A major healthcare payer found itself in that unenviable position: You don’t know what you don’t know. Without visibility into coaching effectiveness and performance of contact center advocates, how do you improve? Which tools do you invest in? How do you recognize and reward excellence?

The challenge

Healthcare advocates assisting members in the voice channel were unable to resolve issues as quickly and effectively as expected. The member experience suffered. The payer lacked access to performance data and the analytical firepower to convert it to insights that inform decision-making.

Our solution

We implemented TTEC Perform, our proprietary, AI-enhanced, people-empowerment platform that identified important metrics and helped team leads identify coachable behaviors. The solution analyzed employee data to create data-driven coaching plans for team leaders and recommend exercises for advocates to practice and improve their skills.

The AI component brought a high degree of personalization, recognizing for example, which advocate might need extra help improving soft skills like empathy, while another advocate might need extra training on processing a specific type of request.

The platform gave advocates access to their own individual performance dashboards, so they could view how their skills measured up with teammates and were better-prepared for coaching sessions with team leaders. Badges, gamification, contests, and automated recognition injected a level of friendly competition among the team.

Team leads and coaches, meanwhile, became better-equipped to tailor coaching sessions to each advocate, focusing on performance areas most in need of improvement.

The results

Coaching effectiveness rose an astounding 94% in just three months, thanks in part to automated metric updates viewable via a unified dashboard. Relieving team leaders of data-collection and other manual administrative tasks freed them up for higher value, one-to-one precision coaching.

The pilot group, which included about 300 advocates located both onshore and offshore, improved compliance accuracy from 93% to 100% in just three months. 

Prior to the pilot, 76% of advocates were able to resolve a customer issue in 48 hours’ time; using TTEC Perform, a full 91% of issues were successfully resolved in 48 hours, a 20% improvement in first call resolution.

The pilot group consistently outperformed the control group during the first three months of the program. By the fourth month, 63% of advocates exceeded the target NPS and met the NPS goal of 80%. Both team leads and healthcare advocates embraced the tool with enthusiasm:

“When I open TTEC Perform, the first thing I check is if there’s an assigned task, a follow-up coaching for my advocate, or a recognition. My advocates also open TTEC Perform daily, so as soon as I post a follow-up or recognition, they can see it right away.” ~ team lead

“I first check which metric my team exceeds in and which metric they are not meeting, so I can focus on that. I also use the performance trend – I like how there’s an option to sort by lowest and highest. That way I can see which advocates are not meeting the goals and need coaching.” ~ team lead

“All of the metrics are already there, so I no longer have to consolidate different reports. I can easily look at the metrics and compare if we are meeting goals.” ~ team lead

For a closer look at how generative AI and TTEC Perform play out in the real world, check out this demo.

Up next: The healthcare payer plans to expand TTEC Perform to additional lines of business.