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From Resource, June 2007
Copyright by LOMA
Customized
e-Learning Course Provides a Perfect Fit for Bankers Life
Bankers Life and Casualty
Co. saw a need to enhance the training of its contact center employees,
especially when it came to serving the company’s sizable career agent force.
In its search for the right training tools, it turned to LOMA, and the two
organizations joined forces to customize an existing LOMA e-learning course to
fit Bankers’ needs.
By Stephen Hall
Serving the needs of your
policyholders is one thing; serving the needs of field agents is quite another.
Just ask any customer service representative (CSR) at Bankers Life and Casualty
Co.
Of
course, both scenarios require CSRs to have extensive product knowledge, an
ability to think on their feet while listening attentively to a caller’s
needs, and a wide range of other people skills. But for Bankers—a
Chicago-based insurer that focuses on the needs of seniors—the difference
between those two customer types is even more prominent than usual.
“For
the most part, our policyholders are seniors, and so our CSRs are serving
seniors and agents each day,” said Kathy Cawley, operations training manager
for Bankers. “Serving an agent can be very different from serving a
policyholder. Agents may be calling about several of their policyholders in one
call and are on a very tight schedule. We want to serve them as quickly and as
accurately as possible to allow them to succeed at what they do best—sell.
Therefore, providing service to both groups becomes a real balancing act.”
In
their ongoing effort to maintain and refine that balancing act, Cawley and her
management colleagues recently observed a need for increased training in the
area of soft skills, especially with regard to serving agents. “We already had
a technical and procedural training program,” Cawley said. “But we needed
more extensive training in the area of soft skills, and we needed more customer
service training, especially when it comes to serving agents.”
To
address this training challenge, Bankers and LOMA modified an existing LOMA
e-learning course, titled “Working With Upset Customers,” so that Bankers
CSRs could train using situations that are specific to the company’s product
line and its agents’ needs. The result was “Interacting Effectively With
Agents,” a customized e-learning course that helps prepare Bankers’ CSRs to
handle all types of agent calls.
During
LOMA’s recent Customer Service Conference in Las Vegas, Cawley and Charles
Anderson, second vice president of customer service for Bankers, presented a
concurrent session titled “Service to Agents: It Matters,” in which they
explained the process of collaborating with LOMA to tailor an existing LOMA
course to fit the training requirements of Bankers.
A
Challenge in Search of a Solution
To help conference attendees
better understand the training challenge Bankers faced,
Anderson
gave a brief overview of his organization. “We have about 1 million
policyholders, so we’re kind of a small- to medium-size company,” he said.
“At any given time, we have about 4,300 career agents, and we have frequent
contact with customers calling in. We also have about 350,000 medical providers
that interact with us on a regular basis as well. In addition to handling
inbound calls at our contact center, we also respond to written correspondence,
e-mail, and Web inquiries. This work is handled by a staff of about 100
employees with varying degrees of experience.”
Bankers’
contact center also includes a number of long-term employees, according to
Cawley. “It’s not at all unusual for us to have employees who have been here
for more than 20 years,” she said. “We started to experience growth, so we
had to hire new employees to meet the service demand.”
Over
the past year, Bankers has hired 24 new contact center employees and was able to
train them to answer simple phone calls within a few weeks. But during the
process of training them and getting them to work with their more seasoned
peers,
Anderson
said, management realized there was very limited soft-skill training available
for the latter group. “Many of our longer-tenured employees began their
careers working primarily in the back office, so they were corresponding with
customers in writing rather than talking directly to them,” he said. “And
when we put them on the phones, they just had to acquire those skills over
time.”
In
addition, many of the more experienced CSRs began voicing an interest in
receiving additional customer service training, Cawley said. After evaluating
the needs of some of the CSRs that did not go through a formal training program,
it was determined that they would benefit from this soft-skills training as
well.
According
to
Anderson
, the next piece of the puzzle was all about the service Bankers provides for
its agent force. “In our particular case, our agents are all dedicated Bankers
agents, so they’re just selling for Bankers,”
Anderson
said. “And service is our key differentiator, because an agent’s priority
is sales. It’s important to be accessible to that agent, to provide them with
timely and accurate information, and to have a good attitude when you’re
dealing with them. If you don’t provide the key support they need during all
phases of that process, they could very easily lose a sale. While our many
self-service channels provide some of the key support our agents need, the
bottom line is, how our contact center supports our field agents really drives
the success of our organization.”
In
addition,
Anderson
said, many CSRs were uncertain as to how to properly serve agents in specific
circumstances. “What I was hearing more and more from employees was that the
issues that agents have aren’t your typical customer-type issues,” he said.
“It does take a special skill set to deal with sales agents, and feedback from
CSRs in our contact center supported the need to improve our training in this
area. In my meetings with contact center staff, I frequently heard questions
like ‘How do I deal with this agent’s problem or that agent’s issue?’
These questions led me to believe that we really needed to provide them more
tools to deal with that unique group of customers that they’re interacting
with every day.”
But
when
Anderson
began looking for such specialized tools, he was surprised by how little he
found. “There was a lot of soft-skill training available, and we had a lot of
off-the-shelf training tools, but they really didn’t pertain to the skill set
that’s required to deal with a sales agent force,” he said. “Also, we
wanted to help CSRs prepare for the task of dealing with an upset agent.
That’s one of the toughest challenges: How do you negotiate when you get one
of those phone calls? How do you listen to that agent with empathy, apologize
where appropriate, and try to find a solution to their problem?”
Finding the Right Tool and
Making it Better
Bankers’ search for a
training solution ultimately led to LOMA, whose learning and development tools
already included a full suite of e-learning courses that touched upon some of
the areas Bankers wanted to cover in their CSR training program. “We partnered
with LOMA and came up with a mini-library of computer-based training (CBT)
courses that we can now offer to our staff,” Cawley said. “The management
team understood that we can’t have our CSRs in training all the time, so we
chose three LOMA courses that we thought would be most beneficial to us and made
them available to our CSRs.”
The
first two LOMA courses they chose were “Exceptional Customer Service” and
Managing Time and Stress.” But the third course, “Working With Upset
Customers,” was of particular interest to Bankers, according to Cawley.
“CSRs have to deal with upset customers and agents at times, and one of the
major sources of stress for them is handling these kinds of calls. The challenge
we faced was determining how to equip CSRs with the skills they need to deal
with these challenging calls.”
Still,
something more specific to Bankers’ customer service challenges was needed. So
LOMA proposed a cus-tom version of “Working With Upset Customers” and
invited Bankers to provide some real-life scenarios and content of their own to
make it as relevant as possible to CSRs and the types of phone calls they
regularly receive from agents.
“We
advise companies not to reinvent the wheel when they need online or blended
learning courses in insurance and financial services products and company
operations,” said Kathy Milligan, FLMI, ACS, ALHC, vice president of education
and training for LOMA. “LOMA owns the content in 25-plus textbooks on
insurance and business subjects, and we’ve converted much of that content into
e-learning courses. Our online courses are constructed from ‘reusable learning
objects’—small chunks of content that can easily be reassembled and modified
to meet an organization’s specific learning objectives. We are working with a
number of companies on custom projects, and these projects range from slight
modifications of content in a single online course to the creation of highly
customized courses and course sequences. For companies that are training a large
group of employees, the costs of customization are minimal, especially when
compared to the costs of using trainers and subject matter experts to develop
content on their own.”
The
final result of the LOMA-Bankers collaboration was “Interacting Effectively
With Agents,” an e-learning course which not only met all of Bankers’
requirements for handling calls from agents, but also made a bit of history as
LOMA’s first fully customized online course development project.
“We
began with the ‘Working With Upset Customers’ course and added
Bankers-specific examples and simulations,” Cawley said. “Working with
LOMA’s course developers, we were able to put together a course that is now
very specific to Bankers, yet it also has that core content that LOMA had
already developed.” But as happy as Bankers was with the final product, they
understood that its success also depended on how it was presented and made
available to CSRs. “Among the challenges of completing CBT and e-learning
courses are the daily interruptions that CSRs encounter,” Cawley acknowledged.
“Many companies who use CBT or e-learning have experienced challenges with
employees not completing these courses. And that’s because those employees are
so busy with their daily job responsibilities.
“So
at Bankers, we came up with what we call a hybrid training approach,” Cawley
continued. “It’s not totally self-study, and we worked with our management
team to come up with an approach that would allow our CSRs to take the online
course outside of their work environment. They could take the course at their
desk or go to a computer lab, but they didn’t have to try to complete the
course while they were working. We gave employees three to four weeks to
complete the course, which reduced the stress of a tight deadline for
completion. Each of these courses takes about one to one-and-a-half hours to
complete, so it’s not a major time commitment. We also developed a one-hour,
instructor-led follow-up session that’s held after each online course is
completed. In a group setting, we discuss what they learned and how they can
apply it to their job. The classroom follow-up session is very beneficial
because it gives them a chance to apply what they learned in the course. The
material isn’t just text they read on a screen. They would say, ‘I had a
call today, and the agent said this, and so I followed these two steps that I
learned in the course.’ They’re using the information and understanding how
it fits into their work situation. And to date, we think it’s been very
successful.”
“We
are grateful to Bankers for giving us the opportunity to work with their
customer service training team to develop a customized course for them,”
Milligan said. “The company’s commitment to providing effective service for
its agents through this training will benefit the entire industry, as this
project prompted LOMA’s development of a generic version of ‘Interacting
Effectively With Agents’ that any company can use as a training tool for
enhancing its service to producers.”
For more
information about how LOMA can work with your company to create customized
e-learning content to fit your specific training needs, please e-mail customcontent@loma.org.
Sidebar:
“Interacting
Effectively With Agents:” A Curriculum Overview
The
contact center management team at Bankers Life and Casualty Co. needed a
training tool that would give their CSRs the knowledge base they needed to
provide the specialized service that the insurer’s agent force requires. After
collaborating with LOMA to customize an existing e-learning course (originally
titled “Working With Upset Customers”), the end result was “Interacting
Effectively With Agents.”
The
course, which takes one to one-and-a-half hours to complete, provides students
with various steps, techniques and procedures they can follow to help guide them
through agent calls, especially the challenging ones. In addition to call
simulations that students listen to in order to learn what to do (and what not
to do) in a given call situation, the course material includes the following:
Qualities
of personal credibility: Competence,
intention, personal impression,
character and association.
The
five stages of negotiation:
Preparation or research, discussion, proposal/counterproposal,
agreement/disagreement, and follow-through.
Factors
that upset agents: Situational
factors, company-related factors, and unmet expectations.
The
four-step process for working with agents:
1)
Recognize the agent’s feelings.
2)
Empathize and apologize for the inconvenience.
3)
Determine the facts of the situation.
4)
Find an appropriate solution.
Two
effective ways to determine facts:
Paraphrasing and questioning.
Four
approaches to conflict management:
Cooperation, avoidance, surrender and coercion.
Assertive
behavior vs. aggressive behavior: Pros
and cons.
Techniques
for managing abusive situations:
Staying calm, asking questions, reminding an agent the call is being recorded,
when to call for a break, when to ask an agent to stop using abusive language,
when to hang up, and when to speak to a manager about the call.
LOMA Custom Learning
Solutions
One of the biggest challenges
facing insurance and financial services organizations today is how to maximize
their training investment while taking advantage of the many benefits provided
by online learning. This challenge encompasses everything from system
customization and content integration to standardizing and localizing learning
delivered across geographically dispersed employee groups.
LOMA
is helping the industry address this challenge by offering several options
designed to provide member companies and their employees with new solutions to
meet their professional development and performance training needs. Some of
these options include:
Interactive
Online Courses
(www.lomalearn.org)
LOMALearn Online provides a
flexible, affordable, online training solution offering industry-specific and
soft-skills courses that cover hundreds of topics in more than 20 key subject
areas. The courses engage users with a self-paced, interactive format that
reinforces their understanding of concepts and strengthens their skills through
a variety of activities, demonstrations, simulations and games. Whether an
organization needs training in financial/insurance products, compliance,
customer service, communication, insurance functions, management, sales, or
other business skills, LOMA e-learning offers award-winning, ready-to-use
content to address specific needs.
Customizable
Learning Paths and Certificate Programs
LOMA content experts can help
your company design custom learning sequences for specific jobs or job
competencies. We’ll even work with you to recognize completion of customized
course sequences with specially designed certificates featuring your corporate
logo.
Customized
Courses
LOMA’s extensive catalog of
online financial services content reflects our 80-plus years of experience and
the expertise of reviewers from throughout the industry. We can modify our
online courses to match a specific company’s practices as well as the products
it sells and services.
Custom Learning Portals
LOMA’s Custom Learning
Portals provide an easy-to-implement, reliable and cost-effective way to deploy
customizable learning programs within an organization. LOMA’s learning portal
solution offers many of the benefits of an enterprise-level learning management
system (LMS), such as convenient site management, powerful administration and
reporting, and flexible curriculum planning and management, without the
implementation hassles or cost.
Learning
Management System (LMS) Integration
For organizations that have an
LMS, LOMA offers an LMS integration solution that allows companies to leverage
their LMS investment by accessing LOMA e-learning content directly through their
existing system.
For more information on
LOMA’s Custom Learning Solutions, visit www.lomalearn.org, or call (770)
984-3751.
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