Our client is a health insurance company that offers both self-funded and federally-funded plans, such as Medicaid and Medicare.
The Client
The Challenge
Our client knew it was due to be inundated with an influx of new member enrollments in January, primarily due to the annual renewal cycle of federally-funded health plans.
This posed a problem, as every member would need to receive a welcome call to complete their enrollment. This phone call needs to be made within 30 days of being brought into the program. If this period expires and the member is not fully onboarded, they are automatically disenrolled and the health plan loses the federal funding for this individual. For this reason, the plan would expect to make two calls per person, in case they didn’t pick up on the first attempt.
Our client predicted that this January they would receive roughly 30,000 enrollments and re-enrollments, which would demand over 60,000 welcome calls. A surge of this scale would have placed enormous strain on their internal resources. In previous years they had been forced to pull in people from other teams simply to staff their phone lines effectively. This meant the strain was not only felt by the call center, but other divisions, too.
In order to prevent their teams from becoming overwhelmed, they sought external assistance, in the form of Harte Hanks.
Our Solution
Our highly scalable outsourced member support services were an ideal solution for our client’s challenge.
We rapidly scaled our call center operations to accommodate the client’s expected surge of 30,000 new and returning members. When the new year rolled around, there were 54,000 members that needed to be contacted in January alone, or over 100,000 calls.
Responding quickly, we scaled our operations again, with 58 agents allocated to the client’s account in January.
In February, the number of new members fell to 12,000, so we scaled our operations down to just 10 agents. In March and April, when numbers are expected to return to a steady level of 3,000 per month, we will have two agents allocated to make the necessary calls.
The Results
Harte Hanks successfully assisted our client in managing the influx of new member enrollments. Despite the challenges posed by unexpectedly high enrollment volumes, we adapted quickly by rapidly ramping call center capacity, ensuring no revenue was missed by the client.