server control for data exchange. When a caller requests to speak to a customer service representative, the IVR application communicates the call status to all agents that have joined the call queue. When an available agent picks up the call, the IVR system transfers the call, along with screen pops containing information about the caller, to the agent's desk. This eliminated the manual process that agents used for logging into the system to answer calls. VBVoice and Agent X also enabled Fidelity Mutual to facilitate the process of agent availability detection. Until now, the phone switch had to be programmed to recognize the availability of a specified list of agents, which was a cumbersome process. However, with the implementation of the new system, agents can be added and removed from the list by the click of a button. Benefits Using VBVoice, Fidelity Mutual was able to achieve its goal of improving customer satisfaction by offering callers increased flexibility and more accessible service. Callers can now make requests and receive information 24 hours a day, instead of having access to the company's resources only during regular business hours. According to Victoria Schwarz, Vice President of Customer Service at Fidelity Mutual, "With the new system in place, a customer service representative has the caller's name and shareholder information in front of them before they pick up the call. Customers feel they are getting a higher level of service when the service representative can greet them personally and instantly begin to discuss their account information." Using speech recognition technology has proven beneficial to Fidelity Mutual, as it is a time- saving tool. When callers update their address information, data spoken by the caller is automatically entered into the company's database instead of being manually transcribed by a customer representative. The implementation of the IVR system also automated the process of detecting agent availability. This resulted in a more effective and efficient redirection of calls - the system keeps track of which attendants are busy and which are available, and ensures that callers are directed only to those attendants who are available. This way, when they ask to speak to a customer service representative, callers are always directed to a representative who is available to take the call. Fidelity Mutual is currently in the process of developing an additional IVR system to handle call traffic from its policyholders. The system - at the heart of which lies VBVoice - is to be deployed in the near future. Among other functions, the new IVR application will allow policyholders to request policy information or ask for benefits forms via the system. About Pronexus Since 1993, Pronexus has delivered proven voice applications and development tools that streamline business processes. Enterprises, Independent Software Vendors, Service Providers and Developers rely on Pronexus to help them integrate voice with business systems that include unified communications, customer relationship management and field service automation systems. About VBVoice VBVoice® is the only rapid application development (RAD) IVR toolkit developed specifically for telephony and speech inside Microsoft Visual Studio.NET that blends high level GUI and sophisticated programming. Service providers and in-house developers can reduce development time and bring their IVR applications to market faster with Pronexus VBVoice® 5.6. Building on fifth generation technology, VBVoice enables the creation of feature-rich speech and telephony solutions including VoIP, voice self-service, unified communications and interactive voice response IVR systems. VBVoice combines an easy-to-use visual call flow environment, with fully programmable controls. Developers can leverage familiar programming skills in industry-standard languages such as VB.NET, C# and other languages supported by Visual Studio .NET. Leveraging existing programming skills dramatically shortens the learning curve. Furthermore, developing voice applications within a .NET infrastructure future proofs the solution and enables seamless integration with enterprise systems. VBVoice supports a distributed/scalable architecture that enables users to expand the application deployment by adding more servers to the network. The architecture supports sharing of system resources among many separate applications for load balancing, independent provisioning and scalability. Pronexus Inc. | 200-750 Palladium Drive, Ottawa, ON, Canada K2C 1V7 | phone: +1.613.271.8989 | www.pronexus.com © 2009 Pronexus Inc. – VBVoice® is a registered trademark of Pronexus Inc. All other trademarks are properties of their respective owners.