Empowering a member-first culture

Improving tools and CX systems

With more than 1,100 associates serving nearly 380,000 members, Independent Health is a leading health plan provider dedicated to improving well-being in western New York. Exceptional customer experience (CX) is vital to the success of that mission.

“The health insurance market has bigger national carriers, but what we bring is a local touch,” said Amanda Prell, Director, Contact Center Experience at Independent Health. “We pride ourselves on delivering the highest level of service and putting members’ feelings before our own.”

Independent Health calls this The RedShirt^® Treatment, a member-first culture across all its contact centers that enables associates to provide fast answers, access to primary care physicians, wellness tools and advice on new ways to stay active — when members need these things most.

However, there was room for improvement when it came to technology. “Along with on-premises Avaya telephony and Verint workforce management we had an array of tools, causing complexity that limited our ability to make the experience better or the associates’ jobs easier,” added Prell.

Fully remote self-implementation

Realizing there wasn’t much to gain from a basic phone swap out, Independent Health seized the opportunity to innovate as part of a broader cloud contact center strategy.

“After speaking with Genesys, we saw the chance to quickly grow our digital and omnichannel capabilities,” said Prell. “That’s helped us to reduce our systems and support costs, while becoming more productive and self-sufficient.”

Requiring minimal external support, the project team at Independent Health successfully migrated to Genesys Cloud in an accelerated four-month timeframe, without even having an on-site visit.

“It was a 100% remote deployment with Genesys teaching us how do things like build our own call flows,” said Jason Lorden, Manager, Systems and Workforce Management at Independent Health. “The main challenges were around data export and training, but our users instantly got comfortable with the solution.”

Enhancing the member experience with cloud

Now, with Genesys Cloud, Independent Health is in a stronger position to stay relevant with members as healthcare costs continue to rise. It can improve the experience around enrollment, onboarding, managing coverage, benefits utilization and member wellness. Independent Health can serve its members and providers in new ways — more effectively, efficiently and empathetically than before. For example, it can offer a chat or callback, which reduces previous sources of friction like excessive queue and hold times.

Associates benefit from timely screen pops, enabled through painless integration with the company’s Siebel CRM system. Outbound marketing activities, such as member retention campaigns, are also easier to set up and run.

In addition, native Genesys Workforce Engagement Management tools assist with frequent back-office tasks like quality assurance, planning and forecasting. Largely automated, these ensure Independent Health always has the right experts in the right place, at the right time.

The next step will be to introduce Call Journey, an artificial intelligence (AI)-powered voice analytics tool from the AppFoundry^® Marketplace that leverages Genesys open APIs.

“We typically manage 40,000 calls and 800 chats per month, with minimal associate and member effort,” said Lorden. “Also, by using AI to increase our understanding of the caller’s intent, we can better connect them to self-service options, whether they simply need to make a payment, check a bill or order a new ID card.”

Benefits beyond the contact center

Independent Health was so impressed with the rich functionality and quality of Genesys Cloud that it extended the solution to 300 back office, IT support and general business users — simplifying and consolidating company-wide voice communications. Unlike before when business users relied on IT intervention and release dates, they now build, test and deploy their own system changes in a fraction of the time. With reduced innovation cycles, the future looks bright.

“We’re now able to respond faster to changing conditions and emerging situations,” concluded Prell. “All we have to do is purchase additional licenses to add new users, services and features. Best of all, our member satisfaction rate remains high at around 95 percent.”