Insurer Improves Contact Center Call Quality With NETSCOUT

Customer Profile

Over twenty million medical benefit members turn to this century and a half old insurer for assistance and support when facing health care treatment. Their benefits, products, and services are targeted at the individual members and their families in need of health care support. They typically work with employers carrying policies for employees, designing and delivering programs and services that match the health care requirements of their members.

Tens of thousands of employees manage these corporate programs, annual enrollments, individual care authorizations, and ongoing responsibilities that support the millions of members every day. The IT team of this insurance provider has taken advantage of digital transformations to ensure the most advanced infrastructure, applications, and customer facing portals and mobile applications are available to meet these everyday demands.

The Challenge

One of the most demanding times for any health care insurance provider is the period of corporate enrollment when new and existing members select the plan that best meets the needs of their particular family situation. Registrations, research, and reputation are all electronically driven via websites, mobile applications, and/or web portals. Depending on the volume of call-in questions and the average length of conversations, demand can be extraordinarily heavy in the call centers, and likely generates the highest level of application and voice traffic, and therefore consuming the most network bandwidth, of any period in the whole year.

IT tackles demands all year to ensure the availability and performance of their member facing application and contact center services whenever the need arises to file a claim, research coverage, evaluate plan physicians, etc. However, during the enrollment period, this becomes an ever more daunting task, particularly without visibility to provide insights to reduce time to troubleshoot and resolve issues. With the increased number of inquiries during this time, contact call centers are busier than usual, just when members face deadlines to complete enrollment activities or benefits adjustments. Anything less than a flawless experience with the contact center and their agents is unacceptable for this insurer.

Unfortunately, issues invariably did occur during enrollment where the call quality was poor, there were reports of connectivity delays and misrouting, and on some occasions, calls were even dropped. Issues did not disappear outside the enrollment period either, they just didn’t happen with the same frequency. Given that the enrollment was an extremely time sensitive activity, this insurer had a standing IT War Room with vendor representatives ready to assist with such issues, however it became apparent that they lacked visibility into the contact centers’ voice and data activity to be as effective as possible.

Solution in Action

This insurer was a long-time user of NETSCOUT’s® nGeniusONE Service Assurance solution with InfiniStreamNG (ISNG) appliances in the core of their network, leveraging real-time packet flow monitoring and Adaptive Service Intelligence™ (ASI) technology analysis for troubleshooting and proactive planning and analysis. It was determined that to ensure visibility and analysis of the contact centers, the IT team would upgrade nGeniusONE to the most current revision to gain all the value of the solution’s unified communications and collaboration (UC&C) capabilities. This would enable them to take advantage of the voice over IP (VoIP) call quality analysis and call set up protocol metrics for evaluating member call experience.

The network operations and network architects at the insurance provider decided to deploy several ISNG appliances with 40GB support to ensure monitoring in their high-speed data center and contact center environment. The team would gain much needed visibility by monitoring voice traffic, as well as traffic coming through the call manager and session border controllers (SBCs). The major areas they are addressing with the nGeniusONE and new ISNGs include:

• Evaluating call set-up issues with analysis of session initiation protocol (SIP) utilization and error details to understand how changes in activity may impact performance and caller experience.
• Triage and troubleshooting of recurring voice quality issues with ability to provide mean opinion scores (MOS), identify quality of service (QoS) assignments and misconfigurations, identify latency and dropped packets, any of which may negatively impact call quality.
• Investigating call routing delays, misrouting, and drops with analysis of such things as load balancing issues across different UC&C servers and the SBCs.
• Pinpointing true cause of issues in a complex multi-vendor call center environment with insight into interoperability issues between call managers, SBC and SIP trunking service providers.

The Results

For this insurer, protecting the user experience of their existing and new members during the enrollment period is critical to the success of the business. Establishing a war room, the size and scope of that in years past, is no longer necessary with the additional NETSCOUT visibility throughout their contact centers. Issues are discovered early and can be addressed quickly, often before members even notice a problem.

Collaboration throughout IT and with their multiple UC&C providers has been improved now that nGeniusONE provides vendor-agnostic analysis of both call set-up protocols as well as voice quality, providing evidence that shortens the mean time to resolve (MTTR) member-impacting issues. Ultimately, NETSCOUT’s nGeniusONE solution is helping this American insurer achieve success with their strategic annual member signup, protecting revenue, reputation, and customer experience.