MaestroQA: Why Attune Insurance Abandoned Spreadsheets

Ah, insurance. Wharton Business School calls it the “most misunderstood of industries”, and it’s easy to see why. Most people think of insurance as an investment (and hence expect an ROI), while it really should be thought of as a layer of protection for your business that you’re purchasing.

Enter Attune. This lovechild of three established giants of the insurance industry was created to streamline the traditional underwriting process. Their product has led to reductions in costs to small business owners, the backbone of our economy (watch the first two minutes of this hilarious bit by John Oliver), and allows them to get the coverage that makes sense for their businesses.

Attune serves as a go-between for brokers and insurance carriers. Here’s how it works: agents use the Attune app to collect a (very) limited amount of information from the customer, which immediately generates a quote. Policies are created in mere minutes, instead of the hours of interviews, questionnaires, and underwriting that was historically necessary to determine premiums and quotes.

Cheaper and quicker policies = happier small businesses (see, math isn’t that hard! 🤓)

Attune’s product complexity lends itself to an interesting case study for how to set up and scale a QA program.

Designing an Excellent Customer Service Program

Attune’s CX team sits at the intersection between insurance carriers, brokers, and policy-buyers, and have to field customer service queries from all three groups. 
If you’re already thinking “gosh, that sounds so complex!”, skip the next line –  it might be too much to handle. The CX team also has to service custom-built financial products, as well as the security requirements of being in the financial services space.

Attune recognized the need for a robust QA program early on, when they only had three agents. And even at three agents...there were very important quality considerations:

Attune had plans to scale their team to 100 agents within the next two years, and the QA program would have to be flexible enough to accommodate teams of that size. Additionally, care needed to be taken to maintain the quality of customer interactions (and CSAT scores!) as Attune’s customer base grew.

Deciding on a Quality Management tool for their Customer Experience Team 

With these considerations in mind, Attune’s Director of Operations, Elena Micich, decided early in the process that a QA tool would be necessary.

“You shouldn’t be grading interactions on spreadsheets just because your team is small! In fact, it becomes even more important that you get the maximum output from the time you are investing in QA – and a tool like Maestro helps immensely with this.”

Investing in MaestroQA early on gave Attune the chance to master the Quality Assurance program and ensure that their QA workflow would scale as rapidly as their CX team would.

Elena again:

“We also used QA to answer the question: what does quality look like for Attune? And how do we make it stick?”

For a company with a burgeoning CX team, the MaestroQA platform was an important tool in codifying their brand experience, and testing to make sure that their CX team was delivering it.

Scaling up Their Customer Experience and Quality Assurance Workflows

Even at three agents, Attune already had their sights set on having a team thirty times as large. They began planning for an eventual team size of 100 or more agents scattered throughout the country.To do this, they experimented with QA programs with very different methods of execution:

To kickstart their QA program, they had agents grade each other’s tickets. This allowed the whole team to have a say in what was expected of the customer Experiences they were delivering, influence the design of the first QA scorecard, and allowed Attune to put off hiring a dedicated QA specialist. However, there were drawbacks to this method.

There was little incentive for agents to give negative or critical feedback to their peers. In fact, there were an awful lot of perfect scores being handed out. It was also unsustainable at scale – the process of anonymously assigning tickets to agents to grade would become a nightmare as the team grew, and would’ve precluded the possibility of giving essential, face-to-face feedback.

The team soon outgrew peer-reviewing, and started having team leads run the QA process. At the same time, they implemented MaestroQA to ensure that the process kept as simple as possible, and that the grading process followed industry security standards.

The combination of an omnichannel quality management platform and having team leads grade tickets improved the efficiency and quality of the quality assurance workflow (very meta, we know).

But there was one major downside to having team leads grade their agents. Beyond interviewing and hiring new candidates, managing the day-to-day operations of the team, scheduling and approving time off for agents, and a plethora of other things, there was little capacity for team leads to grade tickets on a regular basis. For something as important as QA, it was important to have people who were fully focused on grading other agents.

Finally, the team landed on the perfect solution for their needs.

While we generally advocate having dedicated QA specialists grade tickets and own the entirety of the QA process, that wouldn’t work for Attune.

For a complex industry and product like theirs, it made more sense to group agents into groups of subject matter experts (SMEs) – each SME group was in charge of a silo of product knowledge. Similarly, their QA specialists had to have the specialized knowledge needed to effectively grade agents. Attune landed on a hybrid model – QA specialists who graded the agents within their SME group.

Through a process of trial-and-error, working with their dedicated MaestroQA customer success manager, and iterating their QA workflow on the MaestroQA platform, Attune was able to design a QA process that best served their needs.

Have unique QA requirements like Attune? Set up a strategy call with our team today.