Swinton overhauls insurance by phone

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Swinton Insurance, the largest retail chain of insurance outlets has completed a multi-million pound IP telephony renewal programme to improve internal and customer call handling.

The £2 million-plus investment, which spans 450 branch and head offices across the UK, has allowed the company to route customer query calls more effectively, ensuring that calls from policy holders or potential customers are handled wherever possible by a local retail branch.

The company has deployed an IP telephony platform from Alcatel Lucent, working with specialist solution provider Amillan. The network IP telephony solution is based on the Alcatel-Lucent OmniPCX Enterprise platform, OmniTouch Contact Centre software and OmniVista 4760 Network Management platform.

The improvements in voice communications at the company, coupled with free IP-based site-to-site calling, has delivered cash savings of more than £100,000 per year.

"The primary goal of the new solution was to answer more calls, more efficiently. We have already increased revenue from insurance policy sales, reduced abandoned calls by 25 per cent and improved customer service," said Adrian Hazeldine, IT director at Swinton.

However, he played down the prospect of the company using its IP telephony platform to enable on-demand call centre functionality, bringing in call-handling operatives from home or other locations on short notice to handle peak demand and unexpected spikes in call numbers.

"While the technology is certainly there to allow it, I'm not sure it's always practical and not something we are looking to do, especially when handling inbound calling," he added. "A good call centre needs to be a team, and to have pride in the group and the company, and it is harder to foster that when operatives are working in isolation at home. For outbound selling, it's a different matter, it may be more practical."

The system routes each call first to the caller's local branch, and then fails over to a cluster of ten other nearby branches if lines are busy at the nearest branch, effectively turning its existing store network and staff into a giant call centre, but retaining local knowledge and personalisation. This approach has reduced the company's use of non-geographic call centres to catch unanswered calls by 40 per cent. However, Swinton is planning to open a 150-seat call centre later this year to boost its outbound calling operations.

The switch to IP telephony has also allowed the Swinton to extract useful data about call types and point of origination, for market intelligence and direct marking applications.

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