Customer Service

Welcoming 300,000 new plan members with never-before-created technology

Our Client

Our client, one of the leading healthcare payers in the U.S., provides benefits through employers in all 50 states. The company reported 17.7 million members and revenue (excluding realized capital losses) of $31.6 billion in 2008.

The Background

Rapid growth brought this client to us in 2006. For our first engagement, we were asked to determine whether the client’s strategic call-center application would scale successfully to meet expanding staff and hours. Even as it was, however, system response time was unacceptably long. After reviewing the architecture, we designed and developed an implementation tool to identify system bottlenecks, thus enabling the application to handle current and future volume.

In 2007, the client took a major step forward, successfully recruiting a global banking leader as a customer—and its 300,000 employees as members. The terms of the agreement cited certain features as essential to providing the service that the bank’s workers wanted.

The Challenge

Two of those features involved complex technical challenges:

1. New-member treatment. The client asked its call center’s customer service representatives (CSRs) to inform all bank workers and other new members about their benefits. To accomplish that task, however, the CSR had to know instantly whether the incoming call was from a new member.
2. Online chat. This feature would enable CSRs to serve customers online, in real time. Up till this engagement, however, the client’s chief call-center application and its selected chat software had never interfaced before—on any level, in any organization. 

The Blue Slate Solution

Throughout the engagement, Blue Slate not only provided high-level technical leadership, but collaborated early and often—with business leaders, business analysts, programmers, software vendors, and many others—to ensure that the solution would be an ideal fit for the client’s objectives. On the new-member treatment, these strategies led directly to creation of the code that would enable this essential feature.

The online chat required two phases: first, integration of the chat dialogue text into the call-center database, so the CSR could see a history of chats as well as other customer data; second, integration of the applications so that, when the member’s chat text popped up on the screen, so did her member information. First, a customized Blue Slate team used its technical expertise to come up with an innovative design. Then, team members set up and led conversations between the respective software developers to determine potential integration points and strategies. The result was a robust solution that meshed seamlessly with the client’s system.