Bankers Life contact center background

Bankers Life’s enterprise recruiting center is comprised of three full-time leaders—Jamie, Mary Ann, and John—85 US-based contract recruiters and 20-30 offshore BPO agents. The teams are 100% remote, making platform stability, ease of use, and supervisor visibility critical to success.

Recruiters make warm, outbound calls to prospective insurance agents who have expressed interest in working with Bankers Life. Call sequences are also supplemented with proactive, agentless SMS messages for follow-ups, appointment reminders, and more.

Recruiters are responsible for doing an initial assessment of the candidate’s interest level, qualifications, and job fit and schedule appointments for them to meet with an in-branch representative for a more formal interview. Those interviews have two potential outcomes—the candidate signs a contract to become a Bankers Life agent or doesn’t. That’s why recruiters are focused on both the quality and quantity of appointments set because ultimately, the enterprise recruiting center’s primary measure of success is the number of contracts executed.

“Occasionally branches will make complaints related to appointments set by recruiters,” explains manager Jamie. “Before, it would take us ages to find the specific interaction number, find the recording, and listen to it.” But without call transcription, even listening to the call was inefficient, with supervisors having to listen through the entire call to get to one specific part or rewind multiple times to hear it clearly.

Now, if a branch makes a claim, they can pull it up immediately to validate or refute it. And with Sharpen’s automatic call transcription, team leads can search and find the relevant call segment in minutes. “It’s saved me so much time, which I can now spend doing quality management and coaching,” shares Mary Ann. 

As a result, recruiters’ quality scores have increased significantly. “We used to be in the 80s on a good week, but now our team average is regularly close to 100%,” says Mary Ann.

Improved visibility has also helped supervisors create a culture of accountability across the recruiting center. Previously, since recruiters knew leaders had limited visibility into what they were doing, they’d try to engage in typical contact center shenanigans—dialing the same number over and over without tagging it, calling each other and sitting on the phone for long periods, taking prolonged breaks, etc. Now, though, recruiters understand that they’re activity and performance are more closely monitored, curbing any time theft that was happening.

Empowering recruiters while improving accountability

Manual and inefficient dialing processes hindered recruiter productivity on their previous platform. For example, recruiters had to complete multiple steps, toggling between their desktop softphone and browser, just to get ready to make their first call of the day. Additionally, they had to manually dial each phone number via their softphone—they couldn’t even copy and paste it! 

With Sharpen’s intuitive interface, agents are up and running in seconds and can complete one-click preview dial. As a result, they’re average calls per agent per hour has increased 46%, from 15 to 22—driving an 223% increase in appointments booked!

Agents have been enthusiastically supportive of the center’s shift to Sharpen, especially their ability to see how they’re performing in real time via Performance Tiles. They compete against themselves and are continuously motivated to improve. 

And while they’ve always had a positive center culture that promotes agent retention—their average turnover sits between 25-30%, better than the industry average—they now have the systems to support it too. 

Expanding operations and improving contract rates

The executive recruiting center is a shared service within Bankers Life, and with their strong performance, they’ve become a sought-after resource for branches looking for new recruiters. 

“In the last two years, we’ve increased our hold within branches, increased our dialing hours by 150%, and started supporting thirty additional branches,” explains Jamie. “There’s no way we could have done this without Sharpen.”

They’ve also been able to bring on three offshore contact centers to support their increased volume—two in Egypt and one in South America. This wouldn’t have been possible with their previous platform, but with Sharpen, new users can use the system and start making calls on day one.

Their success and improvement in appointment bookings, showings, and contracts is also due in part to their new, omnichannel engagement approach. Previously, they could only make phone calls to prospective candidates, leave voicemails, etc. With Sharpen, however, they’ve incorporated SMS for appointment confirmations and reminders—contributing to a 163% increase in the average number of candidates that show up for their booked interview. 

Evolving operations with a stable, committed CCaaS partner

One of the top things the Bankers Life team loves about their new platform and way of working? The rich relationship they have with Sharpen sales and customer success teams. 

Sharpen’s accessible support and regular business reviews—where they hear about the latest and greatest and get expert contact center advice—starkly contrast to their previous vendor. They didn’t have a contact person, and when the system would go down—which was often—they’d have to self-diagnose and figure out a solution themselves. In the meantime, agents couldn’t make calls, meaning lost productivity.

So, what’s next for the Bankers Life executive recruiting center? They’re incorporating artificial intelligence (AI) into their processes and exploring other innovative ways to improve efficiency and performance.