The challenge

A nationwide home infusion organization (an organization that specializes in the administration of drugs or medicine through a catheter or needle to patients in their home) was aware that it needed to improve its customer experience (CX) in an increasingly competitive field. Callers faced long wait times and employees struggled with complex operational requirements and processes with limited data insights.

As part of its transformation, the organization was seeking a partner to help it improve the operating performance of an under-performing business unit and provide patients with a more timely and accurate service experience while delivering process and cost efficiencies to the business.

Our solution

TTEC conducted an in-depth analysis of the client’s business needs and developed a detailed service delivery model concept and roadmap, winning the right to partner with the client to turn around the business unit and improve the overall customer experience. The TTEC team proposed and deployed a solution that addressed numerous pain points and inefficiencies, applied industry best practices, and increased savings. The solution included:

CX organizational/process design and optimization
To drive more efficiency and increase response times, we reorganized the employee workflow into logical sequential process steps — creating cellular teams instead of siloed departments or specific functions grouped in specific areas. By centralizing all of the required resources, and balancing the activities among the team, teammates took responsibility for their clearly defined workload and key metrics. We also redesigned the work space to increase dynamic communications, enabling teammates to quickly ask a question and receive an answer with no wasted time.

Greater data insights
We designed a comprehensive reporting system with user-friendly dashboards to quickly drive visibility into issues and progress. This included a weekly return and report mechanism, drill-down reporting by errors, payor, etc., and we developed supervisor and managerial dashboards to drive workflow on an hourly basis by team.

Cultural transformation to support a CX mindset
Part of the challenge was a lack of emphasis on the customer experience from an employee and managerial level. Working closely with the senior leaders and team leads, we developed a change management program for leadership to drive new operational practices that emphasize a CX mindset. For example, teams were encouraged to “own” their team metrics and results, creating a sense of pride and motivation for extra mile actions that drove a better customer experience.

The results

The comprehensive roadmap and operational improvements that the TTEC team implemented were a proven success; the client gained transparency into patient statuses, powerful analytics for measuring service performance and quickly spotting issues, a reduction of work queues and delays, and a model for further improving the customer experience.

Removing the operational roadblocks and streamlining the end-to-end care delivery process enabled employees within the underperforming business unit to work more efficiently and support more patients in less time with fewer errors.

As a result of these improvements, abandon rates decreased 75% and the average cycle time — the time it takes to process an item after a call is received, e.g., review insurance coverage, schedule the appointment, produce the bill — was cut in half. New billing denials, a refusal by the insurance company to pay for a service due to missing information, duplicate claims, etc., decreased 23%.

In addition, as a result of these improvements, the client saw total revenue adjustments per month decrease from about $3 million to $600,000 — producing $2.4 million in savings.