eHealth improves responsiveness to enrollment calls

eHealth, a private online marketplace for individual and family health insurance products, handles more than 500,000 customer calls during the Medicare annual enrollment period. The callers need accurate, real-time information to make informed healthcare choices.

With the old system, though, finding information was time-consuming. Call center agents had to put customers on hold and manually search various sources for information. The process usually took several minutes, not only inconveniencing callers but also increasing call center costs.

To improve responsiveness and efficiency, eHealth deployed a Web content harvesting solution from Connotate. With the new system, agents enter a few details into eHealth’s user interface, and the software performs a federated real-time search of appropriate Web sources, returning the desired information in seconds. The new system has reduced the average length of enrollment calls by 10 percent.

Willy Wang, VP of engineering for eHealth, says, “We’re able to provide better service to our customers and reduce our costs at the same time.”

According to Connotate, the eHealth project has resulted in the following benefits:

• eHealth’s call center team can save customers an average of 4.5 minutes per enrollment call.
• eHealth dramatically increased its metrics for compliance with government regulations.
• The call center team was able to fund the project based on cost savings alone.

(Image courtesy of ShutterStock.com)