Engaging Solutions 'Dreams Big'
with NICE inContact CXOne and SpiceCSM
April 5, 2019
NICE inContact Solutions:
• CXone ACD
• SpiceCSM
Results Achieved:
• 80% improvement in agent training time (weeks to hours)
• 75% faster system deployment (months to weeks)
• 90% faster reporting (weeks to hours)
• 85% improvement in time to revenue
• 50% reduction in call handle time
• User-friendly development & maintenance
The Challenge
Working with Medicaid managed care entities and other governmental agencies can necessitate reaching out to large populations, often in a very short time frame, to perform various activities, including customer education, payment reminders and health screenings. The company’s contact center agents, ranging from 100 to 175—scaling up or down as needed—make both inbound and outbound calls in a blended environment.
Call Center Director Christina Sparks says that campaigns often begin with a big “data dump” from a state agency that includes outdated or inaccurate contact information.
“In addition to timing requirements, data integrity is a big pain point for a lot of our clients,” she says. Business process improvements, data mining and integration with client systems (proprietary, on-premise systems, or cloud hybrids), are all important components of the services Engaging Solutions provides.
Case in point: A Medicaid Managed Care plan requested that Engaging Solutions process thousands of plan members within a 90-day eligibility window. Data quality was poor, and the client’s own proprietary system was slowing the entire process down.
The Solution
A collaborative, customized solution with NICE inContact and SpiceCSM enabled Engaging Solutions to bypass the client’s system, do the necessary data mining and complete the extensive outreach assignment within the required timeline.
“After a data gathering session, we started building scripts inside NICE inContact Studio…where member information would be managed and delivered to agents on the front end as well as in our SpiceCSM system,” Christina says. “Together we built an automated process and captured required data points as agents walked through the call script. Once we tested and fully implemented that scripting, we saw increased efficiencies on all levels, including call handle time. This allowed us to eliminate the client’s entire system from the flow.”
“Prior to working with NICE inContact and SpiceCSM, we had systems that only allowed for limited integration and data mining, and they were often incompatible with our client systems,” she continues. “Now we are able to build scripts in the background for both SpiceCSM and NICE inContact with enhanced documentation and automation.”
Automation Drives Efficiency and Productivity Gains
“Average call handle times can be tough to manage when agents are doing health assessments with plan members over the phone,” Christina points out.
“We were looking at around an average handle time of 35 to 45 minutes,” she says. “And that’s without a translator, which extends the call even more—up to a good hour and 30 minutes per call. It’s very difficult to get through the number of members we need to get through within the time frame.”
But automating the process had a major, positive impact. “Once we were able to eliminate the client’s system completely, we reduced average handle time to about 20 to 25 minutes,” Christina says. “In many cases, that was a 50 percent improvement or more!”
Christina says that automating the process had another huge benefit: improved agent morale. Agents simply felt better about the work they were doing. “It wasn’t as taxing to get through calls, and the audit scores were better,” she says. “With NICE inContact, we could set up automation behind the scenes. This way, we were able capture some of the data that the client wanted, so our agents would not have to collect and enter it manually.”
“We were definitely able to increase morale and productivity,” she continues. “We could move through these member lists quicker than before. We could also report information back to the client on a weekly basis. Previously we reported monthly due to the effort required to compile all the data.”
“Automating the process has resulted in a huge improvement in agent morale. It wasn’t as taxing to get through calls, and the audit scores were better.” Christina Sparks, Call Center Director, Engaging Solutions
Automating the Process Provided a Variety of Benefits—to the Client and the Company
Christina says there are other tools in the NICE inContact platform she’d like to leverage with future clients. Remote and work-from-home agents, for example, would add flexibility geographically and could potentially help meet a broader variety of client requirements.
Additionally, Engaging Solutions would like to move to a true omnichannel environment. “We definitely want to take advantage of the other channels that are part of the NICE inContact platform, like SMS messaging, chat and email,” Christina says. “A lot of the plan members we reach out to are younger, and text messaging is all they do!”
In the meantime, Christina incorporates the benefits of NICE inContact into her pitches with prospective clients—the lack of downtime, the reliability and most of all, the flexibility of being able to customize.
“I use the successes of the Medicaid Managed Care plan as an example and tell them to ‘dream big,’ because we will customize their solutions the way they want it,” she says. “We tell them that all of our technology is fully customizable, so however they want their process to flow, we will build their solutions in alignment with that.”
Christina says she also likes the way NICE inContact and SpiceCSM products work together, like a family.
“I like the relationship between the two,” she says. “They integrate seamlessly, and it’s translated into a very user-friendly approach that has made it easy for us to learn and build solutions.”
Engaging Solutions:
Founded nearly 15 years ago, Engaging Solutions has experienced a growth rate of over 140% in just the last five years. Headquartered in Indianaoplis, the management consulting firm operates in nine states, collaborating with government agencies, small businesses and Fortune 500 companies to resolve complex issues. Its contact center sector works largely with managed care entities and other companies in the healthcare industry, and its 100-175 agents handle over 3 million calls every year. To learn more about Engaging Solutions, visit www.engagingsolutions.net.
NICE inContact (Nasdaq:NICE) the cloud contact center software leader, empowering organizations to provide exceptional customer experiences with the world’s #1 cloud customer experience platform, NICE inContact CXone™. CXone combines best-in-class Omnichannel Routing, Workforce Optimization, Analytics, Automation and Artificial Intelligence on an Open Cloud Foundation to help companies act smarter and respond faster to consumer expectations. NICE inContact, a NICE company, is recognized as a market leader by the leading industry analyst firms, and serves customers in more than 150 countries, including over 85 of the Fortune 100 companies. To learn more about NICE inContact, visit www.incontact.com.
SpiceCSM: is the leading platform for creating a digital ecosystem that connects disparate systems, people, and processes, and orchestrates interactions to greatly enhance the user experience and better leverage existing infrastructure. Combining a powerful integration platform, robust business rules and work-flow engines, intelligent robotic process automation, and a unified interface with dashboard and analytics, SpiceCSM allows organizations unparalleled capabilities to innovate and transform their business operations without expensive, time consuming rip and replace initiatives. To learn more about SpiceCSM, visit www.spicecsm.com.
