What is QRC (Query – Request – Complaint) in Customer Experience (CX) / Customer Service Language?
Definition of QRC
QRC stands for Query Request Complaint. It is a mechanism used to categorize incoming customer interaction into these 3 different categories.
Any brand or company can organize their incoming customer interactions into QRC, but it is predominantly used in BFSI sector companies like Banks, Insurance Companies, Loan Companies etc. The reason being these companies are predominantly B2C and contain millions of customers. When you categorize and capture large incoming customer interactions as QRC, guided, data-driven business decisions can be taken for better customer experience.
Customer Satisfaction vs Customer Experience
There is a subtle difference between customer satisfaction and customer experience.
Customer Satisfaction
Whenever a customer buys a product or service, if the product or service is delivered on time with the quality that is expected, a customer will be satisfied.
For example, an insurance company sells a policy to a customer and the customer gets into a situation where he has to apply for a claim and get the insured money. So if the customer gets the insured claim money within a reasonable time and the expected value of the policy, then the customer experiences customer satisfaction.
If the claim is supposed to be delivered in a month and is delivered after 3 months, the customer will experience dissatisfaction. In case, if the customer is expecting a full claim amount, but for some reason, the insurance company approves only 70% of the claim amount, he experiences dissatisfaction.
Customer Experience
Customer experience covers the complete journey of the customer from product/service evaluation, purchase, payment, delivery and post-delivery support until the end of the product/service usage. This includes more departments than the customer satisfaction department. It involves the sales department, purchase department, sales, delivery department, product or service installation department, and customer support department.
In any business, there are many stages in the customer journey experience:
- Product / Service Pre Sales experience
- Product / Service Sales experience
- Product / Service Acquisition Experience
- Product / Service Usage experience
- Product / Service Renewal / Continued Support experience
- Product / Service Decommission Experience
Typically, when you are planning to purchase or before purchasing, there will be a lot of questions/queries on the product and services. During the acquisition time, you will have a lot of requests on enabling it and changing it to be adaptable to the customer. Once you start using the product or service, there may be a lot of complaints and bad experiences.
Most of the time companies and brands will be concentrating more on complaints to improve customer satisfaction rather than addressing Queries and Requests. Generally, the customer journey from pre-sales to customer support is not tracked and analyzed.
Inbound / Outbound customer interaction from the prospecting stage to service stage may come from email, telephone, letters, a self-service portal, live chat, chat-bots, and walk-ins, etc. So that request reaches the concerned team quickly.
QRC Management
The basic element of QRC Management is about capturing all the inbound and outbound communication at one place like a CRM – Customer Relationship Management. QRC Management is all about labeling the communication as one of these three Query, Request or Complaint and then handling it with monitored Turn-Around Times or TATs.
Once communication is categorized, identify the right team/department to address and allocate the request to them. From the time it is assigned to the department, measure the quality and time taken for a completed response.
Define a Turn Around Time (TAT) for all the three types of inbound/outbound communication and monitor them through daily, weekly and monthly reports. The quality of response can be improved by template emails for intimations, reminders, and escalations.
Intimations are typically for customers as well as to the allocated departments. Whereas reminders and escalations help the management to closely monitor the Turn Around Times.
QRC in Insurance Sector
In the insurance sector, the whole customer experience revolves around the following :
- Insurance Policy Evaluation / Suggestion Process
- Policy Premium Calculation
- Policy Purchase and Payment Process
- Policy Issuance Process
- Policy Amendment / Change or Policy Endorsement Process
- Policy Renewal Process
- Policy Claim Process
If you look at these companies, they can set their customer experience standards across the 7 different steps that we can call the Customer Journey. However, customer satisfaction comes only when you approve the claim and deliver the claimed money.
Queries
A Query is a question raised related to Policy, Policy Endorsement, Policy Cancellation, Policy Renewal or Claim, etc that a customer asks in a Chabot or Email or Call.
All these kinds of questions can be captured as a query in CRM.
- How to lodge a Request / Complaint?
- How to Renew my policy?
- Policy related queries –
- What is my Policy number?
- What is my Policy Issuance duration?
- What is my Policy Premium amount?
- Policy Cancellation related queries –
- What is the Process for cancellation?
- What is my Policy cancellation status?
- Product claim queries –
- How do I register my Claim?
- What is the status of Surveyor assignment?
- How much is my Claim amount?
- When will my Claim amount released?
- Endorsement related queries –
- What are the required documents for Policy Endorsement?
- What is my Endorsement Status?
- What is the Policy Number of Add-ons?
- What is the amount I need to pay to add another person to my policy?
Companies can create a repository of all these questions and create a response mechanism for the employees and if the delivery, quality of these questions is maintained across the customer then the experience will be consistent.
When you have a comprehensive repository of all these Queries, companies can analyze what type of questions are frequent and research on why they are coming frequently. Later, prevent them with the right action.
Requests
Customer Request means a work request made to a product by any person through the CRM.
It can be:
- Made in person
- By letter
- By photocopy
- By email
- By telephone
- By two-way radio
- By the self-service portal
- Through a partner or agent
The details of all these service requests that can be categorized as Requests are captured into the CRMS.
In the insurance sector, a customer may request
- Policy Renewal
- Policy Endorsement
- Policy Cancellation
- Claim Requests
Companies that are looking to provide good customer experience, all these Requests should be captured in CRM and handled with the same or similar courtesy and turnaround times.
When customers see consistency in inbound and outbound communications for the entire Request, they will have a positive feeling about the brand.
Some of the typical requests that would be captured as Requests in CRM are:
- Change of Name/Address/Mobile number in the policy
- Issuing Endorsement for Add – on
- Policy Renewal request
- Policy Cancellation request
- Requesting for Policy related documents.
- Claim Registration request
- Inspection/survey Request for policy claim
When you categorize your requests into types and subtypes and allocate them to the corresponding departments, you can aim for consistent turnaround times.
Complaints
A Complaint is an expression of dissatisfaction on a consumer’s behalf to a responsible party and typically highlights a problem. The highlighted problem could be with your product, employees or internal processes.
Any type of complaint that is raised by the customer related to products or services provided should be captured as a complaint. Since complaints can be of many types, they can be categorized further into types and subtypes
Some of the typical complaints that can come in the insurance sector are:
- Product-related complaints –
- Policy not issued
- Incomplete / Incorrect details in policy
- Policy cancellation without prior information
- Premium related complaints –
- Premium amount refused
- Cheque bounce
- Premium receipt not received
- Differentiation in Premium amount
- Refund related complaints –
- Refund amount differences
- Refund amount not received
- Claim related complaints –
- Refused to register a claim
- Delay in conducting claim survey
- Difference in claim amount
- Delay in claim amount process
- Complaints related to employees/agents
- Misbehavior of call center executive
- Misbehavior of surveyor/Investigator/Insurer
- Online payment issues
- Payment Gateway related issues
- Payment Deducted – but not reflecting in the system
Once the service requests that are labeled as “Complaints” are registered and allocated to the corresponding team that can be tracked for time and quality. They can be organized and analyzed based on the frequency of occurrence and employees can be trained for diligent closure of the complaint.
The insurance sector is monitored by government regulatory authority. The customer has the option to directly report the complaint with the regulating authority.
In India IRDAI – Insurance Regulatory Development Authority of India (www.irdai.gov.in) facilitates complaint registration. All these complaints must be handled with tight turnaround times.
IRDAI provides a basic organization of Complaints for all types of insurance companies and facilitates API based integration with the company’s internal CRM.
SugarCRM as QRC Management System
SugarCRM is one of the leading CRM vendors with products that serve on-demand customers and on-premise customers. Most of the banking and financial sector customers may have data residency regulations and SugarCRM On-Premise solution can work well in such situations.
Most of the CRMs including SugarCRM have support modules that are called “Cases” or “Tickets”. The BFSI sector calls them as “Service Requests”. You can rename the cases module easily as the “Service Requests” module. Click here to know more about SugarCRM Ticketing system.
As a standard feature, these modules do not differentiate between a Query, Request or Complaint.
Using SugarCRM admin Studio, add a drop-down field with Queries, Requests, and Complaints. To know the flexibility of SugarCRM for adding fields and modules – read this article.
Add all the different types of sources of communication like email, telephone inbound and outbound calls, self-service portal communication, letters, walk-in, live chat, chatbot, etc.
Support Emails can be converted into “Service Requests” by configuring the inbound email settings in the admin panel. Once emails are converted to Service Requests, they can be manually categorized to Queries, Requests, and Complaints. These QRC Issues are allocated to the corresponding service teams.
Once the Service Request is created with any of these activities, users can capture the status of the Service Requests and the system can send templated emails like intimation, reminder and escalation emails daily to respective departments depending upon the TAT(Turn Around Time) of respective request or query.
SugarBPM component (What is SugarBPM) can be extensively used to create these workflows for automating the intimation process and escalation process.
The default Reports and Dashboards help in visually representing the QRC metrics to the management and the individual performance monitoring – read this article.
A comprehensive QRC system is essential for delivering a quality customer experience in the insurance sector or any financial sector companies.
Bhea has implemented the SugarCRM Enterprise edition for an insurance customer, by building the features of an Insurance CRM. Insurance and Banking sector companies can improve their customer services by implementing customer support automation software like SugarCRM.
Contact us for a quick demo of SugarCRM or a QRC System for the Insurance sector or any finance company. One of our executives will be happy to facilitate the demo.
