Success Stories
An Award-Winning Upgrade: Creative IT solution reinforces stellar customer service at Western States Insurance
How does a rapidly growing regional insurance agency with more than 400 employees and
30 offices in four states retain a small-office feel? Just ask the IT department at Western States Insurance in Missoula, Montana.
Brian Chernish, WSI’s network operations director, and his ten-person IT team recently completed a company-wide voice and network upgrade, focusing on system efficiency and cost-effectiveness while sustaining the company’s commitment to friendly, personalized customer service.
“Our business model is to be in small towns and provide small town service, but with the benefits that come from a larger agency,” Chernish says. One of the largest regional insurance agencies in the northwest, WSI has offices in Montana, Idaho, Washington and Oregon, and there are plans to add up to three additional branches this year.
When Chernish joined the company in 1999, there were only 11 WSI branches, all in Montana, and the voice and networking systems were “antiquated, in a word,”
Chernish says. It was his job to bring everything up to date, and he started by replacing the old Cisco 2501 system with a complete Cisco network including Voice Over IP (VoiP) and Virtual Private Networks (VPNs).
The process took two years and saved the firm significant amounts of money in operating costs, among other benefits. “We had sites where we had 256k of connectivity that was costing us $1200 a month,” Chernish reports. “That’s now being served by a $300 Internet connection.”
The search for a Cisco partner to aid in the transition wasn’t easy. Chernish tried two or three Cisco service providers before selecting Mountain States Networking, another regional institution with a strong commitment to customer service. “The first partners I worked with weren’t Cisco Gold Certified, and they didn’t have a lot of in-house technical support,” Chernish notes. “And they didn’t have Gold pricing, to be quite frank. Pricing was probably what drove me to Mountain States, but their after-sale service and pre-sale service is what’s keeping us there.”
Now, with just two branch offices left to upgrade, Chernish has also upgraded his assessment of WSI’s networking strategy, from “antiquated” to “state of the art.” And Chernish isn’t the only person who thinks so. Western States Insurance recently won second runner-up and $10,000 in the Cisco Growing With Technology Awards, in the “Innovators in Customer Relationship” category, out of a field of 570 applicants.
The award hinged on WSI’s creative use of the Cisco IP Contact Center Express. While most companies use the software for its Interactive Voice Response functionality (i.e., automated attendants) to allow them to cut down on staff, Western States uses it to keep their customers from ever hearing an automated attendant. “We use it to get customers to a live body,” Chernish says.
This goal is at the core of the company’s commitment to maintaining a small-office feel. “If you’re sitting in a small office, you know that Dick’s not in his office because he walked by your desk as he was going out to lunch,” Chernish says. “When you’re talking about an office that’s four states away, you can’t do that anymore … unless you have really good eyes.”
WSI’s “distributed call center,” made possible by Contact Center Express, provides the eyes and ears. All customer calls ring in to a central location and are then distributed to available agents anywhere in the four states. “If a call originates into one of our specific branches, the preference is to have the receptionist at that branch deal with the call,” Chernish explains. “But if that person is busy, then we can use Skills Based Routing to send it out so that it gets answered by someone who can help the caller.”
Besides improving the customer experience, the new network and voice systems have also positively impacted WSI staff. Everyone can four-digit dial everyone else in the
company, even across branches, and everyone uses the same voicemail system.
“Because everyone’s on the exact same system, our training becomes easier and easier all the time,” Chernish says. “And the other big advantage of it is that we can do all our adds or changes from a central location. If an employee calls in sick, we can forward their phone from here, or we can transfer their phone to somewhere else. We can do any kind of magic we want, all from corporate headquarters.” As such, WSI has been able to limit their IT department to just ten employees, while Chernish knows of similarly sized companies that have three to four times that many IT personnel.
As far as future plans go, Chernish and his team are currently working to refine WSI’s use of “presence information,” allowing employees to simply glance at their computer screens and know immediately whether a particular agent is on the phone, in a meeting, available to take calls or not.
“Our biggest thing is reachability,” Chernish says. “If a customer calls looking for a specific insurance agent, it’s now a lot easier for us to get that customer to someone who can help.”
When the right networking solution is in place, everyone’s a winner—the IT department, the sales staff, the company president, the receptionist, and most importantly, the customer.