Reinventing the contact center and helping healthcare payer build stability, resilience, and future readiness

Introduction

In an increasingly competitive and digitally driven world, organizations must ensure that their customer engagement channels are resilient, efficient, and responsive. For a large healthcare payer in the United States, the contact center was a critical touchpoint for millions of customers, making its performance and reliability vital for its success. So, when a catastrophic outage left its 16,000 agents from over 140 locations unable to field tens of thousands of calls, the organization turned to Marlabs, a leader in digital transformation, to help rebuild and fortify its contact center operations.

Challenge

A Failing Contact Center in a Crucial Industry

The client, a Fortune 500 managed care enterprise, relied on its contact center as the primary communication, sales, and customer engagement channel. However, the contact center’s underlying technology and infrastructure were quietly deteriorating. This became evident in 2020 when the contact center experienced its most significant outage ever. Despite having a monitoring system, the client lacked a single source of truth for their data, and their IT teams spent considerable time manually processing information across disparate systems.

Solution

The Marlabs Intervention: From Assessment to Implementation

Recognizing the need for a complete and holistic solution, Marlabs–as a consulting partner–initiated a comprehensive end-to-end assessment of the client’s contact center operations, identifying vulnerabilities and recommending improvements. Armed with renewed trust in Marlabs’ capabilities, the client invited the digital transformation leader to implement the recommendations and stabilize their contact center.

Stabilizing the Contact Center

Marlabs took on the role of general counsel in stabilizing the contact center, collaborating with multiple stakeholders such as cloud communications providers, telephone services providers, and software vendors. In addition, Marlabs conducted several load tests to ensure that the failure rate was significantly reduced, ensuring minimal failures and improved containment during open enrollment season, when call volumes increased by over 50%.

Establishing Proactive Monitoring

Marlabs leveraged its strengths in design-led innovation to create a holistic view of contact center performance by integrating monitoring systems from across the landscape. This new monitoring solution enabled the client to identify and resolve issues quickly, reducing response time from days to hours.

Building Future-Ready Competency

Marlabs developed thorough documentation across the product landscape to future-proof the contact center operations and enable comprehensive knowledge transfer. They also set up disaster recovery protocols for business continuity.

Results

The case of the large healthcare payer’s contact center serves as a compelling example of how digital transformation can significantly enhance an organization’s performance and resilience. Through its design-led thinking, curated human experience, and state-of-the-art innovation, Marlabs demonstrated its expertise in transforming critical business operations to serve customers better and ensure long-term success. The journey of this healthcare payer, with Marlabs as a trusted partner, highlights the importance of digital transformation and resilience in the face of ever-evolving challenges in today’s competitive landscape.

As a leader in digital transformation, Marlabs is committed to helping organizations like this healthcare payer overcome complex challenges and capitalize on emerging opportunities. With a proven track record of success and a forward-thinking approach, Marlabs continues to pave the way for enterprises seeking to build a strong, resilient, and future-ready foundation in an increasingly digital world.

Ongoing Engagement: Building Trust and Driving Long-Term Resilience

After successfully completing the project’s first phase, Marlabs continues to work with the client to optimize their contact center further. In addition, they are enabling active standby for the contact center as part of a long-term resilience strategy, looking forward to delivering even higher value and solving more complex challenges in the future.

Impact

Outcomes: A Transformative Impact on Performance and Reliability

Marlabs’ intervention significantly improved the contact center’s performance and reliability, ensuring that the client was fully prepared to handle the high call volume expected during the open enrollment season. The benefits included:

• Reduced failure rates from ~40% to ~4%
• Increased IVR capacity by 287%
• Improved IVR containment to 14.5%
• Enhanced performance under heavy load
• Increased speed of response to detected incidents from days to hours
• Reduced call drops
• Optimized user experience with self-service and speech tuning