"I was sitting here thinking… why am I doing this? There’s got to be a better way."
Ideal Concepts’ Compliance Manager Alex Liebergall is reflecting on the moment back in 2020 when he realised he had to find a more efficient way for his team to do their jobs.
As part of their Compliance and Quality Assurance (QA) process at Ideal Concepts, Alex and his team review hundreds of hours of calls made between the company’s sales agents and their customers each year, ensuring those conversations adhere to the highly-regulated demands of the insurance industry.
“The standard practice when I set up the QA program was that someone on the team would listen to an agent's call, and make some notes on what was said,” says Alex. “But what I realised quite quickly is that what person A hears is often different to what person B hears - especially if the agents have different accents or speak at different speeds. I was finding that my interpretation of what was said could be different from the interpretation of the person who originally made the report.”
“Also, noting down what someone said, and manually checking and adding a timestamp - it leaves a lot of room for human error,” he added.
In fact, Alex found that the process to QA the QAs was extremely inefficient: “One of the team listens to a call and makes notes, I check their notes, then I have to re-listen to a call, and basically you end up duplicating the amount of work. It just really didn’t seem very efficient. And as a manager, I want our team to be as efficient as we can be.”
In the insurance industry, detail matters. Especially when it comes to the field of medicare and US health insurance. Ideal Concepts, an award-winning insurance, marketing and technology specialist, prides itself on great customer service and finding technological solutions for the often complex and tightly regulated areas in which they operate.
The compliance team, among other things, is there to make sure the company’s agents are delivering customer service that meets all the expected regulatory standards. But the laborious manual workflows were making efficiency a challenge.
Alex started exploring technological solutions to these challenges and in 2020 Alex’s team began using Trint.
“Truly, Trint has become a very big part of what we do because we use it for every single call that we QA. We use it to get a better understanding of what an agent says. It’s really helped a lot,” Alex says.
Each call is now recorded and transcribed through Trint, allowing the team to review the audio and transcript together, and quickly make any final tweaks and corrections, dramatically speeding up the process.
“It’s much easier for someone on the team to review what was said in Trint, with the transcript tied to the audio, rather than having to go back and listen again and again and again and make notes from scratch. Even if there are multiple people on the call and the transcript isn’t 100% perfect, it’s infinitely better,” Alex says.
“It’s become a very critical part of our process. That transcript is a kind of backbone to a lot of our work.”
It’s hard to quantify exactly how much time is being saved by the Ideal Concept compliance and QA team, but in the first 26 days of January 2023 alone, the team transcribed more than 76 hours of calls.
Alex currently has two team members who are tasked with examining the Trint transcripts and ensuring they accurately reflect what was said: “The format saves so much time,” said Alex.
“Not having to constantly start and stop. When you’re starting from scratch, you’re constantly having to pause, go back, listen again… each time maybe takes you three seconds - not a big deal on its own, but over hundreds, maybe thousands of hours of calls. It really adds up.
“And it’s searchable - with audio you have to keep starting/stopping/going back. With the transcript I can find what I need quickly.”
