Deploying a new CRM system isn't easy. Whether you're starting from zero like the City of Minneapolis did before it opened its 311 call center, or trying to integrate and align systems from multiple acquired centers like Horizon Health, there's going to be a lot of tedious documentation of business processes. There might be some surprises. We spoke to some of the management teams at two very different call centers and asked them to tell us their stories about CRM deployment. These are success stories, but, particularly in the case of Horizon Health, they are not without drama.
While these centers represent very different organizations, both of them need to give their agents access to a great deal of information at the desktop level. Both streamlined some very complicated processes by instituting work-order type systems for completing requests that originate at the call center. CRM software provided the essential and very elegant solution for both the City of Minneapolis and Horizon Health.
Minneapolis' New 311 Call Center
Since the FCC created the 311 designation for local governments to create non-emergency information lines in 1997, citizens in cities like Baltimore, New York, and now Minneapolis have found it much easier to reach someone in charge. Originally designed to take the burden off of 911 systems (Baltimore reported a whopping 99% drop in lowest priority calls to 911), the 311 programs have become much more. It's not just the number to call to complain about noise or potholes - New York City even encourages tourists to call 311 with questions about the city.
"Here in Minneapolis, we really look at 311 as being the gateway to the city for non-emergency services and information, whatever it might be," says Minneapolis 311 call center manager Donald Stickney. It wasn't always that way. In creating the 311 line, the city replaced a loose system of government service listings in the phone book, combined with an overworked city information desk - not to mention some 911 operators who had more important things to worry about than barking dog complaints.
"If you wanted to call about a particular issue of a non-emergency nature," Stickney said, "you had to flip through several pages and some 280 different types of listings in the blue pages to find out 'who do I call to find out about this particular issue?' We wanted to simplify the access to that, we wanted to put some measures in place that say: how well are we doing?" He added, "A lot of citizens were looking for more accountability in government: are doing what we're supposed to be doing, are we accomplishing what we're supposed to be accomplishing?"
The city had seen some disturbing statistics from its biannual customer satisfaction surveys: first call resolution was a problem, and 25% were very dissatisfied. It was time for a 311 system. The project started officially in August 2005, but there was a tremendous amount of preparation and testing before that. Stickney said it was easier for the city to start the 311 center from the ground up because they were upgrading the rest of its telephony systems anyway.
"We started with a complete documentation process of all our customer-facing business processes, which then would be the baseline for us helping to configure service requests within CRM, create the knowledge base, index the knowledge base, and be able to provide services to customers," Stickney explained. "We opened with right around 100 different types of service requests. We're up to 150 right now, and we're going to adding another 20 to 25 here in the next two months."
That's how the city handles all requests. Instead of transferring callers to one of a huge number of departments, the agents fill out service requests, which get routed to the appropriate place. Callers get a tracking number that enables them to check back on requests. The service request process makes Web self-service a lot easier to implement, too. Stickney says the first dozen types of Web self-service requests will be operational by the time this article is in print.
Half of the 311 line's calls today are for simple information, calls that only require the agent to consult the knowledge base.
"Our goal in answering calls is, even in the snow emergency that we had in March, to answer 90% of our calls within 20 seconds and we hit that goal every day," Stickney told us.
Choosing a CRM Vendor
The City of Minneapolis didn't choose the first CRM vendor they worked with. Initially, Stickney told us, they went through six months of testing with another industry-leading vendor before they decided that Belfast, Northern Ireland-based Lagan's Frontlink system provided more flexibility and the open architecture they needed to interface with their back office systems. Lagan specializes in CRM systems for governments, with a heavy presence in the U.K. market. The City of Minneapolis was Lagan's first American customer, and they've had more since.
"It was a very quick deployment," Stickney recalls. "We actually signed the contract with Lagan in May of 2005 and we implemented in January 2006."
Part of the reason deployment was quick is because Stickney and his team were ready. "We had all those processes documented and ready to go when we started configuration of the Lagan solution in about July of 2005. So we very quickly moved through configuration of some 100 different kinds of service requests.
Also, simultaneously and before that, we were working on our knowledge base so that it's organized in a fashion that it could be indexed, that it was current and up-to-date. Our primary source for our knowledge base is our website," said Stickney.
The Lagan system has three different portals. The customer service portal has scripted e-forms that give the agents all the information they need to handle a specific request. The resolving departments - that is, the back office departments that receive the service requests from the call center - have their own portals, without scripts, to work with the requests. The third portal is a self-service Web portal which is being implemented on an on-going basis.
Successful Deployment
"It really changed the way we do business," said Stickney. "We've become more customer-focused and we can always be working on those things that are most important to the citizens." The CRM system, the cornerstone of this call center, has allowed the city to operate less like a bureaucracy and more like a customer service-oriented business. Ironically, many customer service-oriented businesses could learn quite a bit from the City of Minneapolis.
Similarly, many call centers can be inspired by Minneapolis' weaving together myriad back offices into one customer/citizen-facing call center. Stickney's story is about going from a series of disconnected groups of departments and services, in effect nothing, to something: a single number gateway to city information, made possible by a CRM system that integrates disparate back offices and leaves room to add more.
"People make comments, even to the extent that they say - 'even if you have to raise my taxes to keep 311, do it, because it's so good' - it's so easy to use," Stickney said. "It's no longer fighting city hall, it's really city hall being responsive to your request."
Horizon Health's EAP Call Center
Lewisville, Texas-based Horizon Health's Employee Assistance Program (EAP) is a division that contracts with employers to provide behavioral health counseling services to employees, often initially over the phone. "It might be a stress-related problem, a marital problem, legal, financial problem," explains Horizon's EAP services group president Cindy Sheriff. "Basically any problem that impacts the employee's productivity - this is the first point of entry before they access a higher level of service through their insurance."
Horizon Health has a network of clinicians across the country that the call center agents refer callers to. Employees of businesses that contract with Horizon call the call center, which is staffed by three levels of agents, which Horizon calls member advocates. Half of their agents are clinicians themselves, educated in the mental health fields.
Horizon Health had acquired a number of smaller EAP firms, and operations across the various companies had grown inefficient. "These regional EAPs not only had their own call center, but their own software systems. So what we had was five different companies with different policies, procedures, different operational approaches. So we made the decision to consolidate these call centers - not just the call centers, but the software," said Sheriff.
While they closed centers, they started building a new center in the Dallas, Texas area, a place where there wasn't an existing center in place. It's a lot to do at once: closings, software conversion, and new center launch. "Retrospectively, it sounds like insanity. We are a behavioral health company after all," Zeke Zoccoli, Horizon's IT vice president quipped. "It worked," Sheriff added, sounding relieved.
Zoccoli continued, "The move to CRM was critical to Cindy's group in that, her processes, because of the acquisitions, were heavily bent more on the insurance side of what she does." What Horizon started doing - and it's something they say is not typical in the EAP industry - is to start handling their claims as if they were work orders and not un-approved pending claims. What sounds elementary to an outsider - pay for the services that you authorize your clients' employee to seek - may be revolutionary in the EAP industry. Why? Because it eliminates the need for an inefficient claims process, a lengthy ordeal that often left the healthcare provider Horizon referred people to without getting paid for too long.
That move to CRM was a rocky one, though. Horizon's initial plan was to install a call center-focused CRM system - not a healthcare-specific CRM system. Their previous systems, the ones they inherited with all of their acquisitions, with all of the claims-related processes, were cumbersome. Zoccoli: "The heart of these regional systems were driven around this heavy logic surrounding claims processing. It created a lot of functional capability in the system that was of no use to the call center whatsoever. As a matter of fact, it added complexity and confusion; whether they wanted to or not [agents] had to page through these screens of information that really did not apply to them."
The CRM system from Oracle Siebel was on their wish list, but it wasn't something they figured they could afford. Fortunately, Oracle Siebel was moving into the small and medium-sized call center market. "We were able to get what we believe was the best software available, maybe for a little bit more money, but with the amount of integrators and the service that surrounded it, the value equation played out very nicely for us," Said Zoccoli.
To implement the system, Horizon brought in third party integrator and Oracle partner, Plano, Texas-based eVerge Group. The integrator did its job very well, but there were some major institutional inefficiencies that had to be addressed before Zoccoli and company understood just how competent eVerge's people were. It took severing their relationship with eVerge, calling in another company to audit their work, and some serious discussions before they realized what needed to happen: a total rethink of all of Horizon's processes.
Part of the problem had been the decision to go with the CRM system that wasn't healthcare-specific. "It became apparent that just implementing the call center solution and not addressing the claims side of things or the reporting side of things was not going to deliver much value to the overall corporation because even in the call center, they'd get a lot of questions on claims," Zoccoli explained. "The black box I drew around the call center was causing more problems than it was solving."
But redoing their systems and processes wasn't going to be fast and it wasn't going to be cheap. They had to convince their leadership to take another six months and triple the budget. How did they do it?
"We had a tremendous amount of documentation on the benefit of increasing the scope which I believe did little to convince our management to back our proposal," Zoccoli told us. "What did in fact gain support was the solidarity and passion that Cindy and I shared for the solution. This shared vision between business and IT is often talked about, and very rarely experienced. With such strong synergy and willingness to take a risk, our management felt confident that it would be successful, if only by the strong desire that IT and the EAP group had to fulfill the vision. In the end it was the teamwork and true shared opinion that swayed the leadership."
So they brought eVerge back in and changed their CRM software. Zoccoli: "We decided that with this expanded scope, the original call center products that we had selected weren't the right ones. We really needed to go to the healthcare vertical, and we had to work fast and furious with them to trade out the software to figure out how we could make that work financially for both sides - and we needed to do that quick."
When it came time to go live, it went so smoothly that they got bored. Some agents who were asked to be on hand in case of disaster were sent home. "I've been through five conversions in the last six years, and they were horrendous." Sheriff told us. "This one, we geared up for: we had balloons, chocolate, and sandwiches; we had extra folks on board to take calls, and it was one of the most boring days I've ever experienced." And that's a good thing.
The System Works
The Oracle Siebel CRM system, not to mention the new call center, works well. Really well. "Our provider complaints, which are usually claims-related, have reduced 60% in the first month after this, and I expect that trend to continue," said Sheriff. Zoccoli added, "Our actual backlog of processed claims has gone down by 90%." Claims are now processed in two days.
The system is still evolving, but in a very natural, fluid way. They've made 180 minor enhancements since going live in April.
The new system is also friendlier to callers. Sheriff explains: "It was counterproductive for us to have a system that forced us not to listen to the caller, but to get their birth-date, their address, the demographics. The system that we have now allows us to let the caller tell their story first, which from a clinical perspective, is therapeutic."
"Even today, the productivity startles us: one person can do 600 claims. A day. Now in the past, it's hard to tell, but it wouldn't be uncommon for a team of 12 people to not be able to do 100 claims in a day."
IT and Healthcare Clinician Staff Learn to Work Together
Horizon Health's IT vice president Zeke Zoccoli and EAP group services president Cindy Sheriff found that the two groups of professionals they represented worked and thought very differently. Going to endless meetings and making collaborative decisions about software implementation and desktop interface taught them a lot about how to communicate.
"I learned, as an IT person, to start the meeting by asking everybody how they felt, and then by ending the meeting by asking them if they felt better," Zoccoli recalled. "It was interesting how Zeke approached it with his IT staff," added Sheriff. "They learned our personalities and would adjust their meetings based on who they were meeting with."
"I think every one ended up slightly changed," said Zoccoli. "The relationship between the two groups, which actually was a very bad relationship at the beginning of the project (the two groups had never really worked that well together), is actually the best I've ever worked with, now. Usually at the end of a big project it gets worse, not better."
Who To Contact
Here's how to reach the CRM vendors and integrators mentioned in this article.
eVerge Group, 888-548-1973
Lagan, 800-550-1824
Oracle, 800-633-0737
Copyright 2006 CMP Media LLC. All rights reserved.
11/1/06, Issue # 1911, page 26.
