With Vonage Contact Center, Farmers Insurance Ensures Great Customer Experience
Vonage Contact Center provides Farmers Insurance Agency owner LaTasha Baucham with the reliability, flexibility, and deep Salesforce integration necessary to streamline her team’s processes, increase productivity, and provide a great customer experience.
Challenge
To reach customers when and where they are, provide a seamless customer experience through CRM integration, and increase productivity
Solution
Vonage Contact Center for Salesforce
Results
Increased productivity by 40%, created a streamlined, flexible customer contact process and provided a customizable, memorable customer experienceFounded in 1928, Farmers Insurance is America’s largest insurer of vehicles, homes and small businesses and provides a wide range of other insurance and financial services products. With over 48,000 exclusive and independent agents and nearly 21,000 employees, Farmers is proud to serve more than 10 million households with more than 19 million individual policies across all 50 states. The company aims to put customers first and provide the kind of personalized attention that is the hallmark of the Farmers experience.
As a Farmers Insurance agency owner, LaTasha Baucham is dedicated to providing a personalized, reliable, and memorable customer experience - and she knows that this is the secret to success. In just two years, her Florida-based agency has more than doubled its number of employees, a testament not only to the power of a great brand like Farmers, but to the importance of superior customer connections. Leveraging Vonage Contact Center, deeply integrated with Salesforce, has allowed Ms. Baucham’s team to spend less time worrying about how they will connect with customers, and more time focusing on how they will best be able to serve them.
Baucham notes, “We've made strategic investments in our communication systems with Vonage and Salesforce, because customer service is very important to what we do and we take it very seriously. Our team is dedicated to making sure that our customers can always reach us - they don't have to wait.
“We pride ourselves on that. Our jobs are about more than just sales. The sale is the easy part. It's keeping the customer satisfied and supported after the sale that matters most.”
Flexibility and Control Over Customer Interactions
Strategic, automated processes lead to reliable, effective customer interactions. Businesses that rely on customer connections to survive and thrive need to be able to adjust and design a process that meets their customer expectations.
“If there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s that follow up and customer connection is very important in this business,” Baucham said. “There are a lot of agents that are saying they offer the same thing. There are a lot of brands that say they offer the same thing. What differentiates you from others?”
When a prospective customer fills out an online form looking for more information on the insurance policies available, the Vonage Contact Center solution immediately makes a connection to an agent. From there, the platform will initiate the process put in place to ensure that this customer receives the answers and support they need, from call back requests to texts to follow up meetings. These automated, streamlined processes translate to reliability and successful outcomes for the Baucham team of agents. And, the Vonage platform itself is flexible and agile, allowing Baucham to adjust processes as needed, without wasting time or money.
“I need to be able to adapt as I learn more about my customers’ needs and preferences. And if it takes me six months to make a change, that's not adapting. Vonage allows us to build and adjust customer touchpoints into our system based upon our unique needs, and takes a lot of the guesswork out of what happens next in terms of customer connections,” Baucham noted. “The Vonage platform is agile and flexible enough to allow us to do that, and fluid enough to allow us to change and grow as our business changes and grows.”
Automated, Integrated Systems Lead to Productivity
After making an investment in and commitment to the Salesforce CRM, it was important to find a contact center solution that integrated with Salesforce in a native way, making life easier for the agents.
“We didn’t want a system that requires our agents to open another application. Now, when we log in to Salesforce, we log in to Vonage. The information that is set up through the Vonage platform, that's captured on each customer lead or prospect profile in Salesforce because the systems are linked. They're connected,” explains Baucham.
“The seamless integration of Vonage and Salesforce works really well for us because it provides for greater efficiency and streamlined processes. When a call is logged, that activity is captured on the detail of the activity page. Those call recordings are there. If I wanted to review, and train, and coach my team on what they could have done differently with a call, it's there. If I want to know whether or not a customer has read an email, it's there. All of this crucial information is captured through Vonage, into Salesforce and it's really the perfect marriage.”
Put simply, automation and streamlining of processes give back time to agents. Time that can be spent on the phone with customers and prospects, time spent building pipeline, time spent providing the kind of customer support that Farmers Insurance agents are known for.
“Moving to Vonage has saved us a lot of money and a lot of time. By allowing the brilliance of Salesforce to work with the efficiency of Vonage, my team is able to work smarter, not harder,” said Baucham. “Now we have more time to focus on driving sales, building rapport, building a pipeline, managing our customer interactions and ultimately providing a great customer experience.”
Connect with Customers When and Where They Prefer
Customers today expect to communicate with companies when they want, in the mode that they choose, wherever they are - and they won’t accept it any other way. With Vonage Contact Center, the Baucham Group team puts the power into the hands of the customer - they can choose to wait on hold, to schedule a call back at a specific time that works best for them or to communicate via email/text.
“We understand that customers have busy lives and don’t want to just wait around for their insurance agent to call. Using Vonage Contact Center for Salesforce, we can build reliability and stability into our customer connections,” Baucham explains. “And that’s huge - it matters to our customers that when we say we will contact them at a certain time, the phone rings at that time. As an insurance agency we need to project that kind of security and support in everything we do. It’s crucial that we are meeting the customer where they are, how they want to do business, and when they want to do business.”
Ensuring a Great Customer Experience
Everything that Vonage has allowed Baucham’s team of Farmers agents to do has ultimately improved their customer connections - and that’s by design.
“Customers today have a lot of information at their fingertips and a lot of options when it comes to insurance,” said Baucham. “Providing a great customer journey can make all the difference, and we need to be doing that at every touchpoint, on every channel. Vonage and Salesforce empowered me to not only give my team the tools to be successful, but to also give our customers an excellent experience.”
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