Insurance industry performs well in phone customer service

Online, March 25, 2010 (Newswire.com) - Mountain View, Calif. (March 25, 2010) - eGain Communications Corporation (OTC BB: EGAN.OB), the leading provider of multichannel customer service and knowledge management software for on-site and on-demand deployment, today announced that overall customer service performance of leading insurance providers in North America remained flat in 2010, when compared to 2009. Good performance in phone customer service was offset by "below average" or "poor" performance in many aspects of customer service through the web and email, and a noticeable decline in cross-agent service consistency in the past year.
Overall service performance for the sector was unchanged with a "below average" score of 1.8 out of 4.0. Cross-agent experience fell steeply from an "above average" score of 2.2 in 2009 to a "below average" score of 1.2 in 2010-the research found disparities across contact center agents in answers, query handling process, business policy, and offers. For instance, some agents would cross-sell contextual offers and others would not, passing up revenue generation opportunities. Some agents would answer questions and even provide quotes, while others would transfer the call to another department or simply direct the caller to the broker channel or the company website. There was also significant disparity in the quality of agent answers in some instances.
Moreover, the industry has yet to adopt eService best practices. For instance, a stunning 84% of the companies did not send an automatic acknowledgement of email queries, a common best practice that can help set the right expectations and elevate customer experience. Furthermore, 28% of the companies simply did not respond to email queries, ignoring revenue opportunities.
eGain's 2010 State of Customer Service Study evaluated multiple aspects of web self-service and contact center customer service of 175 leading enterprises in the U.S. and Canada. These companies are equally distributed across financial services, retail, communications, consumer goods manufacturing, insurance, healthcare, and pharmaceuticals sectors.
Analysts used a "mystery shopping" approach. Customer service performance was measured along multiple dimensions: choice of communication channels, email response, web self-service, cross-channel consistency, single-channel (phone) cross-agent consistency and phone customer service*. Scores in these metrics were then abstracted to an overall Service Quotient (SQ) on a scale of 0.0 to 4.0, for each of the companies that were assessed, as well as for each industry sector and the overall market.
The numeric scores map to the following ratings:
 Poor (=1.0 and =2.0 and