Ameritas Contact Center Achieves Its Sixth Certification as a BenchmarkPortal Center of Excellence

The dental, vision and hearing contact center at Ameritas Group, a division of Ameritas Life Insurance Corp., has been certified as a Center of Excellence by BenchmarkPortal, a leading contact center research and consulting organization. “Achieving Center of Excellence certification is an acknowledgement of strong management and leadership in the call center industry,” said BenchmarkPortal CEO Bruce Belfiore. “Contact centers that achieve certification are remarkable in their ability to balance a commitment to service excellence with cost effective service strategies.”

To achieve certification as a Center of Excellence, a company must undergo a rigorous benchmarking process, which compares the organization’s operational metrics to those of its peers, using the world's largest database of contact center metrics. During this process, BenchmarkPortal experts audit and verify key data from the contact center applying for certification.

Factors (called key performance indicators) such as first call resolution, cost per call, call waiting time, customer satisfaction, agent satisfaction and utilization of human resources are taken into account. BenchmarkPortal is able to scientifically gauge how the contact center being studied compares to other centers in the same industry, and if the performance of the contact center is superior. Customer satisfaction, which relates to customer loyalty and business growth, is the goal, balanced by financial metrics which show that the center is being operated efficiently.

“Center of Excellence certification indicates that the contact center delivers superior customer service within a responsible cost structure,” said Belfiore. "A great contact center operation reflects its management's passion for balancing the demands of high quality and low costs. Ameritas has shown its ability to achieve that balance through its objective performance metrics. We have validated its metrics and have certified that Ameritas is, indeed, among the best in its industry. I congratulate Ameritas on a job well done.”

“Benchmarking delivers a crackerjack profile of a contact center’s operations that can inspire management to move forward aggressively, even in a less-than-robust economy,” added Belfiore, who has been with the company since 2000.

About Ameritas
Ameritas Group, a division of Ameritas Life Insurance Corp., has served customers since 1959 and today provides dental, vision and hearing care products and services for nearly 110,000 employer groups, insuring or administering benefits for more than 5.4 million people nationwide. Ameritas has one of the largest dental networks in the country with more than 235,000 access points, and its contact center has earned BenchmarkPortal's Center of Excellence certification since 2007 and was named fourth in BenchmarkPortal’s Top 100 contest in 2011. In New York, products are offered through Ameritas Life Insurance Corp. of New York.