Achieving a High-Quality Patient Experience with Contact Center

Customer Profile

This fast-growing, U.S.-based health plan organization focuses primarily on providing government-sponsored managed care services to families, children, seniors, and individuals with complex medical needs primarily through a variety of public healthcare insurance and prescription drug plans. The more than 10,000 employees support approximately 5.5 million members nationwide, with more joining every day. With offices delivering services in several states across the country, this organization depends heavily on its network and applications for high-quality, swift, safe patient care services.

The Challenge

The health plan organization had recently undergone an upgrade in their datacenter infrastructure, as well as adding new, patient-facing contact centers. A high-quality experience is the goal for patients calling into the health-plan company’s contact centers for assistance and guidance. This means a clear, crisp, friendly voice and seamless access to the patient records and information, so answers and suggested treatment options can be quickly provided.

Service Representatives and Healthcare professionals (e.g., nurses, clinicians) access the patient’s electronic medical records (EMR) over a Citrix front end, enabling subscribers to enjoyed maximized benefits of an informed and secure conversation about their medical needs. The staff also relied on Cisco UC&C technology for their voice services, as well as Microsoft Office and Oracle for some of their business applications. Delays in accessing any of these business applications and services ultimately impacts the patients’ time on the phone and the employees’ ability to handle optimal numbers of patient calls.

Patient confidence can be shaken if there is a poor experience with the contact centers. So, when they began to experience dropped calls, poor call quality, and delays connecting to the Citrix front end, the IT staff made it a priority to implement pervasive visibility, triage capabilities, and application and network performance metrics to rapidly troubleshoot and pinpoint the source of these disruptions.

Solution in Action

The IT and voice staffs at this organization turned to NETSCOUT, a long-standing, trusted partner, to prescribe a solution to help resolve their issues in the contact centers. While the IT team already relied on the nGeniusONE Service Assurance Platform with InfiniStream Appliances for visibility into their existing data centers, they are further benefitting by deploying next-generation InfiniStreamNG (ISNG) appliances in both their updated data center and several remote site locations. NETSCOUT’s patented Adaptive Service Intelligence™ (ASI) technology in the ISNG appliances generates smart data for smarter analytics in dashboards and views of nGeniusONE. For their current deployment, they added a combination of InfiniStreamNG certified software appliances and hardware appliances for visibility into the upgraded portions of their data center, their primary contact centers, and several smaller satellite call centers.

The voice team is leveraging the unique capabilities in nGeniusONE to monitor and analyze their Cisco UC&C VoIP services. With nGeniusONE, the voice team is able to track both signaling and media issues. They can see the communications session and call path to monitor performance, evaluate errors with call set-up protocols, identify dropped calls, packets, latency or echo, and view MOS scores for particular calls that may be impacting overall call quality. Using contextual workflows, the precise location and source of service degradation can be easily identified with the help of system-wide visibility. The UC and UCS teams use nGeniusONE Service Dependency views to reduce mean-time-to-resolution (MTTR) for contact center issues, keeping the UC&C infrastructure operating at peak performance.

The IT team is using unique features in nGeniusONE to reduce MTTR issues related to the business data services. Dashboard views, alerts, error details, Service Monitors for Citrix and Oracle, and Service Dependency mapping are all helping the IT team to identify emerging problems earlier and provide logical workflows to investigate and resolve degradations quickly.

The Results

The company is achieving its primary goal of delivering a high-quality patient experience when they call into the contact centers for assistance with treatment and plan options. The incidences of dropped calls, disconnects, and poor voice quality have been reduced dramatically. Staff efficiency in the contact centers is being achieved with speedy access to patient records with Citrix access.

The company has also extended the value of their initial investment in the nGeniusONE solution with this additional deployment. They were able to add critical visibility in new locations and achieve network-wide views and analysis in the same nGeniusONE system that the IT team was already experienced using. This also meant a very quick time to value when deploying the new certified InfiniStreamNG software appliances in the contact centers.