The VoIP Advantage

One organization that has made the move successfully in its call center is Unison Health Plan, which operates government-sponsored managed healthcare plans in Ohio, Pennsylvania, South Carolina and Tennessee. Moving to an IP-based communication solution wasn’t just a nice-to-do for the fast-growing insurance provider — it was a technological necessity to meet business and compliance goals.

“It was a very high priority,” says CIO Steven D. Bugajski, a finalist in this year’s Pittsburgh CIO of the Year award. The company had rapidly moved from an organization with just a couple of lines of business with state agencies and one large call center to what is now a $700 million company that as of last year had partnered with about 330,000 members and 15,000 providers throughout Pennsylvania, Ohio, South Carolina, and Tennessee.

“We noticed quickly as we got new lines of business in existing states or new states, as we bid on additional opportunities for membership, we’d activate another 800 number but route them into the same queue,” Bugajski says.

Reducing hold times, getting first-call resolution rates up, and reducing abandonment rates, without substantially increasing call center agent labor, real estate, and IT costs, was critical to supporting the company’s continuing growth. On an annual basis, Bugajski reports the organization is now at six-figure savings. Its existing group-based, automatic call distribution system was too limited and lacked flexibility to support advanced applications.

Then there was compliance

One major concern was the steep learning curve for getting call center employees up to speed as Unison expanded its insurance product offerings to seven, and as call volume multiplied (now up to nearly 50,000 per week). As the company grew, it would be unrealistic to continue to expect that a live person would be able to immediately pick up the phone when a call comes in, and at the same time, Unison couldn’t get full ROI out of its call center employees until they were up to speed on all the lines of business. Without the skills-based routing that could be supported by an IP communications system, Unison wouldn’t be able to create specific line-of-business expertise and to answer calls more efficiently.

“We wanted to quickly get them on the phone and get an immediate return, and as skills increased, we could start adding additional call routes to them,” Bugajski says.

Then there was the compliance issue, too. With the Medicare pharmacy benefits that rolled out in 2006, “we needed a lot of robust reporting off of that to meet the regulatory requirements,” says Bugajski, and with the old system, “quality and call statistics reporting weren’t very robust.”