The Challenge: Contact Center Transformation
One of the largest managed care companies in the United States has grown their top line revenue by 5x in the last five years, primarily through several large acquisitions. Every company they’ve acquired has its own platforms, each with its own customer service telephony and interactive voice response (IVR) system. Achieving targeted synergies of these acquisitions required more than systems integration and necessitated transformational adoption of new common contact center tools to deliver a unified, standard, and scalable omnichannel customer experience across the entire organization. Consolidating these systems will reduce their IT footprint, improve operational efficiency, and standardize and improve member and provider experience.
The managed care company chose Amazon Connect as the common telephony platform for customer service for all its domestic businesses, giving them greater flexibility in staffing and geographic distribution of their contact centers. This multi-year transformation will take advantage of the flexibility and innovative features of this cloud-based platform to improve self-service adoption, thereby increasing call deflection and employ intelligent routing and computer telephony integration (CTI) capabilities to reduce handle times and increase first call resolution yielding operating cost reductions.
Experience Is More Than the Platform
This enterprise initiative reflects the size and scale of their business and will affect their 25 million members and their entire network of providers along with more than 16,000 customer service agents. The managed care provider is working with several partners that are assisting with the implementation of this large-scale, national, multi-year contact center transformation. But they had some key goals they weren’t sure how to meet:
- They want to use customer insights as the guiding principle to drive the design of this transformation, but with the number of disparate systems and processes, it was challenging to consolidate customer knowledge to derive those insights.
- They want to create a single unified experience, spanning all their products, health plans, and brands which span all 50 states. They aren’t sure how to architect an experience that’s consistent yet configurable at the state level - and scalable as they add new acquisitions and health plans.
Ultimately, with such a large and time-consuming project, they want to know that what they build will work, save money, and continue to help them evolve.
...two-thirds of customers say valuing their time is the most important thing a company can do to provide them with good service
-Forrester
Partnering with 1904labs: HCDAgile
We’re partnering with the managed care company to apply our HCDAgile methodology to their telephony transformation. HCDAgile, which combines Human-Centered Design and agile development, can uniquely help the organization address business, user, and technology needs in the Amazon Connect roll out. To apply HCDAgile practices, we’re working with them to create a framework over the program that will ensure: a human-centric, metrics-driven experience design; reusable architecture design; and business value realization is built in from the start.
How We’re Helping
To address their goals, 1904labs is focusing on three areas within the contact center transformation:
Customer Experience
We’re helping the managed care company structure the initiative in order to ensure the new platform delivers on the promise of the new technologies to achieve a truly transformative experience for their members, providers, and customer service agents. We’re bringing our Human-Centered Design methods and techniques to help them gather the necessary customer information and input from key stakeholders representing their health plans before analyzing that data to create the new unified experience.
Architecture
We’re helping the organization design the program in a way that’s repeatable and, ultimately, low cost. To do this, we’re working on disciplined architecture elaboration. The managed care company had a general notion of how this would work but needed a much deeper elaboration of how the system would be architected. We’re investigating those open questions to define the large scope to move from on premises to cloud, from IVR to Amazon Connect.
One of the critical pieces our team is working on is how to design the architecture right for the first states and then reuse that architecture to tailor to each individual state and get more cost savings as they implement each new state.
Business Value Realization
We’re helping the organization understand the value they will get from the contact center program and build business metrics into the design.
We’re also providing technical product ownership for Amazon Connect, ordering the work in a way to get value to the business and customer as soon as possible.
