“Exchange”-ing the Focus on Service Problems for Focus on Helping Customers
The Problem
The Client, a Health Care Exchange, was suffering from utilizing a partner that simply did not staff the correct number of personnel for the call volume, and they were constantly on the front page of their local newspaper for all the wrong reasons: Long hold times and poor quality.
The Challenge
With just weeks to go before the next open enrollment period, the Exchange contacted The Connection® to see if we could do an emergency ramp-up to handle all of their open enrollment calls.
Company Goals for Outsourcing
- Handle Tier 1 calls from customers looking for information on the health exchange or on the status of applications.
- Provide flexible staffing to cover seasonality of volume
- Handle various special projects as needed by the State Exchange, including clearing an initial application backlog of 30,000+ applications, maintain AHT, Quality, Service Level and other KPIs .
Keys to Success
- Ramped over 200 agents in less than eight weeks
- Exceeded customer expectations on all KPI delivery fronts by exceeding all contractual deliverables and KPIs
- Provided continuous feedback from customers to the State to ensure that the State was able to proactively resolve challenges and provide the highest level of support to their customers
- Stayed flexible as staffing requirements varied from 40 FTE up to over 200 FTE throughout the year.
Tasks to Accomplish Success
- We partnered with the Client to develop, enhance, and deliver training curriculum to ensure a successful program.
- With seasonal peak volume coinciding with open enrollment time periods, we successfully ramped 200+ CSR’s between our Rockford and Jamestown locations to meet the volume demands. This improved utilization and ensured that customer wait times were minimal.
- We had a dedicated team of 15 CSR’s on a special project assigned to us that completed life event change applications for insurance program enrollment or modification outside of open enrollment. Our dedicated staff reduced the backlog of applications from 30,000+ to 0 in a very short window.
- We partnered with the Client to provide a dynamic staffing model to ensure availability of agents to handle unexpected volume during peak and off-peak. We analyzed historical call data to enhance volume expectations, resulting in increased agent utilization and cost reduction. We also deployed a multi-site strategy to ensure redundancy in staffing.
- We evaluated historical and current operational metrics, and proactively identified and implemented several new processes that improved the overall consumer experience while consistently reaching 95% quality.
Summary
The Client CEO stated: “Working with The Connection team at all levels of the organization was a great experience! They exhibit an understanding and “can-do” attitude that provides insight, feedback, and value that extends above and beyond their excellent call center services.”
And most importantly… the Client got their name off the front page of the newspaper and was able to significantly improve their P.R. relationship with the community.
