Church Mutual Insurance Recertified To Benchmark Portal's Highest Honor

Would it follow that a church organization might provide superior customer care? Perhaps, and one church organization – Church Mutual Insurance Company – has announced that its National Customer Service Center (NCSC) has been recertified as a Center of Excellence by BenchmarkPortal and The Center for Customer-Driven Quality founded at Purdue University (News - Alert). This is the third time Church Mutual has earned the certification, and it is one of only 53 service centers in the nation to hold the certification, the company said in a press release.

BenchmarkPortal (News - Alert) designates a call center a Certified Center of Excellence after an intensive audit that verifies and quantifies 22 key performance indicators. Those numbers are then compared with data from other peer organizations. 

“The NCSC has consistently provided an extremely high-level service to our customers since opening in October of 2007,” Church Mutual President and CEO Mike Ravn said. “Despite handling more calls each year, its industry-leading performance numbers keep improving.” 

The National Customer Service Center support 90,000 of the company's customers in all but five states and handles approximately 520,000 calls per year, with an impressive speed-to-answer of 12.24 seconds: truly a mark of customer support excellence. (The property casualty insurance industry averages 22.83 seconds.) The Center boasts first-call resolution of 99 percent against an 86.1 industry average.

Only about 10 percent of service centers that begin the Center of Excellence certification process.

“Maintaining this certification always involves an overall team effort,” said Church Mutual National Customer Service Center Manager Jon Smith. “As our roles have expanded over these past five years, our focus on the customer coming first has not wavered.”

Tracey Schelmetic is a contributing editor for TMCnet. To read more of Tracey's articles, please visit her columnist page.

Edited by Chris DiMarco