call centre workers

Wig

Do you think motor insurance call centre agents get a bonus or if not a bonus have sales targets to meet and when they get a customer buying the policy at the end of the cal they some sort of gold star on their target record?

Or do thy just have call handling time targets and they don't care if you buy it or not?

If they get sales targets and you say you will think about it and call back when you call back to buy the policy does the gold star go to the qriginal agent who created the qupte or to the agent who answers your call when you call back?

TSx

Most get a bonus, often dependent on their 'conversion rate' (number of policies quoted for versus number of policies sold). I suspect your second question is completely down to the individual insurer.

I know someone who's target was £2,000 of commission (what the insurer pays the broker for selling the policy) a month. They managed to more than double that when someone took out a policy for £26,000 over the phone, resulting in around £4,800 of commission (of which the agent themselves got 10% of in their bonus, if I remember rightly).

huckster

The amount of any commission that may be earned would be a very small fraction of the premium incomes they generate. And quite honestly if someone was willing to take say 100 phone calls at least 5 days a week and at the end of the week they earned say £100 before tax having met their sales conversion targets, then I think they deserve it.

Call centre sales is not for everyone. There is a relatively high turnover rate of staff, with people let go after a period of time, if they are not meeting the targets and people get fed up after 18mths to 2 years anyway.

Wig

I'm not saying they don't deserve it, I am just asking if it exists, or if it does not exist in a monetary form does it exist in a statistic format?

This is LV motor insurance, I just thought as the guy gave me the final price and I said I'll call back with the go ahead, I detected a slight dissappointment in him. I would hope that when I phone back with the go ahead (which I will be doing) he would get the credit as he was the person who created the quote, the person I phone back to will just take my money for the other guys work.

huckster

Most do now. The way it works with some companies, is that they will get say £3 if they quote and sell the policy. If the customer ops to phone back and take the quote up with a different person, the £3 will be split between the person who originally quoted and the subsequent person who issued the policy. Most call centres discourage their staff telling customers to ask for them when they call again. They share the commission in the way outlined, so they get a share for quoting, even if they don't manage to take the actual call the policy is sold on.

InsideInsurance

As per Huckster, the insurance sales call centres I've worked with all would split the recognition between the original agent and the sales agent if 2 or more agents were involved in the transaction (if more than two the middle ones got nothing).

In some cases it was a straight monetary commission that the agents got per sale, with others the conversion rate or sales figures were just one of their KPIs (time keeping, call handling time, wrap up between calls, cross selling or add ons etc being others) and it was their overall KPI adherence that drove bonuses.

There was certainly a move to the later the last time I was involved with direct sales personal lines both because it help deal with more senior agents having to come off the phones more often to help juniors without losing their money (or without having to flat pay them more to cover the lost sales opportunities) but also helps remove the accusations of hard sales tactics

dacouch

I worked in a call centre for a few months 20 years ago, the knowledge was shocking.

Manual covernotes had to be countersigned by the CS Manager, I correctly issued a covernote for SDP + Commuting, the Manager crossed it out and told me to reissue it, she said SDP + Commuting should be issued as Class 1 which she referred to as SDP + C. I explained it was wrong but she would not have it, fortunately I was seconded to underwriting so gave them a call. They were shocked that every single manual covernote had been issued incorrectly and swiftly corrected the Manager.

They would take people who had been floor supervisors as say a shoe shop and make them team managers. The rest of the staff below them had more knowledge than them. When it was quiet we would ring through to her team pretending to be a customer (We had customers named P.E Ness and Richard Head and Richard Soles so used these records) and would tell their team things like we had just been registered blind could we have a braille certificate. Used to amuse us when the team leader rang through to underwriting.

There were so many mistakes made by CS, this was made worse by the separate telesales team being paid their commission on sales irrespective of whether the policy was correct. They would tell the customer anything to get a sale as when the customer rang to query something and the mistake was picked up, it did not affect their commission if it was miss sold or had to be cancelled.

I was probably the only person in CS who actually properly understood insurance, the rest had a passing knowledge and it was treated like a normal off the shelf product

Hopefully things are different now days

InsideInsurance

Now a days team managers rarely have the ability to over ride what the system says is or isnt allowed. Insurance knowledge isnt very high but then most call centres are non-advised sales and so they need to do little more than read off a script or at most take bullet points and work them into their own script. For those that go beyond their knowledge they typically refer not to the team leader but dedicated specialists


What a manager should be like is a fairly interesting question and one that I never got to a decision on. When I worked handling Fast Track injury cases we had a team manager who had herself handled the equiv of fast and multi-track cases, had done her ILEX etc and who's knowledge on how to defend cases was next to none but was totally unapproachable, had no compassion and couldn't lead a team to save her life. Many refused the promotion from the other claims areas into her team because of her reputation despite earning potential being up to 50% more than the top end of the other teams.

They then hired a chap from a Life customer services background, he was her total antithesis having no GI experience at all let alone knowing how to negotiate liability or quantum. Not only that but after 6-9 months he still hadn't picked it up well enough to be able to sign off cheques on his own. He was however great at creating team spirit, of ensuring the stronger members of the team supported the newbies and junior staff. Turnover of new joiners (none would be new to claims handling in insurance) dropped dramatically and productivity in the team went up.

Ideally you evidently want someone who is perfect at both, reality is you rarely find people like that and typically as the subject becomes more technical then the more difficult it is to find someone with strong skills in both camps. So given you have to choose to focus on one or the other I think it is hard call to prioritise.

Certainly in the FT team it was ultimately decided that the nice guy had to step down as a TM as he simply wasnt picking things up the technical side at all and he went down to being a junior technician which he did for 18 months (normal timescales would have been 6 months) before being let go.

huckster

I think some are better than others. Some take the FSA rules more seriously than others.

But are all brokers the same. I doubt you would like to be associated with some brokers beginning with the letter 's'.

We have seen some large chains of brokers launch themselves onto the internet under a new name and they offer some very cheap premiums that come near the top on comparison sites. But then read the reviews and customer complaints, which suggest they have struggled dealing with the volume of business.

If someone finds a good local broker, they should stick with them or like a lot of the high street, they will disappear.