Insurance Company Customer Care Center

Insurance Company Customer Care Center Training

Customer service is one of the most important functions conducted by employees of Citizen's Property Insurance Corporation. The insurance industry is tremendously competitive, especially in the current economic climate. Generally, there are only two types of incentives that insurance organizations can offer their customers to earn and retain their business: (1) competitive pricing, and (2) high-quality customer service. Moreover, whereas decisions relating to pricing issues are most important to new and prospective customers, the quality of customer service are more important to existing customers. Most importantly, virtually every direct interaction between customers and insurance companies is conducted through customer service functions.

The Training Medium

Operationally, there is no reason that customer service training could not be conducted off-site, remotely, pursuant to outside contracted services, or entirely outsourced (George & Jones, 2008; Robbins & Judge, 2009). When customer service training is conducted internally, the organization has the most control over the process. Since customer relations are so important to this organization, it would be optimally desirable for customer service training to encompass socialization into the organizational culture and its strategic vision, both in general as well as in relation to the way those concepts pertain to customer relations in particular. Ideally, the appropriate training medium would be internal precisely because the quality of customer service and customer relations is too important to the organization to be entrusted to external entities (George & Jones, 2008; Robbins & Judge, 2009).

Implementation and Delivery

In many industries, and business processes, training functions are provided by dedicated trainers; in others, such as customer service training, experienced supervisors generally deliver a large part of the training themselves and in one-to-one format. While it could also be accomplished in group training formats, that approach is much less flexible with respect to accommodating corporate cultural nuances (George & Jones, 2008; Robbins & Judge, 2009).

The optimal implementation of customer service training would comprise various stages, all of which would be conducted on-site. The first stage would be orientation; it would consist of a direct guided observation of Citizen's customer service call center agents handling communications. The observation would be guided in the sense that trainers will provide narrative guidance followed by the opportunity to connect that narrative to the actual performance of existing call center representatives.