NICE Performance Manager Helps Mapfre Engage Agents

Mapfre, a property-casualty insurer with operations across 14 states, has more than 200 independent agents and brokers and is part of a worldwide insurance group doing business in more than 100 countries across five continents. Mapfre has more than 36,000 employees serving more than 30 million customers worldwide.

Mapfre’s agents, brokers, and customers all depend heavily on contact center personnel to help manage initial claim requests, price quotes, and policy changes and to provide basic information, says Jeremy McKechnie, who until July was in charge of contact center workforce management at Mapfre.

To be the most efficient and effective at their jobs, contact center personnel need good coaching, but that wasn’t always possible.

“We were afraid that the coaching had become routine and stagnant,” McKechnie recalls. “We were bringing people in for coaching on a regular basis, but we weren’t doing anything new. If you’re not taking an intentional approach to keep coaching fresh, then it just becomes something you do three times a week with your staff.

“The sessions were still effective, but the [contact center agents] weren’t excited about it,” McKechnie adds. “We wanted to make sure the employees were more engaged. That helps with the success of the company. The more engaged the staff is, the better performers they can be. If they perform better, they can help increase customer loyalty by providing a really positive experience.”

Mapfre was already a longtime user of NICE Workforce Manager, which helps with contact center workforce scheduling, including analytics for mapping contact center volumes and simulating real-world prioritization; routing and skill assignments to determine work allocation expectations; developing flexible schedules by applying different approaches for different departments, locations, and individuals; and monitoring and proactively responding to changing conditions in real time with intraday change management tools.

So when it came time to add a coaching solution, the natural choice was NICE Performance Manager (NPM), McKechnie says. “It provides a one-stop shop for all of the employee performance information that managers want. It makes life a lot easier to go with all NICE products, which we can connect together. It’s easier to go with a single provider. We were glad that NICE had a solution that meets our needs.”

The insurer started with a soft rollout near the end of 2018 before going with the full implementation at the beginning of this year. Installation of the on-premises system took a month or two due to the customization that Mapfre required.

NICE Performance Manager includes various performance metrics along with APIs to integrate with other NICE components and third-party data sources. Using AI and analytics, the solution also provides insights from individual metrics and shows how different metrics affect one another.

Based on this information, NPM constructs key performance indicators that reflect the relative weight of each metric based on its importance to the business. The KPIs are expressed as goals, with progress toward them visible at any time. If a goal is not met or performance trends downward, NPM automatically alerts the relevant employees and provides specific insights into the drivers behind the poor results.

Since going live with NICE Performance Manager, Mapfre has already seen notable benefits, according to McKechnie. “More engaged employees start to use the self-correction features. And they’ve increased their scheduling of coaching sessions.”

With that type of engagement, there’s better quality to the coaching sessions, which have gone up an estimated 25 percent, McKechnie adds. With better feedback and better engagement, the insurer has increased retention of contact center agents—who typically change jobs often—by about 7 percent.

Looking ahead, McKechnie expects to use Workforce Manager in other areas of the company outside of the contact center. 

The Payoff

Since installing NICE Performance Manager, Mapfre has seen the following results:

• a 6 percent increase in agent visibility;
• a 25 percent increase in coaching engagements; and
• an estimated 7 percent increase in employee retention.