Blue Cross Blue Shield Louisiana Enhances the Customer Experience through New Insights

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The results

Improves utilization of quality resources and delivers more precise agent coaching
Streamlines time-off requests and ensures optimal staffing
Deflects callers to the organization’s website to reduce costs and empower customers with 24/7 self-service

About Blue Cross Blue Shield of Louisiana

The largest health insurer in Louisiana, Blue Cross Blue Shield of Louisiana serves over 1.5 million Louisianans, providing medical, dental, Medicare Advantage, and prescription drug coverage to individuals, families, and employers. Its customers range from young adults, to children, to seniors – all with dramatically different healthcare needs.

To address its customers’ needs, Blue Cross Blue Shield of Louisiana put a next-generation technology foundation in place to extract and understand critical insights from both customers and healthcare professionals.

With these insights, the health insurer drives process improvements to enhance the customer experience and business outcomes. Additionally, technology helps elevate efficiency across its customer service operations, with an eye toward continuous improvement.

Solution: Streamline and optimize agent-customer interactions with Verint

Within its contact center operations, Blue Cross Blue Shield of Louisiana uses Verint Call Recording to record upward of 2.1 million customer calls annually. It then utilizes Verint Speech Analytics to transcribe and index every phone call to create a rich source of data that can be analyzed to surface opportunities and trends, root causes of customer pain points, and customer emotions and behaviors around different topics and concerns.

The company has built an extensive library of call categories that it constantly fine-tunes. This enables it to quickly identify trends and devise strategies to address issues and opportunities.

Other Verint solutions are also at work to help Blue Cross Blue Shield of Louisiana streamline and optimize agent-customer interactions. Verint Quality Management and Verint Coaching enable the health insurer to automate its quality monitoring process, from call evaluations to the scheduling, delivery, and tracking of employee coaching.

The organization’s use of Verint Desktop and Process Analytics provides a precise understanding of agent desktop usage, supporting its efforts to simplify processes for reduced speed and effort. Finally, Blue Cross Blue Shield of Louisiana leverages Verint Workforce Management along with Verint Strategic Planner to augment near-term forecasting and scheduling with long-term resource planning.

Benefits: Reduce call volume with Verint Speech Analytics

Blue Cross Blue Shield of Louisiana has seen some big wins thanks to Verint, particularly in the areas of change management and call deflection.

For example, after the Affordable Care Act was passed in 2010, insights gained from Verint Speech Analytics prompted the company to change IVR prompts and web copy to assure customers that their existing healthcare coverage was still in effect.

This helped reduce call volume by deflecting customers to the organization’s website.

Following U.S. Medicare coverage expansion, call insights enabled the company to get ahead of potential issues, with the development of a frequently asked questions document educating agents in advance on expected customer inquiries. This enabled agents to address issues quicker, in turn delivering a more positive customer experience.

“We don’t know what we don’t know,” says Mattias Liljeberg, software engineer lead at Blue Cross Blue Shield of Louisiana. “That’s where Verint Speech Analytics has been invaluable. It has helped us identify and make needed changes to improve the customer experience.”

Understanding the customer journey

Verint Speech Analytics has provided the health insurer with deeper, richer insights to guide precision coaching, while Verint Quality Management and Verint Coaching have streamlined the organization’s quality monitoring process.

All of these improvement further helped it translate customer insights into action for continuous improvement.

“Healthcare is a product that is very emotionally charged,” Liljeberg notes. “A caller may be facing the most difficult time in their life and/or they may be in a lot of pain. We want to empower our agents to better understand the customer journey and be properly prepared, so we can provide great service along with empathy.”

"Verint has an extensive workforce engagement suite that all integrates together. The software is highly configurable and rock solid - very resilient, self-healing, and reliable."
Mattias Liljeberg Software Engineer Lead, Blue Cross Blue Shield of Louisiana

Results

With Verint Workforce Management, Blue Cross Blue Shield of Louisiana has real-time visibility into schedules. This has enabled the company to streamline processes such as time-off requests to improve employee morale and job satisfaction.

Additionally, Verint Strategic Planner enables the business to understand staffing trends and plan on a longerterm basis.

“Verint has an extensive workforce engagement suite that all integrates together,” explains Liljeberg. “The software is highly configurable and rock solid – very resilient, self-healing, and reliable. I can honestly say that Verint is the one vendor I have the least amount of problems with and the solutions require the least amount of babying. Plus, if there is a problem, the Verint alarm modules alert me before it becomes a real issue.”

Creating customers for life

Moving forward, Blue Cross Blue Shield of Louisiana is evolving to fully automated quality monitoring with auto scoring of calls. This will allow existing staff to perform 33 percent more call scoring or use more of their time on other value-add activities.

The company also plans to add chat all the while continuing to invest in its partnership with Verint to ensure a seamless, integrated omnichannel experience for customers.

“Two years ago, I heard Verint talk about its commitment to creating customers for life,” Liljeberg concludes. “Last year I saw it and this year I felt it. The fact that Verint sees customer engagement as a true partnership is very powerful.”