Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan's 2020 AWARD FINALIST CASE STUDY : Best Achievement in Visual Management

Read this article about Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan , one of our finalists, in the category Best Achievement in Visual Management, selected by the independent judging panel, for the 2020 Business Transformation & Operational Excellence Industry Awards program.

BCBSM's Servicing Command Center

Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan (BCBSM) is the largest and most trusted provider of health insurance in Michigan, serving company and government-sponsored group plans, individual plans, Medicare and Medicaid through traditional preferred provider arrangements, health maintenance organizations and health savings account plans.

On a typical day, BCBSM’s 24 contact centers receive more than 25,000 calls from members and providers, all of which need to be handled effectively and efficiently, while maximizing the customer experience.  Customer expectations have escalated over the past ~10 years, and BCBSM’s contact centers were not outfitted to meet these increasing expectations.  As a result, customers experienced occasional long hold times, call mishandling and distorted performance metrics that compromised workforce planning.

The Command Center project created a comprehensive contact center management system, where activity across all 24 centers is visually displayed in real-time. This visual management system is the backbone of BCBSM’s daily customer service performance monitoring.  Located in the middle of BCBSM’s primary contact center, the Command Center is staffed by a team of 17 who focus on: (a) managing capacity, forecasting and scheduling, and (b) coordinating call flow and routing on a real-time basis. From this location, Real-Time Analysts (RTAs) instantly monitor performance data, drill down to location-specific and agent-level detail to understand the flow of work.  Volume and event variations are immediately apparent, and adjustments to call routing and the daily schedule are executed in minutes to balance the workload across capable agents.

In order to deliver this functionality, BCBSM had to create the Centralized Performance Monitoring System (CPMS), seamlessly aggregating and serving data in real time to allow continuous performance monitoring and intra-day adjustments to call routing and staffing.  Data collection and capture had been taking place in the existing systems, but it was collected and used ineffectively, within silos in the organization. Working with IT, a unique system was built that goes beyond simply presenting complex data — it pulls data from both the telephony and scheduling systems and coordinates it to include established thresholds and action points. The physical buildout occurred alongside the implementation of the CPMS.  Launch to go-live spanned just 12 months.  While these builds progressed, significant additional training and skilling of agents at both BCBSM and contract vendors, was necessary to enable agents to handle a wider spectrum of calls.

• Sustained reductions in Servicing Costs: 2017 — $11.6 million; 2018 — $5.7 million
• 6% increase in the percentage of call answered timely
• 30% reduction in calls abandoned
• 33% reduction in agent schedule deviations

The success of the Command Center project is evident in both its progress toward financial and efficiency improvement targets, and improvement in member and provider satisfaction. Initial agent apprehension has been displaced by favorable reactions to instantaneous leader availability and the ability to accommodate last-minute personal schedule adjustments.  The implementation of the Servicing Command Center enabled and optimized the impact of numerous other improvements within Servicing (IVR call routing, workforce management and seamless utilization of outsource call center suppliers), driving impressive results across all measures.

Business Transformation & Operational Excellence Industry Awards 2020